Experience. If you’re mid- or late-career, it’s one of the most important things you bring to a company or team, right?
Certainly, we carry our experience as a badge of honor, having put in decades of work in all sorts of roles and teams. We’ve worked our way “up” a career ladder. We’ve seen it all and learned from it. There are things we know that can only be learned through experience. All that is true, but it’s not always helpful.
Yes, experience has many benefits. But it can actually work against you in certain circumstances. The key is spotting the difference.
When experience works for you
You have developed the soft skills to work extremely effectively with a team. Leadership skills take a long time to develop. Over time—thanks to training, trial and error, and knowing your own strengths—you’ve learned how to manage people well. To listen and guide. To elicit their best quality work. To get out of your own way. These priceless qualities require time to develop and are truly valuable in the workplace.
You’ve seen a lot of what doesn’t work, so can see more quickly what will work. By the time you’re an elder on a work team, you’ve experienced plenty of failures. How to proceed on a project may seem obvious, because you’ve tried all the other options. You know how people and systems work. You’ve acquired hard skills in a range of areas. To younger employees, solutions may not be obvious at all. Here’s where you need your soft skills to pull those teammates along, to help them see rather than forcing things through with a shrug, mumbling, “Well, I just know what will work.”
When experience works against you
Your experience is 20 years old and now irrelevant. In a very fast-moving workplace, practices and technologies are quite different than they may have been even five years ago. What you learned decades ago may no longer hold. And it’s important to recognize when that is the case, and to either update your expertise or get out of the way of those who hold it.
You discount younger employees because they haven’t served their time. It can be tempting to feel junior employees haven’t suffered through the years as you have. That you’ve earned your role through climbing a ladder, and youngers need to get in line—behind you. Not necessarily so.
You resist change or innovation because you don’t want to rock the boat late in your career. We don’t like to admit it, but on the last leg of a career, the “finish line” of retirement can be top-of-mind. And we all want to go out on a high point. This may cause you to resist risk or innovation. You may fear that a failure as you’re readying to exit may tarnish an otherwise shiny career. Or worse, a failure may cost you your job before retirement, and finding another late in your career will be extremely difficult. However, being risk-averse doesn’t necessarily serve the company or the team.
The key to managing these dynamics is self-awareness. Luckily, you most likely developed strong self-awareness through experience! This can help you sidestep the potential land mines. Instead, you can tap into what you can fully offer in your role and in the team dynamics. Then, experience truly is your best asset.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio