The missed business opportunity of ageism

A recent news article I read asked, “You’ve heard of the Great Resignation, but what about the Great Retirement?”

The article, titled “The US has too many retirees,” was authored by Emma Thorne of LinkedIn News and says that the U.S. currently has 2 million more retirees than what was expected and projected by the Federal Reserve. Ageism is one factor the author sees as a contributor to the phenomenon.

Now if you’re not familiar with the term, ageism is defined as discrimination against someone based solely on their age. Most frequently, the term refers to hiring or promotion practices that intentionally exclude candidates over 45 in favor of younger and less costly (based on salary, etc.) professionals.

For those of us of a certain age who may have experienced ageism in our own careers, it might be challenging to separate your personal experience from this topic and seek to look at it from a more “objective” perspective. I would argue … objectively of course … that ageism is a missed business opportunity, in addition to being against the law and just plain wrong.

Logically, the business community would embrace a candidate with more knowledge, experience and seasoned judgment for any role or promotion within their organization. A track record of actual success and awesome results in a given business would seem like a natural “safe bet” when considering hiring or promotional decisions. Logic, unfortunately, has gone the way of “common sense” these days in that both are less common than they used to be.

In my view, what’s missed in these scenarios is an opportunity to gain a business benefit from experience that can cost any business not only revenue on the bottom line but strategically when longer-term decisions are being made about the direction of the business.

In the consulting world, we use terms like “institutional knowledge” to refer to the need for businesses to capture key learnings into the DNA of an organization so that future performance benefits from past experiences, both positive and negative. Remaking past mistakes can be costly and can be avoided when the organization benefits from experienced leaders at every level who can guide the business with the knowledge and wisdom gained from time within a given business or industry.

As a former retail buyer, my long career included several great decisions on the products I selected for my assigned category.

It also included a few items that could have performed better. To be sure, it happens to any buyer, in any category, at any retailer. The unfortunate thing for me was seeing subsequent buyers in my former role re-buy the same destructive items a few years later with the same miserable outcome. Institutional knowledge was not harnessed in this business example to prevent the same mistake from repeating.

That is just one example of the missed business opportunity stemming from ageism. The fact is, there are far more examples out there every day in any business segment. And they could have been avoided.

Scott Benedict lives in Northwest Arkansas and is an affiliate partner at McMillanDoolittle, a Chicago-based retail consulting firm. The opinions expressed are those of the author.