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At Tribe, we conduct ongoing research on the new generations in the workforce and what Gen X and Y need to be successful employees in companies large and small. But I’m feeling a new fondness lately for my generation, the Boomers, many of whom are in the midst of the most fruitful and rewarding part of our careers.

New research indicates that our brains actually hit overall peak performance only after age 40. In her recent book “The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind,” science writer Barbara Strauch cites new neurological studies that indicate that it takes until middle age for the hemispheres to “suddenly begin acting in concert.” So we Boomers will manifest powerful bursts of creativity, faster understanding of complex situations, more sound judgment, and better regulation of our emotions.

Even better, Strauch references brain studies that actually map that welcome by-product of middle age: wisdom. With the brain hemispheres collaborating more seamlessly, not to mention the impossible-to-fake benefits of life experience, Boomers are living proof of those twin traits of age and wisdom.

I often tell younger people that hard things get easier with age. Not just the ability to generate ideas, plough through work and operate at a high level with greater stamina, but also the resilience to absorb life’s blows and keep going. Boomers I know and love have lost jobs, companies, marriages, breasts and beloved dogs and come through the other side intact, if changed.

I once watched two men, a son in his 20s and his father in his 50s, run the Chicago marathon together. Although the son had a much higher level of fitness, he finished far behind his father. At the time, I thought it a striking demonstration of the benefits of life experience. The father came across the finish line exhausted but composed. The son staggered to the finish almost an hour later and looked like he’d been through the wringer of emotions and not fared well in the process.

Of course, it helps to keep the brain sharp. Being engaged in our work, exposing ourselves to new situations, people and ideas, taking on the daily crossword puzzle or a waiting-room round of solitaire or Scrabble™, and maintaining that passion for living all contribute to robust intellectual powers in our later years.

But it doesn’t hurt to know that science supports the notion that we Boomers are just hitting our stride.

At Tribe, we’ve recently shifted our research focus from Gen X and Y in the workplace to Gen Z, the kids 8 to 15 now who will be tomorrow’s employees. Gen Z kids are typically the offspring of Gen X parents, who entered the workforce with an expectation of work-life balance that surprised (and sometimes annoyed) their Boomer bosses.

Many researchers just lump Gen Z in with Gen Y and don’t distinguish between the two. In fact, Gen Z does share many traits with Gen Y, such as their comfort with technology, their view of the whole world as their neighborhood and their team approach to leadership. But we are seeing some differences.

One of our initial impressions of Generation Z is that they’re even more Gen Y than Gen Y. While many corporate employers complained that entry-level Gen Y employees felt they were capable of taking on the CEO role at any minute, the Gen Z kids seem to believe that if they’ve done anything once, they’re an expert at it.

Gen Z is also even more connected than Gen Y, if such a thing is possible. These kids are not only using computers, they’re wielding everything from cell phones to iPads. If they’re not old enough to be on Facebook, they’ve probably made their own website to showcase their personal identity. Gen Z not only grew up with the Internet, they have never lived in a world without it.

People often say that this younger generation will end up dealing with all the problems the adults of today are creating in the world. I’d say they’ll be well equipped to take that role on. Recently, I stopped by my 10-year-old son’s bedroom and noticed him drawing plans for some imaginary space station. I mentioned that he ought to try to figure out what to do about the oil spill instead.

Twenty minutes later, he had researched oil cleanup online and crafted a plan that involved a long tube and copious quantities of kitty litter. He also had gone to the BP website and located contact information for someone there collecting suggestions for cleaning up the oil spill and emailed them his proposal. It’s interesting to me that he not only assumed he was capable of solving a problem that was stumping many seasoned scientists, but he also took for granted that he could get in touch with someone at an international company.

When I was a kid, our expectations would have been much different. It took me until I was a young adult to realize that the people in charge of making things happen in the world were regular old human beings, just like me. If there’s an entire generation growing up with the assumption that they can handle pretty much anything, that’s probably not a bad thing. Like I told Sam the night he was working on his oil spill plan, kids his age will be in charge before we know it.

When do you promote? In this Sunday’s “Corner Office” column in the New  York Times, Adam Bryant interviewed Sharon Napier of Napier + Partners, a well-known ad agency in Rochester. Napier prefers to promote people only after they’ve been doing the bigger job for a while. “We always say when we promote somebody that we hope people say ‘It’s about time,’” she says.

At Tribe, I advocate the opposite approach. If you take someone who’s smart and energized and you promote them a little sooner than they’re really ready for the next job, they will rise to the occasion. This works especially well with the newest generation of employees, our Gen Y folks, who are often accused of thinking they’re ready for the CEO position the day they start with the company. They believe they’re capable of playing a leadership position from the get-go, and if they don’t get the opportunity to experience being stretched and challenged, they’ll get disengaged fast.

We always tell people they can be as big as they want to be at Tribe. But we also tell them they have to figure out the opportunity and grab it. Several years ago, we had an account manager leave unexpectedly, and while we were floundering around trying to figure out who to hire to replace her, another employee quietly started doing the account manager’s job. After a week or so, we finally noticed that she’d taken over the role and gave her the title. It took her about five minutes to move all her stuff into the account manager’s empty office, and none of us ever looked back. She quickly became one of the best account managers I’ve ever worked with.

A huge element of success is being able to see yourself as successful. My experience is that when people are wearing that larger title, they can see themselves filling that larger role. They own the title, and then they very naturally take ownership of the job. That’s what I want: for someone to claim the job and run with it.

Of course, this strategy depends on hiring talented people who can grow quickly. If you’ve got a slacker who’s been coasting for a while, a promotion may not be the best course of action. At Tribe, we hire quickly and fire quickly, and somehow that seems to keep the star talent here longer. If someone has been at Tribe long enough to have us talking about a promotion, they’re someone we’re invested in for the long term. Our role as the management team is to clear the way for them, so they can play larger and larger roles in building a successful company.

For companies both large and small, flexibility is the holy grail of employee benefits. The good news for employers stymied by the Recession, and not in the position to be giving out raises and bonuses, is that offering flexibility can trump financial benefits – or the lack thereof.

Tribe’s recent research with New Generation employees indicates that the younger employees may expect flexibility even more than their Boomer colleagues. Although a story on NPR this morning pointed out that the employees who need flexibility most are the low-wage workers, a disproportionate number of which are single moms.

A family-care focus is a common theme among the companies listed on Fortune’s latest list of Best Companies To Work For. “They don’t just take care of the employee, they take care of their whole families,” said my colleague Jennifer Bull in her Good Company Blog.

One of the things families need most is flexibility. Jennifer Ludden, the NPR correspondent responsible for the piece I heard this morning, describes one example of family-friendly flexibility on the part of Family Fare grocery near Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tina Burgess, mother of two boys, had been a part-time employee at the grocery for years when she was offered a full-time position.

“Burgess wanted the benefits that came with that job, but there was a problem: it started at 5 a.m. Her husband left for work at 5:30, so Burgess needed to be home to get her children to school. Her manager worked it out.”

Burgess goes into work at 5, but calls her teenage sons at 7 to wake them up. (The boys sleep with their cell phones on their pillows.) She then takes her 30-minute lunch break at 7:15 in the morning, to drive home, pack lunches, and get her kids out the door to school. Although the boys are old enough that they might be able to handle the morning routine on their own, Burgess feels strongly about being there.

“’Sometimes in the morning, I get a feel for if it’s going to be a bad day,’ she says. ‘Maybe they want to say something before they go to school. If I wasn’t there, they wouldn’t be able to.’”

What’s more, offering flexibility could make your employees healthier and contribute to the bottom line of the company’s profitability. Ludden cites a recent NIH study on the correlation between job flexibility and employee health, indicating that those employees with more flexible management had both better physical health reports and higher job satisfaction.

The best news for employers? Flexibility is cheap. Even with hourly workers, there are ways to accommodate employees’ family responsibilities, from allowing workers to trade shifts to giving them five minutes to call home to make sure the kids got home from school okay. As we come out of the recession, and the competition for workers heats up again, you can bet flexibility will remain one of the best ways to both recruit and retain talent.

Small business owners might be about to get our own version of the bailout, sort of. A proposed $30 billion of the money the big banks have repaid on their bailout loans could go to community banks — in hopes that they’ll in turn lend it to small businesses. President Obama announced the plans for a Small Business Lending Fund this week as part of his job creation program, once again reinforcing the idea that helping small business will help put more Americans to work.

It’s gratifying to see small businesses be taken seriously, and in fact, relied upon to help turn the economy around. When the giant banks were deemed “too big to allow to fail,” I know many of us entrepreneurial types bristled, knowing full well that our success or failure was something that was, and always had been, entirely up to us.

Many of us do, however, take comfort in the fact that our bankers have our backs. Of course, they’re much more eager to lend us money when we don’t need it than when we find ourselves in a lean stretch, but still. I consider my banker a partner in growing my business. Our close relationship and his attention to my company’s needs are due, in large part, to the bank being a small community bank, and not one of the giant financial institutions.

I’m all for a plan that frees up more capital for those community banks to lend. A New York Times reporter quoted Karen Mills, the head of the Small Business Administration (SBA), as saying, “When you look at what’s causing the problem, the problem is that small community banks might lack capital.” The Independent Community Bankers of America point out that “every dollar of capital that goes into a community bank can potentially be leveraged 8 to 10 times into loans to small businesses,” according to the same article in the Times.

The big banks certainly aren’t jumping at the chance to lend to smaller companies. While small-business lending is down for the top 22 largest lenders under the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program, SBA-backed loans are up, according to the Wall Street Journal. In previous years, estimates of SBA-backed loans ranged from as low as 1% to a high of 8%. At least one industry expert predicts they’ll be up 10% to 15% this year.

Entrepreneurs are accustomed to slogging it out on their own. But if the country’s counting on us to create a bunch of jobs, it sure does help to have some sector of banking willing to lend the money it takes to expand and grow. Here’s just one more reason I advise small business owners to find a good banker at a community bank instead of going with a big bank where you’re more likely to get lost in the shuffle.

It’s amazing what you can get done getting still. Most small business owners, myself included, spend most of their days moving as fast as possible, getting things done, checking things off the list. But the most important work happens faster when we stop.

Once a year, my business partner and I go to Arizona for several days to think about the business. We take a thick workbook filled with questions about every aspect of the business, from our business development strategy, to how we define our company brand, to how we think each employee is doing.

For the first few days, it may look like we’re not doing much that’s productive. We go on hikes, have massages, take yoga classes, take naps. This year, Arizona had an unexpected cold snap and we spent a lot of time in our rooms sitting by the fire.

Then, ideas begin to surface. New-found clarity pulls everything into focus. Suddenly, we see business opportunities that we hadn’t noticed before. We notice things we need to change that we’d been moving too fast to see.

These annual trips are where we set our vision for the company. There are all sorts of important milestones in our company’s growth that can be traced back to an idea we had during Shiatsu or sitting by the pool on our Arizona retreats. If we hadn’t done these trips consistently through the years, there are plenty of times we would have veered off course and not caught it.

The trick is taking the time, even when you think you don’t have it. Or when you think the company can’t afford for you to spend money going away somewhere to loll around.

Our trips are definitely expensive, but I’d say they’re one of the most important items in our annual budget. My business partner and I were talking yesterday, after our most recent Arizona trip, about how we could have spent that same amount of money on an executive coach for the year, or joining a CEO roundtable group, or any other sort of professional development that most business people would find a reasonable investment.

But for my money, the best bet is giving yourself a chance to sit still until you begin to see where you need to go next.

No matter how good your company is, sooner or later you’re going to mess something up. You won’t mean to, but you’ll do something that upsets a client. Maybe you’ll miss a deadline, maybe costs will come in higher than you estimated, maybe one of your employees will unintentionally offend a client with a stupid joke. The question is not whether or not something will go wrong in a client relationship. Something always goes wrong.

The real question is: what do you DO when something goes wrong? A trusted business advisor once told me that it’s always a good strategy to overreact to a mistake. Don’t assume that just because the client says it’s no big deal that it’s no big deal.

Here’s a great example of the right sort of overreaction from the little blue box of high-end retail: Tiffany. A friend’s husband ordered her a necklace from the Tiffany website as a Christmas present. He selected a shipping method that would get it there by Christmas Eve. For reasons that may or may not have been Tiffany’s fault, the necklace didn’t arrive on time. They assured him it would arrive the following week.

But in the meantime, they overnighted — for Saturday delivery, no less — a complimentary gift card for $100. I don’t care who you are, a hundred dollars for free makes an impact. It’s a heck of an apology. My friend says she’d never really been a big fan of Tiffany before, but now she’s a true believer. Her husband, who had planned to have another jeweler knock off a celebration ring Tiffany makes to save a little money, now feels it’s imperative that he buy that ring from Tiffany, regardless of cost. His takeaway: “I know Tiffany will do it right.”

Of course, the reverse happens often enough. There’s a dime store in Atlanta that has been here for about three generations. It’s a well-loved institution. They’ve built their reputation one happy customer at a time, year after year after year. It’s the kind of place where parents take their kids for a ride on the same mechanical horse they rode as children. A ride on the horse still costs a dime.

One day I watched a cashier eradicate all those decades of goodwill, at least for the one customer she was serving. This guy handed her a clapping monkey he wanted to buy. You know the one, with the striped trousers and the brass cymbals. The price tag on the monkey said one price. The register rang it up at a higher price. The customer said he wanted to pay the price on the price tag. The cashier said, well, I can’t sell it to you for that, because the register says it’s supposed to cost such and such. They went around and around and around until finally the customer said, you know, I’ve been shopping here for years, but now I’m not coming back again. What’s more, he promised to tell all his friends what happened with the clapping monkey. And he walked out — monkeyless and not happy about it.

Wouldn’t it have been worth the few bucks difference in price to keep a long-time customer happy? I like to think that if the owner had been there, he would have apologized profusely to the customer. And then given him the clapping monkey for free.

If a tree falls in the blogosphere, is anyone there to hear it? Unless you already have all the readers you want for your blog, you’re going to want to promote your new posts. One of the best ways is to develop a standard system of the things you do each time you publish something new.

Here’s a handy checklist of the steps I take:

1. Ping it: Ping-o-matic is a free service that updates search engines so you don’t have to. Visit pingomatic.com, and go ahead and bookmark it. Then every time you post something new, just click on that, and it will do the pinging for you.

2. Tiny it: Next thing I do is make a shortened version of the URL for the blog page where my new post appears. I  use bit.ly, but there are plenty of other options.

3. Tweet it: Then I send out one tweet to let my followers know there’s some new content they might be interested in. Some people like to do several tweets about one post, or even many tweets a day promoting an inventory of past posts. In the tweet, I’ll include the shortened URL to take them straight to the post. (If you use Wordpress, you can also set it to auto-tweet your new posts.)

4. Digg it: To use this content sharing service, you’ll first need to register at digg.com. Then every time you post, you can go to their Add New Content page and submit your post. Check the box for news article if it’s a text post and the video box for a vlog, of course. You also might want to poke around Digg to see what other people have posted and give the ones you like a thumbs up, just for good karma.

5. Stumble it: Stumble Upon leads visitors directly to websites that match their interests, out of a list of nearly 500 possible topics. So it helps more like-minded people discover your blog. Again, you’ll need to first register as a member and download the toolbar into your browser. Then you can give your blog posts a thumbs up and submit them for other people to find.

6. Contribute it: You might find a few websites out there that allow you to post content, usually as an article or a blog. These will generally be sites that focus on a specific audience, like working mothers or budding entrepreneurs. Depending on the topic of each of my posts, I may or may not contribute it as content somewhere. When you do contribute content, you generally are allowed to tag the post with a brief description of who you are and what you write about, along with a link back to your own blog site.

7. Link it: This last one is so easy, you only have to set it up one time and then your blog becomes part of your LinkedIn account. Install the free BlogLink application and then it will automatically add your new posts to your profile page, and also let your contacts know every time you post something new.

The key to a successful workplace wellness program is employee engagement. The reverse is also true. That is, one way to increase employee engagement is a successful wellness program.

Yesterday we were in a client’s break room, waiting for a meeting room to open up , and I noticed several flyers on the bulletin board about various wellness offerings. I was surprised by my initial reaction, which was, “Who would sign up for those?”

Why did they strike me as loser offerings? Because they seemed preachy and goody-goody and completely devoid of anything fun. One sounded like the school nurse was going to take you through a lecture on the five food groups. I’m not suggesting that wellness should be a barrel of laughs, but a good program creates energy and involvement. The more employees you can get to participate, the stronger your program will be.

An effective wellness program will do more than just increase productivity because people feel better and have more energy. It also gives co-workers a chance to do something together that’s unrelated to their usual work roles. It equals the playing field, so to speak, in a way that lets junior employees spend some time on an equal footing with those who rank above them in the company hieirarchy. It will also build relationships between people in different departments, which helps smooth the way to better teamwork and increased collaboration.

So how do you create a wellness program with plenty of employee engagement? Here are five tips:

1. Ask the employees what they want. Particularly in a small company, you can solicit input from the group. You can do a survey, if you want, but it might be easier just to ask people about their wellness concerns. Are they looking for ways to find time for exercise? Do they really wish they could quit smoking? Are they trying to eat healthier?

2. Get their help in constructing the program. Give some influential employees ownership of developing the program. If the group wants a yoga class at lunch, let an employee track down a good yoga instructor willing to do a class in the conference room. If they’re interested in a buddy-system diet, let an employee research South Beach vs. The Zone vs. WeightWatchers.

3. Make sure management joins in. The top level people in the company need to suit up and show up. If you give the impression that the boss is too busy for exercise, for example, employees might interpret the fitness program as something meant only for those who aren’t as serious about their work. Besides making it clear that you’re committed to wellness, it adds extra motivation for participation, at least by those employees who want more chances to rub shoulders with the boss.

4. Add an element of competition. Put together a contest with some level of cash prize, or a free day off, or something employees will see as worth their while. Look for a way to compete that doesn’t automatically give an advantage to the fittest among the group. For instance, instead of a contest to see who can bench press the most weight, compete on who can complete three workouts a week for the most weeks.

5. Create a collaborative goal. If your group tends to get a little too competitive, choose a goal they work towards together. Maybe after the employees collectively walk or run 10,000 miles, the company donates $1,000 to a worthy cause. Or let the collaborative goal benefit the employees more directly. After they lose so many pounds as a group, you’ll hire a massage therapist to give chair massages on Friday afternoon.

If you’re an entrepreneur — or are thinking about becoming one — take advantage of the prevailing national pride in small business. America has always had a love affair with the Mom and Pop Main Street shop, but now, more than ever, the country is depending on entrepreneurs of every ilk to play a large role in our economic growth.

During the dark days of this recession, small business owners everywhere watched the big banks and car companies in the news and joked, “Where’s my bailout?” If it’s lonely at the top, it’s especially desolate at the top of a small business, where entrepreneurs have struggled alone with all kinds of tough decisions, from whether to lay off valued employees to if it might be time to file for bankruptcy. Plenty of small companies have folded, but many more are still standing.

These business owners, and the new entrepreneurs joining their ranks, are poised to become the national heroes of the American economy. For one thing, they provide half the jobs in the country and create up to 80% of all new jobs. Lawmakers and business reporters are now pulling out all the classic metaphors, like small business being “the backbone of the economy” and “the engine driving our economic recovery.”

If you own a small business and survived 2009, or if you started a business last year, you deserve some high praise. No doubt it required sharp business acumen, not to mention bravery, to pull that off. The people around you, in your company, your community and even your country, appreciate what you’ve done to help keep your employees working and your vendors in business. People with income can spend, which creates more income, and more spending, and eventually, the economy will be thriving again.

This is what I’d like to see. I’d like to be sitting on a plane sometime soon and have the airline attendant stand up and grab her microphone to say, “Ladies and gentleman, we have some small business owners on board with us today. Let’s give them all a round of applause to thank them for their part in stimulating the American economy.”