For the first time in the industry's history, up to five generations are working side by side in Canadian brokerages – and most leaders are not ready for it.
Yet for all the talk about diversity of age and background, much of the leadership response has been clumsy. Younger staff are labelled as “entitled” or “overly flexible.” Older employees are dismissed as “set in their ways” or “anti-tech.” Expectations clash, communication breaks down, and the narrative quickly becomes that generations want entirely different things.
From Irfan Suleman’s perspective, that story is wrong – and it is holding teams back.
“It took me a while to really understand what multi-generational teams look like,” says Suleman (pictured), director, personal lines client care at Ontario-based Mitch Insurance. He has worked with both very young groups and teams with a wide range of experience. “The biggest trap I’ve seen is assuming that different preferences mean different values.”
Across generations, Suleman argues, what people actually want is remarkably consistent: to be respected, to do meaningful work and to feel that their contribution matters. The supposed divide is less about why people show up and more about how they want to work.
“The difference I’ve found is usually how, not why,” he says. That “how” shows up in communication style, comfort with technology, expectations around flexibility and openness to things like AI. When leaders confuse those surface differences with opposing values, they design policies and management approaches that satisfy no one.
“One uniform approach is something that I find does not work,” Suleman says. “What I’ve realized is that building consistency first in the standards allows that flexibility in the way we approach it.” In other words, teams need clear, shared expectations about performance and behaviour – but leaders must be willing to flex in how different people reach those standards.
That is where many insurance managers stumble, especially those who came up through the ranks as top individual performers.
“A lot of managers in our industry are excellent brokers who’ve been promoted,” Suleman notes. “They know how to do the work, and they knew how to do it at a really high efficiency level as well. But the skill of developing somebody and coaching is a completely separate muscle, and it takes time to deliberately build.”
That separate muscle is what is missing in many multi-generational teams. Leaders lean on feedback – often in the form of dashboards and performance reviews – and call it coaching. For Suleman, that is a fundamental error.
“The gap I really do see too often is the confusion between coaching and feedback. They’re not the same thing,” he says. “Feedback tells somebody what’s happening. Coaching builds their capacity to do something different.”
That distinction matters more as teams become more varied in age, background and learning style. Telling a young hire that their call times are too long does not help them develop the judgment or communication skills to handle complex conversations more efficiently. A veteran employee told they are “resistant to change” learns nothing about how to adopt new tools in a way that feels manageable.
Suleman is blunt about the learning curve: “Nobody’s a great coach on their first day of being a manager. You’re probably the worst you’ll ever be. But every new coaching sequence helps you become better, because you’re learning to grow that muscle.”
For him, coaching is not an emergency intervention when something goes wrong; it is a steady rhythm. “Coaching is a rhythm, not a reaction,” he says. “If it only happens when something goes wrong, then it’s associated with making mistakes rather than growth.” In multi-generational teams, that reactive approach can be especially toxic. Younger staff start to associate one-on-ones with trouble. Older staff feel singled out when new systems are introduced. The result is defensiveness instead of development.
Underpinning Suleman’s approach is a demanding definition of “people-first” leadership. In his view, truly putting people first is not about being endlessly accommodating or lowering expectations. It is about holding two things at once: high care and high standards.
“The hardest part for me when it comes to people leadership first is you’re really holding two things at once, high care and high standards,” he says. “A lot of leaders just default to one or the other and choose to kind of stay in that spot.”
Leaders who cling only to high standards risk burning people out and reinforcing every negative stereotype about the industry as unforgiving and purely numbers-driven. Leaders who lean only into high care risk creating environments where underperformance is tolerated indefinitely and high performers quietly disengage.
Suleman instead thinks of care and standards as levers that move. “You have to allow it sometimes to tilt up and down,” he explains. After a mistake – whether from a new hire or a seasoned broker – the standard might not be achievable in that moment. That is when the care level needs to rise, focusing on what happens next rather than on the error itself.
