When it comes to age and the workplace, don’t play a numbers game
“Read This in Big Type. The Best Founders Are at Least 50.” That was the headline of an article in The Wall Street Journal on Feb. 8-9, and I was delighted to read it. I thought, “At last, someone is acknowledging the special skills and advantages that older leaders bring to their roles.” And then I stopped myself. After all, I have long been a critic of age discrimination. Isn’t this just another example of age-based prejudice?
The article outlines the number of advantages that older leaders purportedly offer:
Better business and social connections
Better credibility
Greater industry and domain experience
Better at spotting opportunities
Better knowledge of the rules of business and how to break them
Better judgment about which problems actually need to be solved
Those are all great qualities for a founder, and in fact for any senior business leader. But what evidence is there that leaders over 50 are actually better at all those things?
Age usually is just a number
I have no doubt that some jobs are done better by younger people. Jobs that require considerable physical strength and speed are generally better done by the young. There is some evidence that younger people are also better suited for jobs that require very rapid learning or the ability to mentally manipulate numbers (although in the age of computers I’m skeptical about how often the latter skill is required). “Digital natives”—people who have used digital technology since early childhood—are often more skilled in using technology and adapting to new tools than their elders are.
Similarly, there are jobs that require skills where older people are more likely to excel. One of those skills is synthesis—the ability to pull together a wide variety of information to formulate ideas or develop strategies. Age may also be an advantage when providing counsel to older people because of the perception of credibility and life experience.
Ageist thinking, stereotypes serve no one
However, there are two big problems with using age as a criterion for selecting people for leadership roles. First, a great deal of what we believe about age simply isn’t true. There are all kinds of biases and beliefs about different age groups for which there is no scientific support. “Young people are lazy and entitled” or “Old people are rigid and judgmental.” Those may be your personal beliefs, but you’d be hard pressed to find research support for those generalizations.
The second big problem is that even when there are real differences between age cohorts, there are often equally large differences between the individuals in each cohort. There are old people who are more attuned to digital advances than most younger people. There are young people who demonstrate better business judgment than most old people. Those of us who have studied statistics call these “overlapping distributions,” and they describe most differences between groups of humans. But even those of us who have studied statistics sometimes forget our education and fall into the trap of making mindless generalizations about the differences between groups.
Decisions about hiring, promoting, and investing in the right people are critically important for business success. As Jim Collins put it in his influential book Good to Great, “Get the right people on the bus.” That means scrupulously figuring out exactly what is required for success in each role and then focusing only on those traits and skills when you select a candidate. Selecting people on the basis of their age is highly unlikely to get you there.
To talk more about how to find the right people for your business, contact me at ggolden@gailgoldenconsulting.com.
