Paul's Viewpoints

By: Dr. Paul Pierpoint, NCATC Board Member, Vice President Northampton College

August, 2007

Bridging the generation gap

In Lee Iacocca’s latest book, Where have all the leaders gone?, he laments what he perceives as a frightening leadership void in America. While his most widely publicized comments refer specifically to out-of-touch leaders in Washington, lazy and complicit leaders in the press, and the number of corporate leaders filmed doing perp walks in recent years, he is also lamenting the lack of quality leadership throughout our community. Too many current leaders are failing the people they lead and the problem may not get better. When today’s leaders retire, where is the next generation of leaders ready to step in and take over?

I have heard this concern many times in the past few years. Yesterday’s (and today’s) leaders worry about where we will get the leaders to sustain our businesses and organizations tomorrow. They think there are not enough people ready to step into positions of significant responsibility. But in my experience, there is no shortage of young people with all of the skills and abilities to step in take over. There is only a shortage of opportunities for them to hone their skills and show what they can do.

Opportunity is far more fleeting today than it was 25 or 30 years ago. When many of the retiring generation of leaders first gained positions of responsibility, they were still in their 30s or early 40s. They were ahead of the “boomer” demographic wave. There were fewer people with the education and skills to take charge so the previous generation of leaders was forced to reach deep into the limited talent pool and raise some very young people – mostly young men at the time – into positions of huge responsibility. Many of these young leaders immediately stepped up to the challenge. Many more struggled in their roles and took years to develop the skills required of effective leaders if they ever developed them at all. Most of those who were successful remained in powerful positions for years – even decades. It may not be coincidental that during this time in the 1970s and 1980s, the US forfeited market share in virtually every major industrial sector to foreign competition. Every business and economics publication lamented the hollowing of the American Corporation and our inability to adapt to a competitive global marketplace. If ever there were a shortage of effective leaders in American business, it was then.

But eventually, these leaders began to find their voices and their visions. For the last twenty years the economy really has benefited from a large, extremely experienced, stable class of leaders. Sure we have our share of failed leaders and the most visible of them generally offer terrible role models for anyone to emulate. Iacocca has some very good points. But it is hard to argue that, overall, American business is stronger today that it was in 1980 and much of the credit goes to the leaders who have helped to transform our industries.

Unfortunately, the stability and experience at the leadership level came at a price to those who came along a few years later.

Fewer opportunities for leadership were available to the millions of boomers who were not on the leading edge of the wave. And as organizations in nearly every industry sought to become less bureaucratic and squeezed out layers of middle management, those limited opportunities for advancement became even rarer. Today our workforce is filled with millions of people who are either just waiting for their chance or who have given up hoping for their chance to advance to the top of organizations. Too many of us boomers have clogged up the career paths that were so wide open to us.

If you are over 55 and don’t believe me, go talk to a high performing 40-something in your organization. Ask them if they have had enough opportunity to advance in their career. Ask them if they feel trapped by a demographic ceiling that prohibits them from rising into significant leadership positions. Then ask yourself what your career options looked like when you where their age. And what are you doing to help to develop the high potential employees in your organizations into the leaders we need?

So my response to Lee Iacocca is: I know where all the leaders have gone – they are all around us. And if more of us old fogies would get out of their way, they will show us that they are ready and able to lead this nation’s economy well into the next decade and beyond.

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