Posted on : 2023-10-15 20:21:40
Article : Good morning Monday Management solution for the TASK 263-To continue to grow our economy, companies need to act by bringing older people back to work and giving them meaningful, important jobs. This may seem simple, but age bias is a serious hurdle.
As a discipline, marketing skews young. In both the US and UK, according to industry surveys, chief marketing officers are the youngest in the C-suite, with one US survey citing the average CMO age at 39, versus ages in the mid-40s for disciplines such as finance and HR. And if we venture to the periphery of our discipline, and zoom down on just communications, it seems our cast of specialists is more fresh-faced still.
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 individuals working 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 likely to occur if you can get people of different ages (and experiences) working together. It is a theme increasingly picked up at the more general commercial level by commentators looking to make businesses not just fairer but better at what they do.
In a news edition former entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox claimed that business needs its older heads for their wisdom and their “war stories”. Another publication also brought a business news story that would seem to give a fillip to the Lane Fox viewpoint, and to all those extolling the virtues of age, The Walt Disney Company announced that it had extended the tenure of its 72-year-old chief executive, Bob Iger, to 2026. Isn’t that evidence of the point that the wisdom of age is what even the most forward-looking, tech-based companies are seeking now?
When we go through Iger’s record what do we see? Courage, farsightedness, integrity, ambition – under his first 15-year tenure, Disney’s stock surged from $24 to $148 a share. He is driven, famously, by “the relentless pursuit of perfection”. And he is unfailingly more interested in the story of the future than the past. If wisdom is part of that makeup, judgement might be a more accurate word, it is because he has always displayed it, not because his age happens to start with a seven. Companies like Boeing, Bank of America, Walgreens, GM, and others now invite older workers to come back, through specific programs tailored to the aging. They are branded “return ships.” The question that marketing leaders should be asking when considering hiring, or retaining, a person at any level should be the same as that which, presumably, drove Disney: is this person exceptional? Are they so good at what they do that we can feel sure they are up to the job?
It’s not that simple if you think about it. The longer is a person in tenure, the more any weaknesses or lack of ability will come to the fore. At the junior level, nobody expects too much, and newbies are given the benefit of the doubt. As they go up the experience ladder it will become more obvious who the good, and not so good people are. Combine that with the greater salary costs at senior levels and you can see why a thinning out of older people across the discipline is inevitable. Excellence is what leaders should seek. Marketing success is the ambition. Diversity of outcomes is not part of the plan. And while diversity of gender and ethnicity might make automatic good sense in pursuit of that ambition, diversity of age, on the sole premise of somehow ensuring wiser actions, is harder to justify.
In a career there will be gaps. When was the last time you engaged in training to master a new skill or focus on a key subset of the discipline? That applies especially if you expect there to be a ‘career gap’ between positions coming up. One senior marketer used an enforced break between roles to take a Master’s in data science. It built confidence, buttressed her CV and gave her an important new skill to take to her subsequent role. And in any case, wisdom, if you are blessed with it, is always far better demonstrated than articulated. “We tried that before and it didn’t work” is not going to endear you to your colleagues, and may in any case not turn out to be true in the new contextual environment.
End point- Finally, by all means, when you see an example of a septuagenarian, like Iger, still hitting the high notes, take it as inspiration. But rather than say to yourself, ‘It’s really good that somebody of that age can be in demand’, try saying, ‘There is only one way to be in demand at any age – and that is to be really good’
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