Aging is a Funny Thing: You Only Do It Once

In our HSBC Technology Town Hall meetings we have a rule: if the team wants to know the answer to a question, we answer it, no matter how awkward. (We use an online tool, let everyone post and see questions, and vote them up and down: we then answer the most popular).

In our most recent Town Hall meeting, open to people from all over the world, we got a question along the following lines: ‘The Technology Leadership team are all 50+ years old. Where’s the new blood?’.

It would be easy to feel defensive about such a question (especially for the team members well under fifty), but Darryl West, our Group CIO, gave a very straight answer: he thinks that age is less important than learning, and that it is essential for those of us who have been around for a while to consciously keep learning and reinventing ourselves.

I think that Darryl is right, but this question prompted me to think a little more deeply about what age means to those of us in technology leadership roles, and to consider what it means to me.

This is necessarily a personal and unscientific reflection. Any thoughts based on personal experience have a maximum sample size of one;when I think about what it means to be a particular age, that sample size is even smaller. I will only be my current age (51) for a maximum of one year. Then I’ll have to figure out what it means to be a technology leader at 52, and so on. 

On the face of it,I don’t think that I feel any different than I did when I started my first full time technology job over thirty years ago. On that day I was a bit scared and a bit excited. I knew that I loved working with computers, but also knew that people were going to ask me to do things I didn’t know how to do. I knew that I was going to learn new skills and meet new people. I hoped I was going to get most things right, but also know that I was going to get a few things wrong.

Thirty years later, I still feel pretty much the same way. Every day there are things that scare and excite me. I still love working with computers, but am absolutely sure that I’m going to get asked questions that I don’t know the answer to, and am going to be asked to do things that I don’t know how to do. I am also fortunate that, in my job, I get to learn new things and meet new people every day. I have also gained enough experience in my job to get things right much of the time, but I know that I have made mistakes and that I will continue to make mistakes.

Superficially, then, 51 year old me feels quite similar to 20 year old me.

However, I do believe that age and experience have changed me, sometimes in good ways, which I try to make the most of, and sometimes in less good ways, which I need to work on. I also believe that I have some attributes which have not changed, but which have helped me to stay fresh over a long technology career.

The way in which I feel aging has helped me most is by increasing my confidence. I was quite a young and shy 20 year old (possibly due to spending lots of my spare time with computers). The truth is that I wasn’t just a bit scared on my first day at work: I was absolutely terrified. And, while I still feel some nerves every day, these days they are more often in the form of helpful energy than the inhibition or awkwardness I used to feel. I don’t think that this is due to any profound physical and mental change, but is rather due to the fact that, over my career, I have had the opportunity to try more things, to succeed at some (and to learn what I am good at), and to fail at others (and to learn that failure is a lesson more often than it is a disaster).

If I’ve gained in confidence, is there anything that I have lost (apart from hair)? It’s always difficult to look across the years and clearly perceive oneself at an earlier age, but one of the things I certainly admire in 20 year old me is a na?ve energy. At that age, when presented with new technologies I immediately started to imagine all the ways they could change the world. I still believe that technology can change the world, but these days I tend to start with the practical challenges. I have to consciously put those challenges aside when I need to think as big as possible, and then bring those challenges back to figure out what we need to do next.

There are a couple of attributes which I think served 20 year old me well, which are still useful to 51 year old me, and which have helped all the versions of me in between. First, I have always been curious about how technology works: I want to know what goes on behind the scenes. Second, I have always been comfortable admitting ignorance. I know that there are a lot of things I don't yet understand, but that I would love to understand. I have also been fortunate enough to grow up, live and work in a family, environment and profession which supported my curiosity, and which tolerated and helped me overcome my ignorance.

On reflection, then, I still feel that 51 year old me is not that different from 20 year old me. I have learnt some new strengths, but sometimes need to work to recovery my old strengths. And I am grateful that I have not lost my curiosity and that, because I am still ignorant about most of the world, there is much to be curious about.

These are personal, unscientific reflections based on my very limited existence of being the age I am. 70 year old me may disagree completely.

These reflections are not a case for older people in technology leadership roles, and they are not a case for younger people in those roles. If anything, they are a case for individualsin all roles, with an understanding of all their strengths and weaknesses, whatever their stage of life.