Thinking Differently About Older Age

Let’s talk about age and your role as a leader.

I mean this two ways. I want you to think about your own age and I want you to think about the age of those who work for you. Here’s why.

There is a bias towards youth in our culture today. This is largely because we are much about looks and much about certain forms of energy. When this bias gets absorbed into business culture, we retire people early and are somewhat bigoted in our promotions and assignment of responsibility.

I guest lecture for a university in the Middle East. Retirement there is required at age 63. I have told them that this policy might have made sense a century ago but it is woefully out of date now. They are losing good people and losing them during their peak performance years.

In fact, this policy broadly applied would have prevented Winston Churchill from becoming prime minister of England—for the first time as well as the second. It would have kept Ronald Reagan from being president, which occurred when he was 73. It also would have kept Nelson Mandela from becoming president of South Africa at 76 and Colonel Sanders from founding Kentucky Fried Chicken long after he retired from his first career at 65.

I could go on. What is important for our purposes here, though, is that modern medicine and lifestyles are allowing people to live longer and to produce vibrantly much later in their lives.

A number of studies in the US have suggested that the most productive age in human life is between 60-70 years of age and that the second most productive is 70-80. The third most productive? Believe it or not, it’s 50-60.

The simple fact is that we are living longer and are able to producer better in our later years. Consider this. In 1992, the average age for a pastor in America was 44. That has increased more than ten years since to about 56. And this is just the average age. Today, the pastors of the largest church in America tend to be in their late sixties and seventies.

Here is the message for you. If you keep yourself healthy and constantly growing in skills and knowledge, there is no reason that you can’t lead even decades beyond what most folks think of as retirement age today—their early sixties. This will help you. You won’t limit yourself. You’ll think in terms of the reinvention possibilities I’ve written about here before. You’ll be able to fulfill dreams you’ve perhaps shelved because of age factors.

Here is my message for you as you lead your firm. There are obviously some roles only the young should do in your firm. Most of those, though, have to do with challenging physical tasks. Yet you’ll have a more productive firm overall if you think differently about the aging on your team. Why can’t the CFO be 78 if all performance factors are high? Why can’t the professor be 80 if all standards are reached or exceeded—and young hearts and minds are set aflame? Why can’t your general counsel be in her 90s if she still provides expertise in her counsel and filings? Don’t you need her experience as well as her wisdom, devotion, and character?

We are in a new day. Age doesn’t automatically mean what it used to. Certainly, I know 65 year olds who probably need to go home and rest. They are infirm and a bit afraid of the wider world. That’s fine. But being 65 doesn’t automatically mean infirm and tired. Nor does 75 or 85 these days.

Think differently about older age—both yours and your team’s. Great things can come of it.