Reflections : A Case For Hiring Older Talent

“My life may be summed up in three phases. I was raw, I became cooked. Then I burned.” —Jalal Ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, otherwise known as Rumi (1207-1273)

Sufi Poet and philosopher Rumi wrote “I was raw. I became cooked. Then I burned.” 750 years ago, but digital life seems to have accelerated our cooking time since Rumi’s era.

For millennia, if not for eons- anthropology continuously pushed backward the time of human origin – life expectancy was short. The few people who grew old were assumed, because of their years, to have won the favor of gods. The typical person was fortunate to reach 40. However, beginning in the 19th century, that slowly changed. Since 1840, life expectancy at birth has risen about three months with each passing year. In 1840, life expectancy at birth in Sweden, a much-studied nation owing to its record-keeping, was 45 years for women; today it’s 83 years. In the US, life expectancy was 47 years at the beginning of the 20th century. It is now 79 years, and if about three months continue to be added with each passing year, by the middle of this century, American life expectancy at birth will be 88 years, and by the end of the century, it should reach 100.

Viewed globally, as this piece in The Atlantic titled “What Happens When We All Live to 100?” points out, “the lengthening of life spans seems independent of any single, specific event. It didn’t accelerate much as antibiotics and vaccines became common. Nor did it retreat much during wars or disease outbreaks. A graph of global life expectancy over time looks like an escalator rising smoothly. This trend holds, in most years, in individual nations rich and poor; the whole world is riding the escalator.”

“We are living longer, but power is moving younger. The brisk march of progress from the industrial to the tech area,” writes Chip Conley in a conversation about ageism, “has created a strong bias toward digital natives who understand gadgets and gigabytes better than those of us who didn’t grow up “byting” from the Apple in childhood. One paradox of our time is that Baby Boomers enjoy better health than ever, remain vibrant and stay in the workplace longer, but feel less and less relevant. They worry, justifiably, that bosses or potential employers may see their experience and the clocked years that come with it as more of a liability than an asset. They fear becoming increasingly invisible, or even cast aside. The reasons are not far too seek as “the age-old, three-stage life cycle- education, work, retirement [raw, cooked, burned] – is deeply ingrained in our psyches,” writes Conley. “Changing it won’t happen overnight, especially when “employers can smell fifty,” as actor Steve Martin exclaimed in the film Bowfinger. Being too young to retire but too old to find a job is a modern problem ripe for disruption.” Conley further exhorts us with the sage advice that “it’s time to retire the three-stage life since life stages are just a social construction that today fosters ageism, the squandering of wisdom, and a diminished sense of meaning and fulfillment in the latter half of life.”

Echoing these views Margaret Morganroth Gullette, a global authority on aging and ageism, argues that “ageism stems from the perception that old people are irrelevant.” She links the rise of ageism over the centuries to broad trends: “the printing press and widespread literacy made the lore that elders carried in their heads available to all (a process hastened, and even finished off, by Google); the industrial revolution increasingly demanded younger, more mobile workers; and medical advances made so many people live so much longer.” Ageism is further fueled, Gullette believes, by what she calls the ideology of scarcity – “the trope that the elderly are locusts who swarm the earth consuming all our resources.” “The relevant economic terminology, as a piece in The New Yorker titled “Why Ageism Never Gets Old” points out, “is indeed grimly suggestive: those over sixty-four are part of the “dependent” rather than the “productive” population; they are “the burden” that the young must carry.

A Moody’s report suggests that the aging population – often apocalyptically referred to as “the gray horde” or “the silver tsunami” – will dampen global economic growth over the next two decades. Yet evidence tells a different story – In 2000, 12.8 percent of those over sixty-five were working; in 2016, it was 18.8 per cent. Furthermore, old people have most of the money. Thirty years ago, households headed by those over sixty-five were ten times as wealthy as those under thirty-five; now they are fifty times as wealthy. Older people, increasingly, aren’t creeping off into a twilit world of shuffleboard and Sudoku.”

Rethinking Ageism

“When work for most people meant manual labor, there was no need to worry about the second half of your life. You simply kept on doing what you had always done. And if you were lucky enough to survive 40 years of hard work in the mill or on the railroad, you were quite happy to spend the rest of your life doing nothing. Today, however, most work is knowledge work, and knowledge workers, are not ‘finished’ after 40 years on the job, they are merely bored.” —Peter Drucker

Contrary to our well-meaning intentions towards creating more of an age-agnostic workplace, the reality is ageism is an ugly fact in today’s jobs marketplace. Author Ted C. Fishman [Shock of Gray] has called it the “global age arbitrage,” in which if you are older, you are likely to be considered less capable, less able to adapt, or less willing to roll up your sleeves and do something new than your younger peers. A ProPublica investigation shows that IBM has quietly pushed out upwards of 20,000 aging workers over the past five years. And, for all that has been written about the woeful lack of diversity and the “bro culture” that prevail in the tech industry, Silicon Valley’s 150 biggest tech companies have faced more accusations of age bias over the past decade than racial or gender bias.

Tad Friend’s writing on ageism in the The New Yorker, delineates this sharp shift in the age of authority from increasingly rapid technological change: “With the advent of the cloud and off-the-shelf A.P.I.s – the building blocks of sites and apps – all you really need to launch a start-up is a bold idea. Silicon Valley believes that bold ideas are the province of the young. Zuckerberg once observed, “Young people are just smarter,” and the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has said that “people over forty-five basically die in terms of new ideas.” Paul Graham, the co-founder of the valley’s start-up accelerator, Y Combinator, declared that sweet-spot is your mid-twenties. “The guys with kids and mortgages are at a real disadvantage.” The median age at tech titans such as Facebook and Google is under thirty; the standard job requirements in the Valley – which discourage a “stale degree” and demand a “digital native” who’s a “culture fit” – sift for youth…Even as Lycra and yoga make fifty the new thirty, tech is making thirty the new fifty.” “Middle age,” observes Tad Friend, “formerly the highest-status phase of life around the world, has become a precarious crossing. The relatively new tech sector is generating enormous amounts of a very old product ageism.” Ageism, affects us all, though some older workers feel the pain more than others. Some, refusing to go quietly into the night, choose to start their own companies when they feel invisible looking for a job after age fifty. But, for others, age discrimination in employment has a far more severe effect. It makes less or no difference in the lives of people who do not have to be employed, have a nest egg, can start an enterprise, or can pick up some consulting assignments. In that way it’s like Voltaire’s comment that “equality before the law means that the rich and poor are equally forbidden to sleep under a bridge at night.” And just as some people must work more than others for economic reasons, so also must they do so for other compulsions as well.

In the wise words of Stephen Hawking: “Work gives you meaning and purpose, and life is empty without it.” It represents an opportunity to give value to others and the community; it gives you a network of friends and associates to be with; and it gives you something to do with your intellectual and physical energy. Why would we want to retire if we love our work? “Countless individuals in their 60s and 70s,” as Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Josh Bersin highlight in their Harvard Business Review piece titled “The Case for Hiring Older Workers,” “are actively engaged with their careers, and certain to avoid retirement. At 89, Warren Buffet is still regarded as one of the most brilliant brains in the world of finance, and Charlie Munger, his right-hand man is 95. At 61, Madonna is the undisputed queen of pop. At 81, Jane Fonda is as prolific as ever in her careers as an actress and activist. In addition, the most important job in the U.S. goes to people who would generally be considered “too old” to be productive in most offices. Only two presidents ended their tenure under the age of 50. The other 43 were 60 or older, including 22 aged 60 or older. All this suggests that age does correspond with workplace wisdom, and research proves it. Contrary to popular belief, older, more tenured people are more successful entrepreneurs. Those over the age of 40 are three times more likely to create successful companies as a result of their patient, collaborative natures, and their lack of a “need to prove myself” attitude that tends to accompany youth.”

What Can Older Talent contribute in Liminal Times

The value of humility, emotional intelligence, and wisdom cannot be discounted in times of liminality. The term comes from Arnold van Gennep, the Belgian anthropologist who first outlined the common patterns in how cultures mark transitions from one human state to another (for example from adolescence to adulthood). In his 1909 book The Rites of Passage he described three stages of separation from one world and entry into another: (a) “severance” from the past; (b) a liminal or “threshold” stage that is the uncomfortable space of being in between two phases of your life; and (c) the “incorporation” of re-entering the community in a new role. As Chip Conley, reflecting on the need to create new rites of passage, opines: “So many cultural cornerstones – from the author Joseph Campbell’s work on the “hero’s journey” narrative pattern to the Star War movies, and, for that matter, most great films – track this arc that van Gennep developed in the early twentieth century. Yet the reality is that most of the older workers today have no conscious recognition or moving through these thresholds, which is why so many people in the second half of life feel incomplete and unprepared. There is nothing more life-affirming in midlife than to be reacquainted with that old childhood friend named Curiosity. And, in this new habitat, the gathered wisdom of older workers can be particularly valuable.”

Times of liminality are disconcertingly chaotic; and “while digital skills might have the shelf life of the latest fad or gadget,” says Conley, “the human skills that mid-career workers possess – like good judgment, specialized knowledge, and the ability to collaborate and create – never expire.” For most people, raw mental horsepower declines after the age of 30, but knowledge and expertise – the main predictors of job performance – keep increasing even beyond the age of 80. There is also ample evidence to assume that traits like drive and curiosity are catalysts for new skill acquisition even during late adulthood. When it comes to learning new things, there is just no age limit, and the more intellectually engaged people remain when they are older, the more they will contribute to the employment market.

“Can the Olds thrive among today’s tech’s Youngs?” Tad Friend of The New Yorker, whom we last met in the earlier part of this post wrote the best summary of it I’ve seen:“Earlier in 2017, Chip Conley recounted in the Harvard Business review how he became a patriarch at Airbnb at fifty-two. “Many young people can read the face of their iPhone better than the face of the person sitting next to them,” he explained. Offering emotional intelligence in return for their digital intelligence, he styled himself as a “Modern Elder,” “who serves and learns, as both mentor and intern, and relishes being both student and sage.” Almost sounds like the plot of that movie “The Intern” (2015) which was written and directed by Nancy Meyers. Hollywood’s leading impresario of later-life fantasies. Robert De Niro plays Ben, a widowed menschy seventy-year-old who becomes a “senior intern” at a fashion start-up run by Anne Hathaway’s character, Jules. Discriminated against in his job interview (“What was your major? Do you remember?”), and initially ill-adapted to this new world – he wears a suit, carries a briefcase, and uses a flip phone and a Casio calculator- Ben soon learns from Jules how to set up his Facebook profile. In return he saves Jules’s company and her marriage, teaches the twenty-something interns how to manage up, and even scores with company masseuse. There may be snow on the rooftop, but there’s still a fire in the kitchen.”

"It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment; In these qualities old age is usually not only poorer, but its even richer." - Cicero (106-43 BC)

Writing on the importance of embracing older workers, M/s Chamorro and Bersin assert that “Beside the value and competence older employees can bring to the workforce, there is the issue of cognitive diversity. Few things of value have ever been accomplished by individual workers alone. The vast majority of our advancements – whether in science, business, arts, or sports – are the result of coordinated human activity, or people working together as a cohesive unit. The best way to maximize team output is to increase cognitive diversity, which is significantly more like to occur if you can get people of different ages (and experiences) working together.” Maybe it’s time to stop the generational name-calling and recognize that we all have something to learn from one another. We are seeing today a workplace where brilliant thirty-year-olds can tutor workers twice their age about the future of technology; while the sixty-year-old can offer emotional, leadership, and general life advice to the talented, accelerated young turks. This is a golden opportunity right under our noses.

The Way Forward

"The values of youth are about possession, consumption, expression and individuality; the values that underpin dignity in age and death are about relationships, connectedness, sharing and participation - far more powerful drivers for social change." - British Author Charles Leadbeater

To truly overcome age discrimination, and the damage it could bring to our global economy, companies need to rethink “ageism.” As the management professor Peter Cappelli and co-author of the book Managing the Older Worker says, “Every aspect of job performance gets better as we age. I thought the picture might be more mixed but it isn’t. The juxtaposition between the superior performance of older workers and the discrimination against them in the workplace just really makes no sense.” If employers can reverse their ageist practices and create a workplace where older workers are celebrated rather than sidelined, this mixture of experience and youth can foster higher productivity, profits, and innovation.

As the global economy ages, ageism bias will become a more important issue than ever. As deeply divided as we are politically and culturally today, the eventual arrival of old age is a condition that unites us. Staying competitive in a world of unprecedented longevity demands that organizations adopt new strategies to engage with older talent. Traditional assumptions – that learning ends in one’s 20s, career progression ends in the 40s, and work ends in the 60s – are no longer accurate or sustainable. Writing on the importance of pairing older workers with smart and ambitious millennials, Chip Conley observes: "Many companies have admirably focused resources on becoming more diverse and inclusive when it comes to gender and race, but too many are laggards when it comes to age. In a 2015 survey of global CEOs, PwC found that 64 percent of companies have a formal diversity and inclusiveness strategy and 85 percent of CEOs think it's improved their bottom line. However, only 8 percent of the 64 percent include age as a dimension of their strategy. At a time when labor shortages are emerging, due in part to new restrictive immigration policies, while there simultaneously exists a demographically aging workforce that declares they want to delay retirement, it's shocking to see so few company leaders think expansively age-wise about how they can attract and retain both the smartest and the wisest. Equally puzzling is that most companies don't have a longevity strategy, a comprehensive plan that makes them a model employer for the fastest growing demographic in the workplace population: employees fifty and above."

Rethinking talent strategies across multiple generations to account for longer lives will require open minds and fresh approaches and it is here that CEOs, HR leaders, and others can help write the recipe book for recruiting in their organizations who want to reap the myriad benefits of a multi-generational workforce. It’s time organizations embraced age as any other diversity and put the terms “longevity” and “age” in their well-being, DEI, and recruiting strategies.

Rumi was a wise man and defined our three-stage life long ago, but it's time for us to add to Rumi's three phases of life. Maybe there's a fourth...I was raw, I became cooked. I burned. And, then, I became raw again. And finally as Chip Conley reflects with uncommon intellectual elegance, “Wisdom precedes us and will succeed us. The Modern age needs Modern elders.”

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