Wisdom work: the new Business opportunity?
Why wisdom matters
Does anyone else find it odd when wisdom is extolled as a positive workplace contributor until it is associated with an older worker and suddenly it becomes a potential obstacle to new knowledge development and organisational adaptability? Wisdom seems to become synonymous with lived experience and the greater the age of the worker the less relevant that experience seems to become, as bedazzled by a digital workplace future, a career primarily developed through an earlier era seems unhelpful in understanding or solving contemporary organisation issues. Worker age appears to become a major consideration in whether a business perceives wisdom as of value or otherwise. The incredible narrowness of this perspective and the faulty thinking built within it is in fact is a compelling argument for the importance of the embrace of wisdom and the older worker to business success.
Certainly, Chip Conley is of this view. Commencing professional life as a hospitality entrepreneur, in midlife he found himself engaged by the young founders of Airbnb to help grow their disruptive startup into a global hospitality business. This assignment helped him appreciate the value experience and wisdom could offer young leaders with a limited understanding of the broader world removed from their specialised knowledge. This insight became reflected in his creation of the ‘Modern Elder’ work role. Conley passionately believes business acceptance of such a work role will provide opportunity for the older worker to thrive through learning to marry wisdom and experience with curiosity and a willingness to personally evolve. An increasingly prolific author in the wisdom space Conley sees his role now as an advocate reframing the meaning of ageing.
Business ‘threatened’ by wisdom
Conley argues rather than older workers being perceived as less valuable due to lack of specialised digital knowledge with an ever-increasing speed of obsolescence, maybe they are in fact more valuable because they can help balance narrow specialty thinking with the ability to see the bigger picture. This is a very positive way to position the potential value of older worker wisdom perhaps at odds with the negative view many business leaders currently associate with older worker wisdom. Research demonstrates that in many instances older worker wisdom is perceived in a threatening manner by management teams. Three common reasons usually put forward to diminish or ignore the wisdom of the older worker include:
age discrimination literature positioning older worker involvement in business as actually incongruent with its financial well-being and longer-term sustainability.
managers believing older workers may not act in a culturally compliant manner, be more judgemental about their employers and be more likely to voice criticism than younger workers.
younger leaders with older workers as direct reports feeling threatened and insecure. These leaders feel uncomfortable older worker wisdom might either challenge their leadership authority or highlight their potential incompetence resulting in the older worker taking their role.
These viewpoints sadly reflect more on the febrile political environment of the contemporary workplace more than older worker wisdom value itself.
The benefits of wisdom within the workplace
Once more evidence abounds of companies benefiting from the interaction of older workers and their wisdom with younger workers. Here are some examples:
The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) has found that teams composed of older and younger workers are more productive than teams composed of workers from a single generation. According to a study conducted in the United Kingdom by the International Longevity Centre in 2020, teams with an age range among their members of 25 years or more met or exceeded management’s expectations 73% of the time, compared to only 35% for teams with an age range of less than 10 years.
Mercer has found older workers’ contribution is more likely to show up in group performance than in traditional individual performance metrics. The contribution of older workers materialises in the increased productivity of those around them.
The OECD (2020) reported a firm that has a 10% higher share of workers aged 50 and over than the average is 1.1% more productive.
The nature of wisdom
So, the time has come not to see wisdom as a potential threat to an organisation but a real business upside opportunity. Conley argues that the future organisation context of work will be critical in driving the changing perception of wisdom’s value. In a world increasingly reliant on digital intelligence, companies are falling over themselves to hire and promote younger ‘digital native’ employees with the likely consequence most of us will be reporting to a younger boss in the near future. And as the world accelerates its demographic ageing trend, Conley anticipates organisations will experience growing pools of older workers and younger managers, thereby creating the necessity for understanding the value of age diversity on work teams. As more and more young people run organisations, Conley asserts, in the smart companies the demand for knowledge workers will decrease and the demand for workers with wisdom will increase.
This is good news for the older worker as the association of wisdom with the older adult, neuroscience is revealing, might be neurobiologically based, born out of changes to the brain that allow the two hemispheres to communicate more freely. Whilst there is no one definition of wisdom, researchers understand it to be more than primarily an intellectual quality, in fact it is heavily reliant on emotional maturity and a shift in the motivations that drive us. Gerontologists observe as people age greater and greater maturation processes take root resulting in increased emotional intelligence characterised by better anger and stress management, greater empathy and social awareness, positive change skills and capability for self-renewal. Conley appears to have neatly packaged all these positive ageing qualities in his ‘Modern Elder’ role category.
In terms of motivations, there is emerging evidence that many older workers have achieved all that they want to in their careers and are not particularly interested in further advancement or climbing up the corporate ladder. Intrinsic motivators take precedence over the extrinsic drivers that might once have fuelled career development. On this point I would love to see research testing whether the premise of a happiness to step away from continuing careers is a natural phenomenon of the ageing process or influenced by environmental factors, such as experiencing ageism in the latter years of career?
Platformed on a solid emotional platform, according to the neuroscientist Levitin wisdom arises from four things: associations, experience, pattern recognition, and the use of analogies. This is why we accumulate more and more wisdom as we grow older. Older people have more wisdom precisely because the longer we’ve been alive, the more patterns we’ve seen and can recognise, the greater the ability to abstract out common principles and to be able to see the core of a matter that might escape a younger person. The advantage of years of experience is older people having a vast warehouse of solutions allowing them to synthesise more information and potentially offer more solutions. In the workplace, an important way this wisdom plays out is in the capacity for holistic or systems thinking that allows one to get the ‘bigger picture’ of something by combining a wide variety of information quickly.
However, an important caveat is just because we all get older doesn’t mean we all naturally becomes wiser. You only have to observe a certain current US Presidential candidate to illustrate this point! A Max Planck Institute for Human Development study found the average correlation between age and wisdom is roughly zero from ages twenty-five to seventy-five. However, researchers did find that many people cultivate something even more valuable - a skill for gathering wisdom as they age.
Adding wisdom into your workplace
Conley added wisdom to the Airbnb organisation in two original ways:
1: Using employee-satisfaction surveys to create an organisational Wisdom Heat Map identifying where wisdom was stored in the company. People, often older and not in leadership positions, who were perceived as wise by other employees were identified in the surveys and offered opportunities to be trained as internal coaches.
2: The developing of “mentern” programmes based on the idea that two people were paired who both had a lot to share (as mentors) but also a lot to learn (as interns), no matter what their position, age, or experience. Often, these menterns were from different generations.
A few other thoughts we leave you in adding wisdom into your workplace are:
Consider adding ‘wisdom’ as a capability in hiring profiles. As we’ve discussed experience is an element of wisdom but not its sole determinant. The more complex the position being hired for, the greater potential for the requirement of wisdom in its execution. Exploring emotional intelligence, intellectual curiosity, personal adaptability, important professional work learnings, systems thinking and a candidate’s understanding and application of wisdom all offer the opportunity to make more wiser hiring decisions.
Consider whether the ‘Modern Elder’ role may offer business benefit in specific work function areas. For instance, in staff roles with the increasing complexities in workplace management, interactions with the community and environment and managing risk might there be added business value in having leadership advisors with the wisdom of the ‘Modern Elder’ to help contribute to critical business decision-making and organisation sustainability?
Some final words
Wisdom is a critical organisation capability that makes and will continue to make a vital contribution to business success and sustainability. Wisdom at work represents the point where wise actions outnumber the unwise. And developing age inclusive workforces by increasing older worker employment represents a huge wisdom building organisational investment opportunity. One upside of a demographically ageing world, Conley optimistically notes, is the wisdom of older workers is one of the few natural resources globally that is increasing, not declining. Business would be mad not to take advantage of it.
Not sure how to get started?
We’re happy to speak to your organisation on the business case for older workers and intergenerational teams, and how to make age-inclusive teams’ work. It's a winning proposition for your organisation.
References
Conley, C. (2024) Why “Wisdom Work” Is the New “Knowledge Work”. HBR (August 2). https://hbr.org/2024/08/why-wisdom-work-is-the-new-knowledge-work
Conley, C. (2018) Wisdom@Work: The Making of the Modern Elder. Currency. New York.
Levitin, D.J. (2020) Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives. Dutton. USA
OECD (2020). Promoting an Age‑Inclusive Workforce: Living, Learning and Earning Longer Report
Spedale, S. (2018). Deconstructing the 'older worker': Exploring the complexities of subject positioning at the intersection of multiple discourses. Organization, 1-17. doi:10.1177/1350508418768072
For an example of managers seeing older workers as potentially non culturally compliant refer:
Thomas, R., Hardy, C., Cutcher, L., & Ainsworth, S. (2014). What's age got to do with it? On the critical analysis of age and organizations. Organization Studies, 35(11), 1569-1584.
