St.Louis Business Journal
EXPECT YOUNGER BOSSES AND ACCEPT THEM GRACEFULLY

By Anna Navarro

April 2007  

Author's note: Client stories in this column are based on actual situations fictionalized to protect privacy and told with permission.



Traditionally, we think of bosses as people who are older and more experienced than we are. But what if they aren’t?

Peter sought my services as a career strategist because he was outraged when at 55 he found himself reporting to a 34-year-old. He thought the only solution was to change jobs. But after listening to his story, I wasn’t so sure.

He liked his work, was good at it and got excellent performance reviews. He was the senior person in the department and had been expecting to be promoted to department head when his boss retired. Instead, he had been passed over. Top management had said the department was due for a major overhaul in its operations and they wanted someone from the outside who could bring a fresh perspective.

Except for not giving him the promotion, however, the company treated him well. He was well compensated, got a major bump in salary when the younger person was advanced over him, and enjoyed perks, like vacation, that had improved over the years. If he stayed with the company 'til age 62, his retirement income would probably be more comfortable than if he left and joined another company.

All these factors led me to suggest he consider experimenting with adjusting to the situation rather than immediately looking for another job.

He agreed that staying made sense in some ways, but said he didn't know how to deal with the anger and pain he felt. I’m not a psychologist or a counselor, but it was clear that Peter would make scant progress adjusting to the situation until he dealt with these feelings.

Referring him to a psychotherapist wasn’t a good option. It would take too long to resolve these issues using that approach. Instead I proposed using “emotional freedom techniques”, self-help tools developed by personal performance consultant Gary Craig that are based on tapping acupuncture points and doing rapid eye movements to deal with emotional blocks. (You can download a free “How To” manual on these techniques at emofree.com).

We used these techniques to deal with Peter's embarrassment at being passed over, his fury at having to report to the person who was now department head, his hurt that management had not chosen him despite his years of service, etc. In the space of a few sessions, he worked through most of the emotional fallout of not getting promoted. I also taught him how to use these techniques on his own whenever additional aspects of the problem cropped up.

That clearing of emotional debris created space for Peter to learn some new behaviors. Here are the ground rules we evolved to deal with his new boss:

• Do your level best to follow his leadership. Support him in every way you can.
• Be even more meticulous about getting approvals and clearing things with him than with your prior boss.
• Don’t talk about how things used to be. Focus on how things are currently. Base suggestions on the here and now, not the past.
• Don’t get hung up on respect for age or experience. In fact, don’t bring those issues up at all.
• Be willing to learn from your new boss. Bonus: it may be that learning from him will in time make him feel safe enough to learn from you.
• Don’t try to imitate your boss in terms of language or mannerisms unless it happens absolutely spontaneously. Be yourself in terms of these kinds of issues.


These behaviors took several months for Peter to master. Along the way emotional blocks sometimes re-emerged (example: resenting his boss asking him to run a specific kind of decision past him that he had been used to making on his own.). Whenever that happened, he would retreat into his office, close his door and apply “emotional freedom techniques” until he could get to a calmer place.

Eventually Peter found he was glad he wasn’t the boss. As time went on his perception of both himself and the leadership role changed. He realized the job of leading the department through the changes that were underway didn’t look like much fun to him, and that he was actually better suited to being the star performer in the department than to being the boss. Getting to that point required both hard work and acceptance of the situation, but the payoff was that he kept a job he genuinely liked with excellent compensation and benefits.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.