Why Your Baby Boomers Aren't Going Anywhere, and Shouldn't

Somewhere along the way we decided age is a countdown timer on someone's value at work. The closer someone gets to a certain number, the less point there is in training them, promoting them, or asking what they actually want next.

I believe that story is wrong on two fronts at once, and both mistakes are more expensive than they look.

Most clubs have a plan for stock loss, a plan for cash handling risk, compliance risk, WHS risk. Almost none have a plan for the risk of losing an entire career's worth of knowledge because a senior staff member walked out the door assumed rather than asked. That's the real cost of getting these two assumptions wrong, and it's exactly what I’m unpacking this week.

Myth one: Baby Boomers are all leaving soon

They're often not. The cost of living has pushed the retirement finish line further out for a lot of people, making staying in work a necessity for plenty of your senior staff, not a lifestyle choice. And unfortunately, no amount of "you've earned a rest" changes that maths for them. Others stay because the job is their social world, the place they see people, have a laugh, and feel like themselves, and cutting their hours doesn't free up their time, it cuts them off from their community. For others, that wage is funding something outside work that genuinely matters to them, work isn't competing with that life, it's paying for it.

This is where the misjudgement gets expensive, not in how leaders talk about older staff, but in what leaders eventually stop offering them. The new system rollout goes to someone "who'll be around to use it". The conference seat goes to someone "with more runway". The stretch project goes to someone the business is "investing in for the future". None of it is said unkindly, but all of it adds up to a slow withdrawal of opportunity from people who were never planning to leave, based on an exit date nobody confirmed and most people never had.

Myth two: the ones who are staying don't want more

Here's where it flips the other way. While you're assuming your longest-serving staff are coasting, some of them have more capability sitting untapped than anyone on your team realises. Competence that's gone quiet for twenty years starts reading as complacency, when it's actually just familiarity. The person who's been running your back office for fifteen years, who's outlasted three GMs and knows exactly why every system works the way it does, may be sitting on more leadership capacity than you've ever given them the chance to use. Not because they've hidden it, simply because nobody's asked.

The uncomfortable part is that age bias runs in both directions on the same person at the same time. You can simultaneously assume someone's about to leave and assume they've got nothing left to prove, and never notice the two beliefs contradict each other. Test each individual against reality rather than against an assumption, and you'll usually find the picture is more interesting, and more useful to your business, than the story you'd been telling yourself.

The ladder cuts both ways

Phillipa Fuller said something on the podcast this month that's stuck with me: keep the ladder down for the people coming up behind you, instead of pulling it up once you've climbed it yourself. Most of us hear that and think about mentoring younger staff, but I’d argue that it has to apply to how we treat our senior staff too.

Stop sorting your team by age. Start sorting them by what they still have to give, and what they still need to learn. And stop stepping back from older staff before they're ready to step back themselves.

In practice, that looks like three things.

• Pairing your most experienced staff with your emerging managers deliberately so the knowledge transfer is a job someone owns rather than something that might happen in passing.
• Documenting the reasoning behind decisions, not just the decisions themselves, so the next person doesn't have to rediscover why a policy exists the hard way.
• Having an honest conversation years before anyone's talking about retirement, so it's a genuine two-way discussion about what someone wants (or doesn’t want) next, instead of a farewell speech dressed up as planning.

What you're actually risking

Every senior staff member is carrying something your emerging managers don't have yet, the memory of what happened last time you tried this promotion, this roster change, this renovation, and why.

When that person eventually leaves, whether it's this year or in ten, you lose everything you never captured, and you'll pay for it twice. Once in the cost of recruiting and training a replacement, and again in the slower, harder-to-see cost of relearning lessons your business had already paid for once. Succession planning done six months out is damage control. Done years out, while your most experienced people are still on the floor and willing to pass it on, it's actually a plan.

Where to start

Skip the assumptions and run a proper knowledge risk audit on your senior team instead. Three questions, asked directly, rather than guessed at:

1. What do you actually want from the next few years here, more responsibility, less, or exactly what you're already doing?
2. What do you know about this business that isn't written down anywhere?
3. Who's currently learning it from you, and if the answer is nobody, who should be?

Don't stop at the answers. Turn them into action, a mentorship pairing, a documentation project, a genuine conversation about what's next, so the audit becomes the start of a plan rather than a list of things you now know and still haven't acted on.

If building a stronger, more capable leadership bench across every generation in your business is something you want support with, that's exactly what the Middle Management Movement, the Executive Leaders Movement, and my leadership coaching programs are built for. You can find all three at https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms.

And to watch this week’s full episode of The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast, click here: https://youtu.be/0q3VfElGof8