Bridge the Intergenerational Leadership Gap

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Today’s workforce spans five generations, with millennials and Generation Z together accounting for over 60% of workers globally — a share projected to reach 74% by 2030. Yet there’s a widening intergenerational gap in business leadership. While age diversity in the workplace is growing, decision-making power increasingly rests with more senior generations.  The average age of board members across major markets such as Brazil, the European Union, and India ranges from 58 to 64 years old — around 20 years older than the median age (about 39) of the global workforce.

While experience is undoubtedly important for effective leadership, it also comes with the risk of relying on the same mental models that have underpinned past successes. When the context of business changes rapidly, maintaining the same strategy can hinder adaptability exactly when new thinking is required.

Enter younger leaders. More age-diverse leadership teams have been found to excel at ambidextrous learning: They’re better at communicating important tacit know-how from one generation to the next. This helps organizations retain critical expertise over time. Simultaneously, younger leaders help counterbalance experience with curiosity and a willingness to question the status quo, which supports a continuous update of organizational knowledge.  Such ambidextrous learning and a diversity of ideas can also unlock innovation.

Importantly, this does not in any way suggest that older managers are less capable or willing to innovate; rather, analyses emphasize the potential of a greater diversity of generational perspectives. Recent research highlights the positive effects that “grey entrepreneurs” on age-diverse teams of founders can have on measures of innovation performance and business growth.

Research has found that intergenerational leadership teams perform particularly strongly in the realms of sustainable business model innovation and eco-innovation.  The case for intergenerational leadership is increasingly clear. A more systematic, bold approach to involving younger leaders promises to drive progress on key strategic goals, such as innovation, talent recruitment, and sustainability. 

Three main approaches to increasing the influence of younger leaders are: 

1. Consultation.  When taking a consultation approach, senior leadership actively seeks opportunities to learn from younger generations. Typically, the focus is on employees from within the organization, but businesses can also find ways to involve external emerging talent. Consultation programs that have recently gained prominence include reverse mentoring — where younger employees mentor senior leaders on selected issues — and shadow boards, in which teams of younger experts act as sparring partners for the executive committee of the board. 
2. Decision Rights.  For real change, it may be necessary to go beyond consultation and integrate younger perspectives into executive-level venues.  This is the core idea behind shared decision rights: Younger leaders are included in key leadership structures and empowered with formal roles on executive teams, project teams, and boards. This shared leadership combines the range of perspectives and strengths across people of different ages in everyday and strategic direction-setting.
3. An Intergenerational Leadership Pipeline.  Most consultation and co-leadership practices typically remain confined to episodic one-off engagements for specific segments of the organization’s workforce. A more holistic approach is to embed age-diverse leadership as a guiding principle across organizational structure, culture, and leadership development strategy. Organizations should thereby seek to build and sustain an ongoing intergenerational leadership pipeline by deliberately recruiting younger talent into leadership tracks, accelerating their advancement, and integrating their perspectives into decision-making at every level.

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