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

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

The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast

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Michelle Pascoe:

Welcome to this week's episode of The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast, and that's me. I want to start with an assumption I hear all the time in our industry, and it's one I think we need to pull apart properly.

The assumption goes something like this: the baby boomers in our clubs and venues are on their way out. They're winding down, they're counting down to retirement, and pretty soon it'll just be a younger, more tech-savvy generation running the show.

Well, here's the problem. That assumption is lazy, and it's costing us good leaders.

Because not every boomer in your club is wandering off into the sunset on the grey nomad caravan. Some of them are running your finance committee better than anyone else could. Some of them are the only person on your floor who remembers what happened the last time you tried this promotion, or this roster change, or this renovation, and why it went sideways. Some of them, frankly, are just getting started on the most interesting chapter of their working life. If you're writing them off because of their age, you're not planning for succession. You're just making a leadership mistake and calling it strategy.

This month I've had four conversations on this podcast that, on the surface, are about very different things. One was about burnout. One was about a woman stepping into the spotlight after decades behind the scenes. One was about marketing and AI. One was about succession in regional clubs. But pull the thread on all four, and they're actually the same conversation. They're about how we lead people across very different life stages, and what happens when we get that wrong.

So let's get into it.

If you walked onto most club floors today and lined up your team by age, you wouldn't find just two generations. You'd actually find four, sometimes even more, standing shoulder to shoulder on the same shift. I was talking to Kenny Ridgell this month, a data-driven marketing entrepreneur, and we talked about how these four-plus generations relate to information in very different ways. Some people look at a data report and go, great, straight in the top drawer it goes. Others want to act on every single number immediately. Most sit somewhere in between.

Kenny was talking about marketing data specifically, but he could just as easily have been talking about a new POS system, a new AI tool, a new rostering platform, anything you're trying to roll out across your team. The mistake leaders make is assuming resistance to something new is a generational problem. It's not. It's a leadership design problem. You cannot hand a nineteen-year-old and a sixty-five-year-old the exact same training, in the exact same format, and expect the same result. That's not because one of them is more capable than the other. It's because you haven't done the work of understanding how different people on your team actually take in information and change their behaviour. That's on us as leaders, not on them.

Now, when it comes to experience, I think we've got this one backwards. I had a wonderful conversation with Cassie Davison this month, what a treat her episode was. We got into this idea of working harder not actually being the answer, which is something so many of us in hospitality have believed for years. Cassie's been in the industry over thirty years, same as me, and she rightly said her generation came up believing you just worked hard and hoped somebody would notice, and you wore burnout like a badge of honour. She was honest enough to say the younger generation coming through now, the ones who protect their time and know their worth and treat work as work, they're not wrong. In a lot of ways, they've learned something from their parents and grandparents faster than we did.

The reason Cassie can say that with such clarity is because she's already lived through the burnout. She's already crashed and rebuilt her business more than once. She already knows exactly what it costs a person and a business when you don't protect your capacity. That's not knowledge you can hand a twenty-five-year-old manager in a training module. That's knowledge that takes decades to earn, and it's sitting inside the heads of your most experienced people right now.

So when I talk about not overlooking baby boomers, I'm not talking about sentimentality. I'm talking about the fact that the person who has already been through the fire is usually the person best placed to stop your younger managers walking straight into it. If you're not actively pulling that knowledge out of your senior people and putting it in front of your emerging leaders, you're leaving one of the most valuable resources in your business completely untapped.

Now I want to give you a real example of what it looks like when someone doesn't fit the sunset narrative at all. I spoke with Patty Aubrey this month. Patty spent decades behind the scenes helping build a billion-dollar publishing brand, co-authoring bestsellers, making other people successful. In our conversation, she told me flat out, she's older now, and she cares less than ever about what people think of her. But instead of that meaning she's winding down, it meant the opposite. She's stepping into the spotlight for what is genuinely the boldest chapter of her working life, speaking up, being seen, doing the things she spent thirty years helping other people do with the Chicken Soup for the Soul books.

That's not a woman heading for the sunset. That's a woman who's just getting started on something new, later in life, with more clarity and less fear than she's ever had. And I'd put money on the fact that you've got someone exactly like Patty on your team right now. Someone who's been excellent in a support role for twenty years, who everyone assumes is coasting towards retirement, who might actually be sitting on the most capable, most confident version of themselves they've ever been. If you've mentally filed that person under winding down, you might be about to lose your best next leader simply because you never asked the question.

Now, Patty's story is a great example, but I don't want to leave you with the impression that every boomer who's still clocking on wants a bigger title or a bigger stage. Some do, and some don't. And if we're going to lead this generation properly, we need to understand the real reasons they're still standing on your floor, because it's rarely about ambition.

For a lot of your senior team members, it's simple. They don't want more responsibility. They've done their time carrying a team, hitting targets, managing rosters and difficult conversations, and they're perfectly happy staying exactly where they are. That's not a lack of drive. That's someone who knows what they want and what they don't.

For others, it's perhaps financial. Retirement simply isn't affordable the way it used to be. The cost of living has shifted the maths for a lot of people, and staying in work isn't a lifestyle choice, it's a necessity. That's an honest reality for a huge number of people in our industry, and it deserves respect rather than assumptions.

For some, work is where their social life lives. The shift is where they see people, have a laugh, feel useful. Take that away and you haven't freed up their time, you've cut them off from their community. And for others, the wage from that job is exactly what's funding the caravan trip, the grandkids' birthday presents, or the overseas holiday they've been planning for years. Work isn't competing with their life outside the club, it's paying for it.

And underneath all of that, there's something even simpler. A lot of people, no matter their age, just want to feel like they're part of something that matters. Having a purpose, being needed, being useful, having somewhere to be and people who notice if you're not there, that doesn't just expire at sixty-five.

So before you make an assumption about what an older team member wants, how about you go and ask them. You might find the answer isn't retirement, and it isn't a promotion either. It might just be more of exactly what they're already doing, and doing well.

I also had a really honest conversation with Phillipa Fuller this month about leading her club through generational change in a regional community. She said something I've actually said myself on this podcast more than once, which is that we are about to see a massive shift over the next five or so years. The stalwarts of our registered club community, the people who've given decades of service and thoroughly deserve to retire and enjoy life, are going to retire. The question Phillipa raises is what happens to the next group coming through when that generation walks out the door without a plan in place. For a lot of clubs, that's a right-now problem.

And it's exactly why writing off your baby boomers as already on the way out is so dangerous. If you treat them as a group to be managed out, you lose the chance to transfer everything they know before they go. Succession planning isn't something you do in the six months before someone retires. It's something you should be doing years out, with the very people you've assumed don't need your attention anymore.

Phillipa put it in a way I loved. She talked about keeping the ladder down for the people coming up behind you, instead of pulling it up once you've climbed it yourself. That's what it was like in business in my early days, and it was horrific. I never did it myself, but I can tell you, I've faced it. I think that's exactly the mindset we need across every generation in our venues. Your senior leaders need to be keeping that ladder down for the emerging managers. But just as importantly, we as leaders need to be keeping the ladder down for our senior people too, instead of quietly assuming they're on their way out and stepping back before they're ready.

So here's what I'd like you to take away from all four of these conversations. Your workforce is not two generations, it's four or more, and they don't all learn, adapt or engage with change the same way, and that's on you to design for, not on them to fix. Your most experienced people have often already survived the mistakes your younger leaders are about to make, and that knowledge is wasted if you're not actively pulling it out of them. Not everyone slows down with age. Some of your best people are about to do their best work yet, and you need to be watching for who that is instead of assuming you already know. And the succession gap coming for our industry is real, it's close, and it will not wait for you to feel ready.

The leaders who get this right are the ones who stop sorting their teams by age and start sorting them by what each person still has to give, and what each person still needs to learn, regardless of which generation they were born into.

If this episode has got you thinking about who on your team you might have already written off, I'd genuinely love to hear about it. And if building a stronger, more capable leadership bench across every generation in your business is something you want support with, well, 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 michellepascoe.com, or via the show notes.

Thank you for listening today. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with a CEO, a board member, a colleague, or anyone in this industry who you think needs to hear this conversation. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast on YouTube, we're getting our numbers up, which is fantastic. Leaving a review helps even more, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe and review so you never miss an episode.

Next month we're diving back into customer service, and I've already interviewed a few, and they are amazing. So until next time, please take care. Bye.

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