Sixty Years in the Room: The Gap Runs Both Ways (Global Edition)

Often seniority. Age and rank travel together, so from the floor the two are hard to tell apart.

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The OECD found the chief executive older than the median employee at every level of firm productivity, and managers older than the people reporting to them, in Costa Rica, Finland, Hungary, Japan and Germany alike.

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The distance is widening. Across 50,510 American chief executives and 17,962 European ones, average CEO age rose by roughly ten years between 2000 and 2023, to 61. The college-educated workforce aged about a fifth as fast, and the age at which somebody is handed the job moved from 47 to 55.

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So somebody describing a generational difference is describing something real. They may have the cause slightly wrong.

Sharply. 42% of leaders describe themselves as highly engaged, against 22% of managers and 9% of individual contributors.

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Dale Carnegie's survey of 3,375 people across 18 countries found the same split on every topic tested. Feeling valued runs at 46%, 29% and 17%. Trust at 45%, 27% and 15%. Belief that career advancement is available at 43%, 30% and 18%.

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Even goal achievement, which ought to be a matter of fact, splits the same way. Asked whether their team exceeded its goals last year, 45.2% of leaders said yes, against 25% of individual contributors.

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That is 33 points between a leader and an individual contributor on engagement. Two people the same age, in the same company, one level apart, are having completely different experiences of it.

Two things, for every role in every model: feeling valued as part of the company, and the quality of communication.

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After that the drivers diverge, and they diverge by role rather than by age. For managers, the unique driver was career advancement. For individual contributors, it was believing their work contributes to the company's success. For leaders, it was understanding the company's goals.

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McKinsey found the same shape from the other direction. Across 13,386 workers in six countries, employees of all ages wanted largely the same things and left for largely the same reasons.

Pay has to be competitive. Once it is, it stops moving anybody.

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Asked what matters, 46% of workers name compensation first, ahead of career development (36%), meaningful work (35%) and flexibility (34%), and the ranking holds in every age group (McKinsey, 2023).

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Behaviour says something else. Pay accounts for about 2% of what makes one person more satisfied at work than another (Judge et al, 2010, 18,460 people). In Glassdoor's 2019 research across five countries, pay and benefits mattered least to how people rated their employer, behind culture and senior leadership. Feeling valued, by contrast, drove both engagement and intention to leave in every Dale Carnegie model, at every level.

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Herzberg described this gap in 1959 and Google found it again in 2015. None of which says pay doesn't matter: anyone paying under the market loses people whatever else they do.

Four moves that work at every level and every age. Two of them cost nothing but attention.

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1. Make people visibly necessary. Feeling valued predicted engagement and intention to leave for every role. Every manager finishes one sentence about each of their people: if this person left on Friday, the thing that would break is ___. If they can't finish it, that is the work. If they can, the person needs to hear it.

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2. Measure whether the message lands. 50% of leaders strongly understand the company's current goals, against 26% of individual contributors. Ask three people two levels down to describe the strategy in their own words. The gap between their answer and the deck is the real number.‍

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3. Give managers something to offer. Only 30% of managers believe advancement is available where they work, yet they are asked to develop everybody below them. Every manager should be able to name the next two roles they could credibly hold and what stands between them.

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‍4. Teach people to lead across an age gap. Name the capabilities (the difficult conversation with somebody 30 years older or younger, reading a room that shares none of the same references, influencing people who report to someone else) and teach them on the organisation's own situations.

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