Episode #160: Is Forty The End Of The Line For Most Leaders?

Sport is a popular source of inspiration for corporate leadership. Coaches attend off-sites and make good money telling business executives how to be better people motivators. Sports journalist Simon Kuper made an interesting observation in his column in the Financial Times about famous football coaches falling into decline, supplanted by younger, more innovative rivals. These superstar coaches were the original innovators, but then they ran out of gas. Well, not all of them. Almost as an aside, he flagged the difference between the shorter longevity of the flash in the pan “innovators” and those more hardy types who excelled at “people management”.

This is an interesting observation because often we surge through our careers based on our ideas, innovation or technical expertise. We are thrusters, shining like comets across the evening skies. In Kuper’s article, the age of forty was singled out as the pivot point. The planets start to align and leadership hopefuls begin their move to the very top. In my native Australia, historically, you were not thought to be a real man until you reached the age of forty. At that point you were considered to have amassed the knowledge, experience as well as the physical strength.

Kuper notes that at this age of forty, when you get the big promotion or the shot at a significant job, you have probably expended all of the your innovator ammo just getting there and now it is all downhill. That doesn’t sound too hopeful does it. What does this mean for those who have risen in the organisation based on their technical knowledge or the strength of their ideas? They are thinking that now they make that all important swing up to the top job. According to Kuper instead they cross that ominous forty threshold and can look forward to nothing further than creeping decline? Are the leader’s ideas now escaping the muse and thinkers block has set in like a black mist? As a side note, the age of forty is also considered the danger year for men (akudoshi) in Japanese culture. Okay, you have been warned!

A lot of firms value those corporate hard skills over soft skills. The culture is geared that way and so are the promotions. Somewhere along the line however the soft skills become more important in practice, but often there is not the organisational recognition that this is the case. Being the smartest technical person in the room is fine but not much help necessarily, in leading other mere mortals. That was our boss’s era. They knew every part of the job, had the experience and deep knowledge of the complexities. Actually they had all the answers.

Organisations today are more complex because business itself has become more technology driven and so more complex. Firms favour those who are collaborative and who can provide leadership and accountability at all levels. Leading without authority is the marker for those who will be able to keep rising. Companies are screaming out for insights into how to beat the competition. One single boss cannot know everything today. Companies need to have good teamwork to combine strengths to outplay their rivals That means work gets done more collectively today, so a different skill set is needed. More ideas are called upon, more viewpoints required, more synergy than what can be achieved by a couple of lone wolf superstars.

Getting the best ideas out of everyone in the team, ensuring clear, concise communication and a culture of going the extra mile in the plan execution are not driven from the hard skills toolbox. The technician often stays the technician because they are not skilled at dealing with and motivating the people in their teams. The higher we climb in organisations the more our leader’s soft skills are required. This is where the gaps arise between the hard skill and soft skill proponents. Being the best technician runs its race at some point, as we are overtaken by internal rivals, who are able to marshal the power of the entire team through their people and communication skills. What about the rest of our work life, if we can’t master those key skills? We need to be able to substitute “I do it all” with “we do it all together”. That is very hard to do if you have been successful at being the best you can be, operating as an individual.

Okay, you might argue that you are really great at your technical skill set. The key question however is does anyone in the team care? Actually, they don’t. They want to be understood, to be supported, to be helped to rise in their own careers. That is a change from the “I know it all, so follow me” leadership model of the past. If we want to gain altitude in our careers, we need the communication and motivational soft skills of the top leaders.

Like the most successful sports coaches, we have to learn how to become excellent people leaders. The best sports coaches know their athletes in amazing detail and they coach to that person, rather than to the group. Who knew that there was a time limit on our innovation ability. When we get to forty, we have to understand the clock is ticking. If we haven’t done it already, then we need to start working on our people management capability big time. We need to tap into the innovation potential of the whole team to get the leverage we need to keep moving ever upward.