The Gen X-ers Taking Over Parliament, Boardrooms And Our Biggest Arts Institutions

Wednesday, 24 July 2024, 6:34 pm
Article: RNZ

Kate Newton , Senior Journalist, In Depth

There was a moment in Angela Green's career, as she watched an older generation finally relinquish the leadership positions they'd clung to for decades, where she wondered: 'Have I missed out?'

"I saw a pattern of younger people being promoted into positions of leadership - which is awesome - but it almost felt like that was going to skip over my generation a little bit."

A Gen X tail-ender, "we aspired to be [in charge] but never thought it would happen", Green says.

"We feel a bit wedged in between the Boomers and the Millennials in a way."

Now the executive director for Tāwhiri - an arts organisation responsible for the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts, among others - Green is among a plethora of Gen X-ers who have ended up in the driver's seat after all.

While Boomers and Millennials were squabbling over who had been dealt the rawest deal in life, Gen X - born between 1965 and 1980 - quietly aged into power.

The result of this bloodless coup is that they now make up a majority of our MPs, chief executives of our largest companies, and our arts and media leaders.

Christopher Luxon (1970) isn't even New Zealand's first Gen X Prime Minister - he's the third.

Jacinda Ardern, born in 1980, just scraped in as the first, and Chris Hipkins (1978) was the second.

Hipkins says it's not something he dwells on.

"Politics goes in generational cycles. The Lange government was heralded as a bit of a shift towards the Baby Boomers taking over and then you could see the last Labour government led by Jacinda as the next big generational wave."

He doesn't see much evidence that a changing of the guard for political parties has also changed their values or policies, but "there's certainly a shift in tone".

"I do think there's a bit more focus on substance and a bit less of the pettiness in some of the parliamentary debates, but then by the same token I think parliamentary debate is a bit less relevant than it used to be as well."

He's noticed subtle differences creeping into the business world too, though mostly in style rather than substance.

"Ties are no longer the norm - I think there's a generational shift happening there, but overall the tone of engagement is much the same as it's always been."

His fellow ex-PM Jacinda Ardern described herself as 'youth-adjacent' when she took over as Labour leader as a 37-year-old in 2017.

Te Papa chief executive Courtney Johnston - born a year before Ardern - reckons it's 'kaumatua-adjacent' now.

"When I was appointed as chief executive here at Te Papa that was the main thing that people wanted to talk to me about, like 'Oof! You're awfully young, aren't you?' No one's looked at me and said, 'Gosh, you seem young,' for two or three years.

"As a member of Gen X, sadly youth-adjacent is behind me."

Johnston sees Gen X as a "cusp generation" for a whole series of changes that have happened in leadership and business - young enough to be malleable as the world has gone digital; old enough to bear witness to massive social revolution.

"I really powerfully think we stand on the shoulders of the generation who came before us."

The rise of women in leadership is among the most significant of those changes, she says.

"When I was at university you had Helen Clark as PM and you had Theresa Gattung running Telecom. So by the time I was conscious of it there had been a big shift in the idea of women as leaders."

She believes there's been a major, noticeable shift in how leaders present themselves and relate to their workforce, especially among younger Gen-Xers.

"Leadership still probably rewards the people who have the privilege of time and resource to devote to it… But the idea of captain at the helm - invincible, invulnerable and isolated - I think that's broken down."

Angela Green has noticed a similar change.

"Vulnerability is valued now, which was never modelled to me as a young person coming through."

She still dons what she refers to as "a cloak of leadership", but it's less impermeable.

"The people in my generation who are in leadership, we're all just trying to figure it out and maybe we're a bit more honest about the fact that we don't know the answers and we don't feel that to act like we do."

She also identifies the growth of women in leadership roles as a defining change over the course of her career.

"We're seeing another shift again which is around the rebalancing of power with Māori and non-Pākehā people coming into power as well."

Green says she was brought up as part of a generation that was told they could do anything, "but the second part of that sentence was, you have to work hard".

Mid-career, she's having to recalibrate that Gen X self-reliance and individualism.

"We've also suffered from those side effects of working too hard and burnout, and actually made a choice that no, actually, I need to have some balance."

Her younger colleagues are already well across that.

"As a manager and a boss now I've really had to check my own tendencies of what I believe work should be, in relation to what my younger staff are telling me what work could be."

Her own adaptation as a leader is far from over, she thinks - and that in-between, Gen X feeling is still a hard one to shake.

"I still feel like I'm in the middle or still emerging in some way."

Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection, opens at Te Papa on Saturday 27 July and runs until 20 October.

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