Organizations spend enormous resources on diversity training, anti-bias workshops, and inclusion initiatives, all in the name of seeing each employee as a whole person. And yet one of the most pervasive forms of stereotyping in the modern workplace carries a cheerful name, fills management seminars, and appears in virtually every HR playbook on the market. It classifies your employees by birth year and tells you, with confidence, exactly who they are. David S. Cohen has been watching this happen for years, and he has a direct name for it. When organizations categorize employees by generation, he says, “you create a disposition for some people to assume if you’re a certain age or certain type. And by the way, that’s stereotyping. And I thought that we were trying to avoid stereotyping and take people as individuals.”
Cohen is the founder of DS Cohen and Associates, operating as SAGLTD, a consultancy focused on values-based organizational culture and talent management. He is the author of Selecting the Best and has spent his career working with companies to identify the core beliefs and behaviors that define their culture and integrate that knowledge into how they hire, develop, and retain people. He also works directly with senior leaders on what he calls the ethical dimension of leadership: if these are your stated values, are the decisions you are making actually aligned with them? That framework, applied to how organizations understand and manage the people inside them, is the foundation of the argument he brings to this conversation.
Why Generational Labels Spread and Refuse to Die
Cohen explains the appeal of generational thinking with a precision that is itself instructive. “It’s easy,” he says. “You don’t have to think as much. You just classify people into certain categories and then you start to treat them that way.” That shortcut has obvious appeal for managers who are already stretched across too many responsibilities. The problem is the feedback loop it creates. When a manager treats an employee as though they match a generational profile, the employee responds to that treatment. The response appears to confirm the original assumption. The assumption hardens. The actual person inside the classification is never quite seen.
Cohen points to something he has tracked over decades of studying business literature: the critiques aimed at whatever generation is entering the workforce are remarkably consistent from one era to the next. “Some of the things that I’ve seen said about the current generation were said about Gen X when they were the same age,” he observes. If every incoming cohort receives the same critique at the same life stage, the explanation almost certainly has nothing to do with the generation. The practical starting point for any leader is simply this: notice when you are reaching for a category before you know a person. That pause is where a more accurate understanding begins.
The Life Stage Framework That Explains What You Are Actually Seeing
Cohen’s alternative to generational thinking is not abstract. It is a concrete framework built on life stage, and it explains nearly everything that generational labels are routinely used to explain. Consider a 22-year-old who is single, living with roommates or at home, and carrying no mortgage. Cohen points out that this person has entirely logical and predictable needs: flexibility, creative work, and feedback that confirms they are on the right track. None of those needs require a generational explanation. They are a straightforward response to the actual material and emotional conditions of that stage of life.
Move that same person forward several years and every relevant variable changes. They marry, and responsibility expands beyond themselves. A mortgage enters the picture. Children arrive. With each transition, the needs and motivations that looked distinctly generational reveal themselves as rational responses to changing circumstances. Cohen traces the arc all the way to the stage he calls legacy. “Legacy is not about what you create,” he says. “Legacy is about what you leave behind, and how you’re remembered by other people.” At every stage, the birth year explains nothing. The life stage explains nearly everything.
What Cohen offers managers here is a more useful set of questions. Instead of consulting a generational profile, ask where someone is in their life. What responsibilities do they carry? What does their daily reality look like outside of work? Those answers come from a conversation. The birth year comes without one.
The Formative Experiences That Follow People Through Their Lives
Life stage is one lens Cohen uses to replace generational thinking. He identifies a second one that operates at a deeper level and is far harder to shift: the experiences that happened during the years a person was forming their foundational view of the world. These are not generational in the way the labels imply. They are cohort experiences, shared by people who came of age during the same historical moment, and they travel with a person through their entire life regardless of what demographic category they have been assigned to.
Cohen describes how baby boomers were shaped by postwar prosperity and the accessibility of the American dream, and then by Vietnam, by Kent State, and by social protest movements that permanently altered how that generation understood authority. Those who came of age around September 11, 2001 carry a fundamentally different relationship to safety, institutional trust, and the reliability of the systems around them. These are not personality quirks. They are lasting dispositions built from specific lived experience, and they do not dissolve as someone moves past a generational date range.
He makes this concrete through a personal example. His grandson, turning 21, already says he believes he will never own a home. That conviction about stability will follow his grandson for decades, Cohen predicts, even if his financial situation changes significantly. “Suddenly getting money is not going to change that,” he says. He draws a careful parallel to Holocaust survivors who continued hoarding basic goods long after scarcity had ended, noting that the same psychological mechanism applies. He is clear that he is not equating the two experiences, but the underlying principle holds: when a powerful event shapes a person during their forming years, the brain encodes it as a permanent reference point. For managers, the more useful question is not what year someone was born. It is what the world looked like when they were growing up.
Traits Versus Behaviors: The Distinction That Changes How You Lead
The most operationally precise concept Cohen offers is the difference between traits and behaviors, a distinction that most management frameworks consistently collapse. Traits are stable, general characteristics: optimism, anxiety, ambition. These are the dimensions measured by what psychologists call the Big Five personality framework, and they describe the broad shape of how a person tends to engage with the world. Drawing on developmental theorists including Jean Piaget and Carl Jung, Cohen explains that traits typically stabilize in late adolescence and settle more firmly during a person’s late twenties and early thirties. They rarely shift unless a significant emotional event forces someone to reconstruct how they see the world.
Behaviors are something different. A behavior is what a person actually does in a specific situation. An anxious person does not necessarily freeze under pressure. An introvert can be a generous and compelling conversationalist. An extrovert can go quiet when the stakes are high. The trait gives you a statistical tendency. The behavior tells you what actually happens. Cohen offers a clear analogy: the trait functions like a camera, capturing the general shape of a person’s character. The behavior is the photograph, the specific image that appears when the shutter opens in a real moment.
The implication for leadership is direct. Psychometric assessments measure traits. Generational profiles measure traits. Both describe what someone might do. Neither tells you what they will do on your team, under your specific leadership, in the situations that actually matter. To understand a person’s behavior, you have to observe it, hear stories about it, and build enough of a relationship that real moments become visible.
“The trait tells you what they might do. The behavior tells you what they will do.”
David S. Cohen, Founder, DS Cohen and Associates
What Lean Organizations Lost When They Cut the Time to Know People
Cohen offers a structural explanation for why generational labels became so dominant in management culture, and it goes beyond convenience. Over recent decades, organizations went lean. Management layers were removed, support roles were cut, and spans of control widened until many managers were responsible for more direct reports than any one person could meaningfully know. The casualty, Cohen argues, was the unhurried human exchange that makes real understanding possible. When a manager has too many people and too little time, reaching for a category is not laziness. It is the only tool still within reach.
He describes what was lost through an image that is both simple and precise. The best part of summer camp, Cohen says, is not the structured activities or scheduled programming. It is the bus ride there and the bus ride home. That is where real friendships form, where people show you who they are without an agenda, where you learn things that no onboarding document would ever surface. “You have managers do all this formal onboarding,” he observes, “but they don’t have that bus ride with that employee to get to know who they are.” That specific kind of conversation is what builds genuine commitment. Without it, the relationship between a manager and an employee stays transactional, and transactional relationships are easy to leave.
Cohen also draws a distinction between trust and respect that most workplaces treat as interchangeable, and he argues they are not. Trust, in his framing, means predictability: you know how someone will behave in a given situation. “I can trust somebody, but not respect them,” he says. Respect is something more, a genuine regard for the person that goes beyond predicting their behavior. Organizations that have established trust without cultivating respect will still face real problems, and collapsing the two into a single concept prevents leaders from understanding which one is actually missing.
What It Actually Looks Like to Manage the Person Instead of the Profile
Cohen’s practical prescription is specific. Discard the generational categories and replace them with close attention to observable behavior. Not personality scores, not birth year ranges, but the actual, concrete ways a person communicates, makes decisions, responds under pressure, and contributes to the people around them. Cohen urges leaders to define the behaviors their organization genuinely needs and then look for those behaviors across every age and background.
He illustrates the gap between knowing what someone does and knowing who someone is through a carefully chosen example. Consider a mechanic. The job title suggests a certain educational path, a certain set of assumed preferences, a predictable profile of who this person probably is. Sit down with that mechanic and you might discover someone who attends symphony concerts, reads philosophy, and holds perspectives and interests that have nothing to do with the label you had already assigned. Cohen says, “It’s not what you do, it’s who you are that’s going to count.” What someone does is readable from a resume. Who someone is only becomes visible through genuine conversation.
Cohen describes the practical shift as replacing the formal with the real. He is not calling for eliminating structure, but for ensuring that structure leaves room for unscripted exchange, for questions about a person’s life, for listening to their stories, and for letting what you hear inform how you lead. That, he argues, is the actual work of management.
Know Who They Are, Not What They Are
The generational framework is not going away soon. It is too convenient, too embedded in management culture, and too consistently reinforced by business media to disappear quickly. But Cohen’s argument gives any leader a more accurate and more immediately useful set of tools. Before concluding what someone wants or how they will perform, consider where they are in their life. Ask what the world looked like when they were growing up. Watch how they actually behave in real situations, not what a trait assessment suggests they might do. These questions take more time than applying a label. They require sitting down and listening. That investment, Cohen argues, is what separates the managers who keep good people from the managers who lose them to someone who bothered to ask.
The distinction between traits and behaviors is one that any leader can begin applying today. A trait tells you what someone might do. It is a tendency drawn from psychological patterns that stabilize in a person’s late twenties and rarely shift from there. A behavior tells you what someone will do, because you have watched them do it, heard them describe doing it, and understood the context that shaped it. Most hiring tools, most performance frameworks, and most generational profiles operate at the level of the trait. The person in front of you is a behavior.
Cohen ends with a framing that carries past the management conversation and into something more lasting. Legacy, he reminds us, is not about what you create. It is about how you are remembered by the people whose lives you touched. The employees who leave because they were never seen as individuals carry that experience forward. The ones who stay often do so because someone took the time to know them. That is the work David S. Cohen has spent his career teaching organizations to do, and it begins with one decision: to look past the label and ask who is actually there.
