Most workplaces now hold four generations in daily working contact — and a fifth, mostly retired, still present at the edges — and most teams have never once talked honestly about what that mix does to how they communicate, give feedback, run meetings, share knowledge, and judge each other. Instead they trade quiet assumptions: the older colleague is "resistant," the younger one is "entitled," the mid-career manager is "stuck." Those assumptions are usually wrong about the person, often unfair, and always expensive — they misdirect work, withhold opportunity, and turn solvable differences of habit into unsolvable verdicts about character.