June 2005 – Age is not a measure of performance

As the author of a new report that makes a case for the focused use of performance measuring of workforces, I must declare myself in favour of the judicious use of employee metrics in business. But there is one measure I believe has no place in the running of an enterprise – that of age.

When new health statistics tell us that someone who is overweight or who smokes may have cell damage, making them biologically 10 years older than leaner non-smokers who are the same age, it makes a mockery of measuring age in years. Yet companies retire people when they pass a certain birthday, not when they reach a certain weight or when their lungs turn black.

Prof Tim Spector, of St Thomas’s Hospital in London, whose research findings were published last week in The Lancet, says the physical damage that people can inflict on themselves has the effect of speeding up their “chromosomal clock”.

Those employers who have created on-site gyms or health and fitness centres are at least recognising that it may be in their interests to help their staffs maintain or improve their physical health.

But I suspect that most companies still view their employees in the way that a racing driver treats a set of tyres. Drive them hard to beat the competition, then, at the first signs of wear, change them for a fresh set.

Careful motorists know that tyres last longer if they look after them. The same applies to our bodies. But just as the management writer, Jim Collins, understands in the title of one of his books that companies can be Built to Last, so can a workforce. In fact people are built to last a lifetime. It is the lifetime that varies.

But a working lifetime ends officially at a certain age. If people were told to stop driving their cars at the age of 65, there would be an outcry. Instead there is closer monitoring of motorists’ health and competency in their later years. In the same way airline pilots and train drivers are subjected to regular medical checks and skill assessments.

In other employment areas, such as the adoption of accelerated promotion on the basis of ability, many companies appear to regard age as an artificial barrier.

Andrew Chapman a 19-year-old engineering trainee, has just become the first apprentice at British Telecommunications to be promoted to a managerial role. Mr Chapman, who joined the company at 16, has been appointed BT’s global customer field services manager, heading a team of 24 skilled engineers, at an age that some students are about to enter university. Indeed he has still to finish his apprenticeship.

Older managers used to tell their trainees that they needed to learn to walk before they could run. That was before companies got rid of those who held on to such beliefs. These days the kindest thing you can buy managers on their fortieth birthdays is a bottle of hair dye and the latest compilation from the singles charts. We have entered the age when the way to a fortune is to record your best imitation of a crazy frog on a motorbike. How can anyone but a teenager understand that?

We should congratulate Mr Chapman. No-one able enough to do a job should be denied the opportunity for promotion because of their age. But he and all freshly promoted managers should learn to enjoy and develop their new-found status while it lasts. There are signs that executives are moving through the corporate sausage machine at a faster rate than ever.

Booz Allen Hamilton’s latest annual study of chief executive succession within the 2,500 largest companies in the world found that 14 per cent of chief executives in these companies had left their jobs in 2004. This included the highest level of firings since the studies began four years ago. “The age of the ephemeral CEO is here,” says Booz Allen, calling big company chief executives “the world’s most prominent temporary workers.”

Most of these people, however, have developed an acute understanding of the law of diminishing interest. This law states that the level of management interest in your career relates directly to the length of your service. A fresh face in the corner office is as cherished as the new ball in a game of cricket.

A consequence of this law is a selfish interest among survivalist executives in change management. The instigation of change has become a potent weapon in the hands of careerist managers who know that the skill they must develop most sharply is their sense of timing. The favoured tactic, therefore, is to get in post, instigate change that will take two or three years to achieve, then get out before anyone has time to measure the long-term results. The losers in the Booz Allen study are those who miss-timed their exits.

But many people in the workplace have little or no control over the timing of their progression or their departures. If they do not join the scramble for promotion they must look to their calendars and watch the days and weeks passing by. It doesn’t matter how much experience they gain, how much time and effort they spend on their physical fitness or how much they look after their diet. One day that finite measure of career durability – their age – will count against them.

At managerial levels the corrosive effects of prolonged tenure begin to bite long before all but a fortunate few reach normal retirement age. Many who leave prematurely, soon find out how much their age can count against them if they are optimistic enough to seek further employment.

If age is no barrier to the career aspirations of Andrew Chapman at the age of 19, it should be no barrier to his ambitions when he is 60. Unfortunately we live in a world that has yet to recognise that anyone could have ambitions in their later years. As the proportion of older people rises in western economies, this kind of thinking makes less and less sense. The employment of older workers is moving swiftly from a moral concern to a business concern.

Further, if measuring some significant areas of employment can make a difference, and in a new report on human capital management* I argue that, when applied selectively, its use is becoming an imperative in companies, then consistent performance levels should be the important measures of sustainable careers. That is not to dismiss the importance of potential or that of experience, although the latter has been ignored in all too many cases. Both qualities should be considered when assessing the contribution of employees.

But age should not enter the equation, as Prof Spector’s findings demonstrate. Companies wouldn’t dream of ending an employee’s career on the basis of their body mass index. So why then should anyone consider it acceptable to do so on the basis of age?

*Human Capital Management is published by Croner, price £80 or £64.62 for a pdf version (www.croner.co.uk).