Two interesting bits came out last week regarding the increasing amount of young bosses amidst an aging workforce:

• WSJ: For Mark Zuckerberg Wannabes, Sometimes It’s Easy to Lose Face
• Focus: Is Your Boss Younger Than You?

Apparently, as people get older, they are more likely to work for someone younger and be accepting of the situation.  Young people are the least accepting of younger bosses.

I would say from personal experience this trend feels true.  I think younger people, already prone to question authority, would do so more with even younger bosses since for most of your life, age establishes status — older kids are cooler and have greater responsibilities.  It’s hard to accept that someone who has been around less than you have could know more or do something better.  

However, as you get older, you realize age isn’t necessarily indicative of who you want to follow.  Older people do bring experience accumulated over many situations, relations built over time, and pragmatism evolved from tough choices.  

So, to be taken seriously, a younger boss then must take advantage of qualities that younger people offer more of:

Learning Mindset

Knowing there is so much you don’t know allows you to be respectful of others’ experience, seek them out, and value them.  You can become a better boss because you allow others to educate you so you have the most information available for decisions.  As you get older, you tend to convince yourself that you know best and close yourself to new knowledge.  To counter this, you must be a “perpetual pupil” which is a lot easier when you were just a student in a classroom.

I’ve constantly found myself learning from my older entrepreneurial peers and coworkers.  No body wants to waste a breathe on you if you don’t listen and that means as a boss, you need to wisen up and listen or else people will go around you to someone who will listen.

Passion

Professionalism is important, but passion is what invigorates others.  Young leaders should make use of their natural energy since everyone else looks to them for how they should be feeling about the company.

This can be hard when you inevitably become exhausted — even young people run out of energy.  I once found myself losing the confidence of people when I was physically too tired to be everywhere at once.  People then worried that I was stretched too thin or may not be able to make things happen.  Passion is what re-ignites you when you inevitably burn out and so it’s important to embrace it.

Idealism

Younger folk tend to be more idealistic.  They believe the impossible can be done and they try to do it.  This (possibly naive) courage is what allows the impossible to be done and it is why I think young leaders need to embrace this characteristic.

I have found that a vision of an ideal world to be more attractive to talent than a pragmatic outlook.  The talent you recruit is the determiner of success as a boss so it will help to have some idealism.

Risk Taking

The future belongs to the bold.   This is because I believe people take you a lot more seriously when you take risks since then you aren’t all talk — it’s a signal.  Because they take you more seriously, you are more likely to get things done since people will respond to you.

Young people naturally can take more risks since they have less to lose and more time to win.  So why shouldn’t young bosses take more risks?

I took a leave of absence from Yale when I started PaperG.  I believe this single act alone made older investors, employees, and customers take us very seriously and want to hear what we had to say.

Conclusion

Altogether, these characteristics of the young can be used effectively as a young (or old) leader and help overcome the skepticism from employees.  Being taken seriously is hard when you’re young but I have learned you can’t take yourself too seriously.  If you can’t laugh at yourself, then everyone will be on edge about the situation and never be comfortable with you in charge.