I’m a Gen-X in an Office Full of Gen-Y’s and Z’s

It’s time to release my old fogey superpowers

I used to be a young up and comer

I decided to apply for my first management position after I asked myself one simple question: “Is my current group of managers dumber than me?”

Now, I’m pretty dumb, there’s no doubt about that. But once I came to the realization that my managers were generally much, much dumber than I was, I knew it was time for me to make the leap out of my unionized job and into a position of authority.

That’s a good piece of advice for anyone starting out: Assess your competition.

In my early 30s, getting ahead in management was simply a matter of using my God-given common sense in tandem with my desire to work harder than my competition.

“Keith, you will find that most people in business don’t use simple common sense”.

Those were the wise words of my ex-girlfriend’s father, shortly before she dumped me for good.

Yes, common sense and dogged effort got me far in the corporate world when I was young. By the time I was 40, I had been promoted 6 times. To be honest, I employed a fairly simple system: I was the first one into the office in the morning, and the last one out of the office at night.

The airline business is a 24-hour operation, you see. Those who only work for 8 hours a day are left behind.

So after work, I placed my clunky Compaq notebook on a pillow on my lap so that I could work on the couch in my living room while I watched episodes of The Sopranos with my wife.

As actor Wil Smith once said “The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is that I am not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be outworked period. ”

Will Smith later admitted he let himself get fat, just a few years after making that comment. He must have figured out that battling someone else on a treadmill is easy when you’re in your 30s because, believe it or not, life hasn’t fully caught up to you yet. But when you reach 52, like Smith, you get a little tired.

In November of 2012, when my wife and I had our first child, I somehow believed that I could keep up with the pace of work that I had set for myself previously.

I couldn’t. Getting older, and having a child changes a person. It shifts your focus. It spreads you thinner.

So you can no longer work in the same way that you once did. If you try, then something is definitely going to suffer; either your work or your family. It’s probably why you see so many divorced and single people in senior management positions.

No, when you get older, and your body changes and your priorities change, you have to adjust the way you work if you want to keep it all together. You can’t spend 18 hours in front of a computer, in meetings and on the phone every day. Not if you want to live a balanced life.

Then there’ll come a time when a young person shows up to your office, and they’ll remind you of yourself when you were that age: brash, arrogant, ambitious, willing to do anything at any time in order to get ahead. But most of all young.

They will be the new shining star in the eyes of your corporate overlords.

And you will feel the familiar burn of that competitive instinct inside your gut. You will want to fight to ensure that your place in the company and your legacy remain intact, but you won’t have the same time or energy that you once did.

What do you do when that Gen-Z or Gen-Y whippersnapper starts biting at your heels?

To be honest, this is just part of the circle of life in the corporate world. Senior people are eventually replaced by younger, more ambitious, less pricey people.

Not immediately, but eventually. Sooner or later, we all lose our youth and become old news. We become the “old guy at the office”.

Releasing my old guy superpowers

The great thing about having a long career behind you is that you can work from muscle memory in many cases. Where younger people have to figure things out for the first time, you’ve been through most situations at least 10 times and you know basically what strategies work best.

So that helps you to keep up until it’s time for you to move on. That gives you value.

You don’t need to battle that young punk on that treadmill. You need to work smarter not harder. Use the knowledge that you gained over your many years of working.

Your wisdom is your superpower.

Leverage your contacts. Call on your experience. Work on Sunday when Gen-Z is recovering from their hangovers.

Hall-of-Fame hockey star Wayne Gretzky was famous for figuring out where the puck was going to be, and for going to that place so he could score a goal, not for trying to chase the puck down like a madman.

That’s what you need to do, in these final years of your career. Trust your wisdom to figure out where you need to be, so you can get an edge on your competition, and then go there.