Avivah Wittenberg-Cox on the leadership gifts of longevity

Decades of depth

Older workers’ seasoned and nuanced insights could help emerging five-generation workforces address our most complex conundrums, writes Avivah Wittenberg-Cox

Peter Drucker was an exceptionally early thinker on the topic of longevity and its consequences for leadership and firms. Only now are those ideas becoming more mainstream. From his personal vantage point of living and working into his nineties, he predicted that “in future there will almost certainly be two distinct workforces, broadly made up of the under-fifties and the overfifties respectively. These two workforces are likely to differ markedly in their needs and behaviour, and in the jobs they do.”

Drucker invented the term ‘knowledge worker,’ and then realised that this profile of professionals would age very differently to prior generations. They would be healthier, less tired and more able and attached to continuing their work into their later decades of life. What’s more, their actual careers would stretch into 50-year marathons. “Historically,” he pointed out, “the working lifespan of most employees has been less than 30 years because most manual workers simply wore out. But knowledge workers who enter the labour force in their 20s are likely to be still in good physical and mental shape 50 years later.”

Decades after his death, this remains linear path with a cliff-edge ending must be largely unexplored territory. Few business completely flexed. Older workers’ insights, leaders or companies are engaging with it. gleaned over decades of work, life, love and Many of yesterday’s leaders try to ignore it loss, could be leveraged in the world’s first entirely – along with the spectre of mortality five-generation workforces to holistically – by investing in life-lengthening technol- address our most complex conundrums. ogies or drugs. A handful As I zoom into 60, I’d of thinkers and writers are Longevity suggest that adulthood retaking up these ideas as our societies skew dramatically gifts the ally only starts at 50: the halfway mark for an evertowards entirely unprece- world with expanding bunch of us. It dented demographic shapes. From Japan to Germany and exceptionally takes time to figure out the complexity of what it means Cuba to the Czech Repub- experienced to be human. But you only lic, countries are facing declining populations, characand mature know that – and certainly only believe it – from the far terised by a combination of humans side. The challenge is a comfalling birth rates and a rising plete paradigm shift at mulnumber of long-living old folk. tiple levels – among individuals, companies

When age does enter the conversation, and countries – complete with a rebranding there are usually just two options to listen of what leadership looks and sounds like. to. One is the hushed murmur of impending Some of tomorrow’s wisest leaders may doom, led by actuaries and insurance firms, be old and grey and wrinkled. We’ll have which allows pensions to drive the debate – a to learn how to sell – and prove – that refactor now trumped by Covid’s levelling of ality to the young ’uns. “All you have to do,” vast numbers of elderly care-home residents. suggested Drucker, “is raise the retirement The other is the ‘good-aging’ mantra that age to 79.” nudges old people to behave as much like young people for as long as possible, so that they will continue to consume, thereby fuelling our economies.

But the enormous leadership opportunity – suggested by Drucker, developed by Harvard’s Robert Kegan and put into action by Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Advanced Leadership Initiative – is that lon- Avivah Wittenberggevity gifts the world with exceptionally ex- Cox is CEO of global perienced and mature humans. Their talents consultancy 20-first, – often tossed aside by firms eager to ‘make room’ for the next generation’s ‘fresh thinkwhich helps companies harness the competitive advantage of gender, ing’ – must be reassessed, in parallel with a nationality and redesign of career shapes. The old up-or-out, generational balance