Ask HR: How best can I supervise colleagues who are older than me?

I am 55 years old and I’m handling a senior management role. I am content, but I see that the organisation is paying more attention to young talent. I believe age is a number and hope that the organisation will not send me home before I am 60. Do you, HR practitioners, think that employees become useless at 60? 

Employees are retained by organisations based on their ability to make expected contributions and not necessarily because they have attained a certain age.

It has however become rare, in a world increasingly afflicted by rapid disruption and uncertainty, particularly in the private sector, to find employees leaving organisations at retirement age. The recent past ripples with successive waves of retrenchments and redundancies have raged against careers, washing ashore scores of both young and old onto the coast of abrupt unemployment.

While it is unlawful to discriminate employees based on their age, note that different careers have different prime seasons. In athletics, a retirement age of 50 for sprinters would be wishful, while judges at 60 years of age might still be in the prime of their careers. Are employees as productive in their 60s as they are in their 30s? It depends on the demands of the role in question and individual differences.

Succession planning is not designed to eject the older generation out of an organisation but to provide an opportunity for mentorship to the young. Everyone’s career goes through a season of decline. At some point, you will leave employment.

Have you abdicated the duty of planning for your life and lent it to the devices of your employer? You need a personal plan for your life that is not entirely yoked to your employment. You may be an important cog in your organisation yes, but you are still a cog. A retirement age is an academic longitude that demarcates life into working and retirement hemispheres yet in reality the intersection between the two remains blurred. 

If you remain productive and develop others to take your place, you may even be granted greater responsibilities and be retained past your retirement age. True, age is a number, yet we all bear its load with the ticking of the clock until both brawn and brain eventually succumb to decay.

HR Practitioner
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