Biological age is spoken of frequently, but I don’t hear much about psychological age. And when it is referenced, it often refers to the biological components of brain function.
“Your psychological age can be broken down into cognitive functioning—your abilities to learn and remember—and emotional functioning—your ability to handle and manage your feelings,” Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD, ABPP, wrote in the Psychology Today article, “What’s Your True Age?”
The take on psychological age that is most relevant to the workplace, though, is this one: “Psychological age is how old one feels, acts, and behaves, and is thus not necessarily equal to chronological age, which is age since birth. A person can, therefore, have a psychological age that exceeds their chronological age if they are mature or at least feel older than they really are,” Douglas K. Symons, lead author of “Psychological Age” wrote in Encyclopedia of Child Behavior and Development.
Openness to Try New Things
The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is showing how even the youngest people can be recalcitrant to try new things out of fear and perhaps a lack of imagination and ingenuity. They are too psychologically old to imagine that AI will be professionally beneficial to them, so they fixate on and never move past the one-dimensional fear that it will “take” their job.
Meanwhile, a person decades older may be happily using AI to better prepare for sales meetings with prospective clients that enable them to go into those meetings with an inside track. They have information that pre-AI would have taken hours to compile, curate, and put together in a coherent presentation.
Your workplace can frame the way employees think about new technologies such as AI. Do you present it to employees as something to be feared and resisted or as an opportunity?
What Do You Present as a Chore?
With employees often overwhelmed with work, it’s easy for an organization to present business travel and participation in meetings outside the office as chores. Some organizations strictly focus on how much time an employee spends typing on their computer.
Instead, the corporate culture should focus on the learning opportunities both inside and outside a conference or meeting, and the advantages of spending in-person time with colleagues.
For instance, managers could be trained to find activities outside of the official duties of a business trip for employees to experience together, both for fun and as learning experiences.
The older mindset of, “I just want to get in and get out,” shouldn’t be the outlook your managers are taught to cultivate. It should be more, “I want to meet all of my responsibilities and also see what fun I can have.” It can be scary to train employees on openness to fun, but in doing so, you train them to have the kind of playful minds that can’t help but experience and appreciate new things that will help them do their jobs better.
On past business trips I have enjoyed aquariums, zoos, and all manner of restaurants and walks with colleagues. Seeing these businesses together was a bonding experience as a team, while also giving us a lot to talk about once we got back to the office. In remembering our shared experiences, we also remembered what we liked and disliked, which then could inform how we approached our own work and the experience people outside our organization had working with us.
Are we too much like the restaurant that made us wait a half hour to be seated even though we had a reservation? How can we be more like the aquarium we visited where even the lowest level of employee appeared highly knowledgeable?
Open to the Approaches of Others?
A child sometimes will be stuck in one way of doing things—because they have only had exposure to their parents, and consequently they feel their parents’ way is the only way.
Some of your employees may be like this—and it doesn’t matter if they’re chronologically young or old. A chronologically young employee could refuse to do a task differently than the way their first boss taught them to do it. A chronologically older employee may have already tried a few different ways of doing the same task and knows there are many ways to approach it and is happy to try another.
Beware of putting people in leadership positions who have a rigid outlook about the way tasks should be done. “There’s a right way and a wrong way,” is usually not the most helpful way to approach work.
As technology continues to advance, and people get used to working both in person and remotely, a workforce with a psychological mindset of openness to try new things, eagerness to explore and have fun, and flexibility in how work gets done will be a differentiating advantage.
Why type of psychological mindset do you foster in your employees?