From attending elders in Toronto, in a totally female environment, I suddenly found myself on a flight to Amsterdam - and debating gender balance with a team of … mostly men. It’s enough to give you whiplash. From an extreme form of withdrawal, discussing birds in the backyard, to engaging with a dozen nationalities in the heat of a booming billion-dollar business. It was also a welcome change of pace. After caring and cooking and convening, it was, I must admit, not unpleasant to settle into a plane where someone was offering me a drink.
As usual, the ExCo team I was working with was more engaged and enthusiastic on the gender topic than the few women on the team had thought possible. Stop calling men biased and start offering some insights on how to reframe the issue as a business opportunity, while skilling them up on how to lead and implement change, and suddenly you get enthusiasm, momentum and engagement. As I’m constantly reminded, building balance of any kind (whether it’s nationalities, gender or generations, the areas I work on), starts with leadership. Leaders need the time and space to build skills and what I call ‘gender bilingualism’ (very akin to cross-cultural competency). They don’t often get it. Yet for their often well-meaning efforts to ‘take’ they need to step up and lead - with accountability and conviction. It’s pretty depressing to see how often gender programmes are still misframed, underestimated and led by the wrong people in an unnecessarily divisive and alienating way. Here’s the slide I use to illustrate the difference. Most companies are still sadly stuck on the left. If anything, it’s gotten more entrenched in the last few years - with many companies now concluding that gender is ‘done,’ worn out with gender fatigue and failure to move the dial.
At the same time, the next huge consumer and talent transformation is on their doorstep (not even on the horizon). Yet most companies I work with haven’t even started thinking about age. It’s not even on the radar of the diversity folk yet. Which may be an opportunity for the laggards. If you are just starting to tackle gender seriously, you’ll leapfrog far if you bundle it with age.
This ExCo team discussed how relatively successfully their company had been at balancing the nationalities in their management to reflect globalisation and emerging markets. Most ExCos are no longer all men of the home country nationality (although they can still often remain an ‘in-group’ clique). I always think how strange it is how the move towards nationality-balanced teams was never referred to as ‘diversity’ or ‘inclusion’ - they usually just called it business. I find that the companies that succeeded at building multi-cultural teams usually have an edge building gender balanced ones. They understand how to lead across differences - strategically. They will probably be some of the first movers on age too once it gets going, which it must over the next few years. It will be helped by a new book.
I read this in one sitting on the plane home, Stage (Not Age), by Susan Wilner Golden, a 2016 alumna of the Stanford equivalent of Harvard’s ALI programme - called the Distinguished Careers Institute. (I’m preparing an interview with her for a fuller review soonish). It’s a great call to action for companies to start addressing longevity strategies to tap into what she estimates is a $22 trillion dollar global market opportunity. She’s a perfect voice to be raising the call. A former public health care executive turned venture capitalist, now teaching at Stanford Business School and mentoring startups, she brings a highly credible corporate and entrepreneurial lens to the opportunity she sees so clearly on the horizon.
The book is full of examples of the few companies that are leading the way, and the importance of framing, vocabulary and understanding life phases - and not talking about age. She, delightfully, pushes my own idea of life divided into quarters (although she puts in 5 quarters which my math degree won’t allow me to follow). The book is essential reading for any entrepreneur who might want to explore ideas in the longevity space, or corporates wondering how to engage with the issue. It’s remarkable how much her analysis reminds me of the work I’ve done on gender this past quarter century - and that I am now overlaying with generational balance. It’s very comparable - a huge, global shift affecting every country, every company, every couple - and every career. And one that is not yet well understood, named or framed.
“The longevity economy and opportunity skews heavily female”
One of the key similarities is not to make the ‘older’ a separate category - just as I invite companies not to make ‘women’ a separate category, ERG, or initiative. She recommends a ‘stealth’ strategy. Where you learn the differences in each phase, but then find a way to speak to all of them, inclusively, at the same time. NIKE, for example, when they designed their CruzrOne sneaker designed for the ‘forever athlete,’ no matter what their age. Because it was designed by NIKE Co-found Phil Knight - in his 80s. Just as the best marketing and talent management understands and integrates male/ female perspectives and different cultural lenses too.
Golden underlines a point I’ve been making repeatedly - that the longevity economy and opportunity skews heavily female. Women live longer, buy more (for everyone else - including their ageing parents) and have some of their best career decades post-50. She accentuates the reality of the younger woman supporting and managing the older one (a very familiar tale to me and all my friends). Understanding the 50+ workforce and consumer will be accelerated hugely by understanding women and their evolving life phases and preferences - and how it differs from men, and can be wonderfully complementary if you allow the differences to co-exist and be equally valued and recognised.
One of the common mistakes male leaders make is to think that treating people equally means treating them the same. Progressive men will proudly push their ‘gender blind’ credentials. As they will insist they treat every age ‘the same.’ This is where the nationality, gender and age topics overlap so comparably. You can never treat everyone equitably and equally until you really understand the differences between them - and what makes them tick. Only then can you devise truly ‘neutral’ products, services and companies that include everyone.
The goal is to get the 5 generations now in the workforce to work together by using their differences to connect better with clients and consumers (and build more interesting teams). The same is true of genders, which requires getting men, women and all the other 70 genders now on offer, to understand what those differences are in order to be able to work across them. Which is exactly what global companies have done for decades with different nationalities… which required understanding and integrating different races, religions and ethnicities.
For inspiration, I’ll leave you with a gorgeous video (thanks to my ALI colleague Manal El Sharif) featuring a Spanish artist, Sergi Cadenas, who seems to revel in exploring the transitions of life through phases. We have a lot of fascinating work ahead to build on the better balance many companies have partially built. And longer lives give us a few extra decades to push onwards. Onwards!
Ha Ha Avivah - that '5 quarters' bit would do my head in as well! Like when my kids were small and would ask for the 'big half' !