What's The Theory EP 4: Is Young Leadership A Good Thing?
Companies House states that in the last few years 50% of MDs and Founders registered were between 30-40 years old. We’re also seeing an increase in younger execs being promoted into leadership roles across businesses. With this rise in younger leaders a lot of conversations opened around their ability to run profitable businesses.
The average age of CEO’s has been falling by nearly 1.4 years every year with the average now being 53 years old. Boards used to focus on seasoned executives who had weathered major economic changes but they’re now moving towards younger leaders with raw potential, innovation, and long-term succession capability.
In this episode you will learn:
- How our careers progressed to start our own agency in our 30’s
- What we learned from older generation leadership and what the new generation is bringing in
- How X-Box tackled declining business sales by bringing in talent no one expected
- How young leaders are tackling toxic environments
- The impact of old-school toxic workplace tactics on performance and clients
Understanding Business Ownership – The New Way
With over 75,000 registered business founders being between 29-50, Companies House is seeing a change in UK leadership. New employment laws, support from ACAS, and employees speaking up is changing how businesses need to be led.
More transparency is needed. Business-wide understanding of cost and teaching the younger generation how to track their incomings and outgoings can improve future-thinking within teams. But most business want to hide the overheads and profit numbers to either keep the bad news at bay or fill the pockets of those who sit in board rooms.
In this episode we discuss some things we learned along the way that helped us lead, even at a young age, and prepare us for strong business cases or decision making:
- What are your team overheads? The cost of tools, salaries, national insurance, and pensions on a monthly basis gives you an understanding of what your team costs the business.
- What are you charging? Knowing how projects, retainers, or products are priced and then sold in helps you know what comes in at what price. If you’re making X a month and spending X a month on overheads – what’s the profit.
- Are you selling your services correctly? If you’re charging X but logging X amount of work against it, it may not be a profitable project. Are you tracking time and effort to know whether you’re over or under servicing.
- What does the pipeline and capacity look like? Do you know what the monthly working hours are (taking breaks, lunch, admin, and holidays into account) per person as well as sales coming? Keeping track of these can help forecast when capacity runs out and how early you need to start hiring.
These basic questions and tracking the numbers behind them can give you a solid foundation to know where you are at. This doesn’t take 30 years of experience, just clarity and transparency within how your team operates!
Performance vs Results In Leadership
The biggest shift is that the younger generation is focusing on inspirational leadership, agility, self-correction and reception to feedback, drive for results vs just pleasing clients and focusing on performance at the detriment of morale and skill building.
There is a significant push from older generations to add AI to everything, use it for efficiency or roles in their entirety. We’re seeing less data analysis or trusting in professional ability and more use of “AI Models” that are replacing entire teams. This has been creating a divide in businesses whereby the soul of companies is lost for the sake of increasing profit margins.
With this, there’s a rise in anti-AI stance from not only employees but also clients as they’re starting to see their performance and relationships with providers change. Reducing many projects to transactional and removing human elements that give campaigns more of a feel that customers can ultimately relate to.
Toxic Environments Impacting Performance
Once of the biggest shifts that young leaders are bringing in is drawing attention to workplace wellbeing. Increased need for HR support, understanding employment laws, and ACAS backlogs are just the tip of the iceberg as employees are demanding their rights be respected and their wellbeing taken into account.
One of the biggest talking points of our podcast is how employee wellbeing impacts performance. When your team isn’t treated well – the work coming from them will become less and less cared for. More mistakes, less attention, and certainly less effort as they will feel like their work isn’t being respected… And ultimately clients suffer.
There’s a missing link from older generations who believe in “collaboration” and “community” by forcing everyone into stuffy offices 5 days a week with strict hours and rules… Not seeing how miserable they are to be there as they come into the office to sit on online meetings.
