When is your peak? If you are a swimmer or a model it may be at 20, a soccer player or city trader at 30, chess or acting at 40. What about a politician, or a corporate professional? Our dominant logic suggests the answer is “the day before retirement”. Is that right? Experience certainly counts for a great deal in business, but what about energy, motivation, freshness, being up to date?
Of course there are many contextual factors apart from age affecting our capacity to perform. Slowly the business world recognizes pregnancy and early child rearing as external factors to be accommodated. But what about the menopause? The male menopause? Caring for ageing parents? Unruly adolescents? Health generally? Non-work and post-work priorities? We all have days, months, years, decades where we are fit and ready to do our best work, and times when other things get in the way. We still tend to compartmentalize these things away.
With many bumps along the way, I would posit that the typical peak for many corporate type jobs would be around 45-50, with a gentle downward curve after that. This is far from universal – just like jobs, people are different, and some may genuinely peak at 80 (and some at 30). So I ask again, when is your personal peak?
The question becomes more relevant not less with ageing populations and consequent changes to retirement legislation. I have long feared mass keeling over of 50-somethings living lifestyles involving planes and hotels and little else, and I’m surprised that doesn’t seem to have emerged yet as a public issue. Now we are all free to keep working longer, it will be 60-somethings and even 70-somethings.
There are other bad consequences of the dominant logic, beyond risking premature death, holding back talent and suboptimal management (in case those aren’t bad enough). I have seen so many sad career endings – recently more than ever, maybe because the downturn is leading to more endings overall. If our most challenging job is our last, yet our peak is long past, there is a good chance that the Peter Principle really applies and we rise to our level of incompetence, and hence we will somehow fail. So our last interactions with our employer may be bad ones. We might burn out. We might feel bad inside because we know we have done a poor job. We might let down staff. We might end up being forced out in some humiliating negotiation, with embarrassing leaving speeches. We might be put out to grass, told to sit at home, to become invisible. I have seen all these things many times, and it makes me so sad. The coaching I always give to someone in this situation is to view the career as a whole – most of us can say with truth and pride that overall Shell has been good for us and that we have been good for Shell. A bad ending can make that perspective hard to retain.
Another bad consequence is more subtle, and that is that we don’t prepare adequately for life after work. Because of the dominant logic, we follow the crowd and keep trying to develop at work. We work even longer hours at the end because we need to in order to succeed. We avoid talking to our partners and finding things outside work and generally managing the transition. Shell is ahead of most corporations in that if offers a good pre-retirement course, yet I understand that most of the content is about finances, and there are many other factors in play than that. Then suddenly we stop, exhausted, we try to get the leaving speeches out of our head, turn to our partners, and…I’ve seen many of those stories with sad endings too.
So are you becoming convinced that changing the dominant logic is a worthwhile challenge? Good. So what drives that logic? Two things do, the reward structures and the prevailing mindset.
Reward structures all feed the dominant logic. Performance management all emphasizes development. Pensions and also exit packages are all skewed heavily towards salaries right at the back end, and encourage continual climbing of the greasy pole and holding on as long as possible, or at least making sure it is the employer initiating closure.
This whole structure is very fixable. It is tough, and needs great courage and radicalism, and full solutions would need to involve companies, governments and societies. But it is fixable. And actually a company like Shell could go a long way on its own initiative, and create a wonderful differentiating employee value proposition. Key steps would be to make backward job group transitions normal and accepted, the same for part-time working, widening salary bands to decouple job group somewhat with salary, maybe some loan type schemes to phase salaries better through careers (loyalty type schemes), starting again with a blank sheet of paper and full transparency on exit options, and more flexible pensions. All of this is achievable, probably in a self-financing way as well.
Changing the mindset is harder, as always. A good parallel is with getting women into the workforce 30 years ago. It is hard to shake the culture. Excuses abound. The power is with those who will preserve the status quo and don’t have the imagination to see beyond it. Individually, it is tough on the ego to swim against the tide, even if we can reconcile ourselves to the financial penalties. The pioneers will be bullied.
Just like D&I. So let us handle this the same way. Build a groundswell of opinion (why do you 20-somethings tolerate the current structures?). Hope for some visionary leaders. Then follow through with quotas, training, and so on. Campaign. Celebrate successes. Hope that other companies and countries join in. It will take a while.
This would be a wonderful area for Shell to lead. Shell has always been an HR pioneer. It would benefit society, save lives even. It would create a differentiated employee proposition. It would promote talent, and massively improve our performance – as a small example, think of the benefits in knowledge transfer of people in late career doing more mentoring and shadowing
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