On 16 June, Grupo Binternational took part as a driving partner in the second edition of the B Dinners, the initiative by the Steering Group of the B Madrid Community that brings together companies committed to more human and conscious organisations. The event, held at the Infinito Delicias venue in collaboration with Ars Persona, centred on a challenge that today runs through a large share of companies: the coexistence of generations in the workplace.
For the first time, up to four generations coincide in the labour market. Different ways of communicating, leading, collaborating and understanding work coexist every day within teams. Around the table sat people and management leaders from a diverse group of B Corps and committed companies, including Evercom, Abadía Retuerta, 3INA, Specialisterne, Ars Persona, CMI Business School and ATREVIA, alongside other organisations such as Grupo Cartés, a client of Grupo Binternational.
A space for an honest conversation
Beyond the topic itself, what defined the evening was its tone. The venue hosted a candid conversation in which organisations shared real challenges: worrying turnover, the burnout of middle managers and transformation processes still under way.
That is the value of spaces such as the B Dinners: they work as a peer-to-peer learning environment in which to compare experiences and realise that many of the challenges each company experiences as its own are, in fact, shared across the wider business community.
The symptom and the problem: a different way of looking at generational coexistence
Nano de Gabriel, CEO of Grupo Binternational, framed the conversation around a question: what if the problem were not the generations?
In conversations with CEOs, managing directors and people leaders, it is rarely framed as a generational problem. What comes across is something else: talent that leaves before contributing its full potential, overloaded managers, difficulty in sharing knowledge and strategies that are hard to execute at the speed the market demands.
The thesis Grupo Binternational put forward at the table is that generational tensions are not the problem, but the symptom: of leadership that does not evolve at the pace at which the market changes, of cultures that no longer connect, of misaligned expectations and of organisational models designed for another context. From this perspective, the question is no longer how to manage each generation, but how to build organisational capability. When the organisation works, age matters less: differences enrich, contribution increases, and well-being and talent retention improve.
One of the images used during the evening sums up this approach well: that of a bucket with holes. If an organisation loses people and keeps bringing in new talent without repairing the leaks, that talent will continue to leave. And it is worth highlighting a point that matters to leadership: the cost of those leaks — turnover, absenteeism, lost knowledge — is measurable and has a direct impact on the bottom line.
The turnover of young professionals: the case of a LifeSciences company
During the conversation, Nano shared a real case. A company in the LifeSciences sector, a client of Grupo Binternational, was facing what looked like a textbook problem: more than 100 newly recruited young professionals, turnover well above average and friction with their managers. The immediate reading pointed to a generational clash with Generation Z, and the parent company in the United States had already warned that turnover had become a business problem.
The analysis, however, did not start with the generations, but with listening separately to the young professionals and the managers. The conclusion was revealing: both groups wanted practically the same thing — to feel heard, to understand what was expected of them, to grow, to contribute and to trust one another more. It was not a generational problem, but one of connection.
Generational handover in the family business: the case of Grupo Cartés
One of the most valuable testimonies of the evening came from Roberto, of Grupo Cartés, a third-generation family business and also a client of Grupo Binternational, who shared his own transformation process.
Roberto described how a model based on closeness — “at the bar”, with the owner alongside each person — stopped being enough when the business grew. His own workforce put it plainly: “those of you at the top don’t understand those at the bottom”. As he recounted, the management committee had to undertake “an exercise in humility” and acknowledge that the business was not growing. The symptom seemed generational, but the origin was another: leadership, connection and a management model designed for an earlier stage of the company.
From there, the company introduced method where there had previously been intuition. Roberto summed it up in one idea: giving the new generations “one hundred per cent of the support to develop and to crash”, because “if they crash, nothing happens”, always with a methodology tested by Grupo Binternational that makes it possible to measure and provide support in time. He also framed the whole process in a personal key: “all of this is about love”, he said, speaking of the purpose of turning his experience “into a legacy through the business”. That handover took shape when his son Pedro joined the project with an “I’m ready to contribute now”, bringing a fresh perspective — artificial intelligence, among others — to a business with decades of history.
Organisational design and talent attraction: diversity as an advantage
The conversation was not seeking a single solution, but it did leave a shared conclusion: many organisations face similar challenges, even if they do not always approach them from the right perspective. When organisational design supports it, generational diversity stops being framed as a matter of coexistence and becomes a business lever, linked to more learning, greater capacity for innovation and better execution of strategy.
Grupo Binternational thanks the Steering Group of the B Madrid Community for organising the event, Ars Persona for sharing the drive behind it, and all the people and organisations that took part in the conversation. For Grupo Binternational, a consultancy specialising in organisational design and talent attraction, gatherings like this reaffirm one conviction: building the right team and structure for each company’s strategy is, today more than ever, a matter of organisational capability.
