Why “Wisdom Work” Is the New “Knowledge Work”
We’re in the midst of two enormous demographic shifts in the workplace that seem to be at odds with each other. We’re living longer and working longer — either by choice or necessity. In the last century, the 65+ age group has grown five times faster than the rest of the population and, by 2031, according to a recent Bain & Co. estimate, employees 55 and older will constitute a quarter of the global workforce. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly half of the increase in the number of people participating in the U.S. labor force between 2016 and 2026 is attributable to those 60 and older.
At the same time, there’s such a growing reliance on DQ (digital intelligence) that companies are desperate to hire and promote digital natives, who are often much younger. According to Harris Interactive in 2014, 38% of Americans reported to a younger boss and the Department of Labor suggests the majority of Americans will have a younger boss in the near future. Physiologically, 60 may be the new 40, but when it comes to power in the modern workplace, 30 is the new 50. And as the pool of older workers and younger managers grows, so does the necessity for understanding the value of age diversity on teams.
With five generations in the workplace for the first time, some observers have predicted that battles will break out among the generations. I beg to differ. For years, in my role as the mentor to the Airbnb and other start-up founders — and as the CEO of MEA, the world’s first midlife wisdom school — I’ve observed how symbiotic relationships among the generations can develop in ways that take companies to great heights. For that to happen, though, we have to move beyond the obsession with “knowledge work.”
That term dates back to 1959, when it was coined by the visionary management theorist Peter Drucker. “The true investment in the knowledge society,” Drucker wrote, “is not in machines and tools. It is in the knowledge of the knowledge worker.” That insight held true, with extraordinary influence, for more than half a century, but today anybody with a computer or mobile phone has vast amounts of the world’s knowledge at their disposal, and AI is increasingly able to handle knowledge-based tasks that until just a few years ago only people could perform. With this shift, and in a world where more and more young people will be running organizations, there will be less demand for human knowledge — and more for human wisdom.
I’ve spent the past decade studying the value of wisdom (which I define as “metabolized experienced shared with others”) in the workplace and have seen firsthand just how valuable a resource it can be when cultivated and shared intergenerationally. In this article, I’ll discuss some of the benefits and then will lay out a set of wisdom-management practices that I’ve found to be particularly effective.
The Benefits of “Wisdom Work”
In the workplace, as in life, wisdom is most useful when it’s shared. I’ve identified four major benefits that a focus on the transfer of wisdom can bring to the workplace.
Growing employee retention and satisfaction
Deloitte research shows that Millennials who intend to stay in their company for more than five years are 68% more likely to have an in-house mentor. And although burnout is rampant in many companies, Gallup has shown that Boomers have the lowest levels of burnout and the highest engagement at work, possibly because they feel more content in their work and less stressed about climbing the career ladder or job-hopping. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has found that companies whose proportion of older workers is 10% higher than that of other firms experience 4% less turnover compared with companies with a lower proportion.
More productive teams and internal learning
The 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.
That’s consistent with what BMW, the German automotive company, has found in its experimentation with age-diverse teams: Teams composed mostly of younger or older employees performed less well than mixed-age teams, which the company found to be the most effective in combining the risk-taking linearity of young brains with the seasoned, holistic thinking of older brains.
Sutherland Labs, a design agency creating better customer and employee experiences, has made it a practice to assign two researchers to each new project, ideally one older and one younger, to help create a diversity of perspectives. Alessandra Gallo, a senior design researcher at the company, extolled the benefits for me. “Young researchers are better at mastering tools of speed and bringing a sense of drive to the project,” she said, “while those of us who are older have more peripheral vision and also bring a sense of calm and long-term perspective. Not only does this make us more effective as a team, but we get great benefit out of learning from each other.”
Understanding the needs and motivations of your workers
Only about 10% of Fortune 1000 companies use age as a diversity metric in evaluating their DEI initiatives. Atlassian, the software-collaboration company, is one of the few that does; because the company knows that age diversity creates more effective results, the company tracks age data, not just across the enterprise but also on individual teams. They’ve also surveyed the emotional needs of their employees and have found marked differences across generations. (It turns out, for example, that Millennial and GenZ workers feel more alienated from their colleagues than do Boomers and GenXers.) Exploring the needs of their employees by generation, fostering multigenerational teams, and then measuring the results has become a key strategic initiative for Atlassian — one that, its leaders believe, is an effective differentiator and a magnet for talent.
Elevating the value of wisdom
Gabriel Galluccio, 62, is a three-time Emmy winner with global experience in brand strategy, creative communication, and marketing in entertainment and sports media. He started exploring multimedia technology in his thirties and quickly became an expert creative director for media companies, including FOX and Sky. But in his mid-50s, while working as FOX’s head of creative for Europe and Africa, he started feeling old — and started to be treated as old. “Even before AI came along,” he told me, “I had young, tech-savvy designers nipping at my heels, and I started feeling like I might become irrelevant.” To avoid that fate, Gabriel invested in refreshing his skills, repackaged himself as a design director (a step down in title), and focused on sharing his wisdom with others. “The moment I realized my job was no longer to impress others with my design prowess,” he said, “but rather to make everyone around me wiser by helping them to see their lessons, I had all kinds of young folks asking me to be their mentor, and our senior management kept asking me, ‘How can we bottle you?’”
A Wisdom-Management Toolbox
I had a similar experience when, in 2013, the Millennial founders of Airbnb asked me to help them “democratize hospitality.” Based upon my experience as one of the first boutique hoteliers, they wanted me to help turn their tech company into a hospitality company dedicated to helping their hosts become successful entrepreneurs. I soon found myself in the unusual position of reporting to and mentoring the same person: Brian Chesky, the company’s CEO, who was 21 years younger than I was. My role as a mentor soon expanded to other young members of the leadership team, and in time I became known at the company as the “modern elder.”
I ended up staying at Airbnb — full-time and part-time — for more than seven years, during which time we developed a toolbox of wisdom-management practices that included the following, which can be deployed in all sorts of work environments.
Distilling team lessons
We asked our leadership team to keep close track of the lessons they were learning, and once a quarter we brought them together so that they could share with the rest of the team what the biggest lesson was that they’d learned during that period — and explain how they intended to put it to use in the future. Additionally, we voted on the most important team lesson of the quarter. In an ongoing way, the exercise involved an exchange of wisdom that strengthened the whole team. I probably learned more from the younger members on my team regarding their lessons than I did those who were closer to my age.
Making the wise more accessible
As part of our routine employee-satisfaction surveys, we tested a new question: “Beyond your boss, who in the organization offers you helpful advice or wisdom?” This information allowed us to create what we called a Wisdom Heat Map, which focused on where wisdom was stored in the organization. This, in turn, allowed us to ask some of the people identified as wise, who were often older but not in leadership positions, if they’d like to be trained as internal coaches. It also allowed us to develop a list of the character qualities that most commonly defined our best informal mentors, among them: less ego and more collaboration skills, a knack at asking generative questions, and an ability to offer unvarnished insight that feels like a gift as opposed to judgment.
Developing “mentern” programs
The word mentern is a combination of mentor and intern. At Airbnb, we based our mentern program on the idea that the two people who are paired in the program have both 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, as was the case with the San Francisco-based younger Millennial who deeply understood the diverse utility of her smartphone yet wanted to learn more about how to run a great meeting, and the older, London-based GenXer who had the opposite learning and teaching desires. Fostering this kind of reciprocal mentorship was a great way to transfer knowledge in the organization and deepened the connection of these two managers and their commitment to the company.
Sharing “process knowledge” intergenerationally
Process knowledge is the wisdom you have about how to get things done in an organization. You have organizational savvy, intuiting the underlying motivations of everybody in the room — and especially the people not in the room who will have to be persuaded. Some of this process knowledge may be specific to a particular organization, but much of it has to do with what may feel like common sense at 50 but a revelation at 25. For example, I reminded one of my younger Airbnb direct reports that she needed to spend some time with a couple of potential critics on our team to get their “fingerprints” on a new initiative that she wanted to present at a leadership team meeting. Similarly, I would ask my mentees, “Assuming this idea gets some momentum, where might it hit some delays or obstacles down the road?,” and then we’d develop a plan for how we’d navigate those impediments far in advance of getting there. Wisdom is about having peripheral vision and anticipating the future. This is a skill that can be taught to younger leaders.
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Valuing human wisdom provides the ideal workplace balance to the rise of artificial intelligence. Although anybody who effectively distills life experiences can be wise, the more life lessons we’ve navigated, the more raw material for wisdom we possess. It’s time that we invest as much energy in helping older workers distill their wisdom as we do in helping younger workers accumulate their knowledge.
Source: https://hbr.org/2024/08/why-wisdom-work-is-the-new-knowledge-work
