Podcast

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. It's the weekly micro edition of my podcast. Each episode is just six minutes long and is designed to provide you with tips, tools and tactics around specific aspects.

Of leadership and management.

It addresses some of the most common, common challenges you will face as a leader or manager. They are all recorded unscripted whilst I'm out walking in the countryside. So you'll probably hear birds tweeting in the background or just ambient noise as the people around me are going about their day to day life. That's all I'm going to say by way of an introduction. So let's dive straight in to this week's episode.

If you find yourself in a situation where you are leading and managing colleagues who are significantly older than you and are unsure, worried even about how to earn their respect, how to approach them, how to get the best from them and generally lead them effectively, then today's episode of the Leaders Kit Bag is for you. In this episode I'm going to talk once again about how you can use David Rock's scarf model that's heavily grounded in neuroscience to help you in these situations. And if you missed the previous episodes, I'll include the link with this episode of the Leaders Kit Bag so you can go and familiarise yourself with the scarf model. So, tips for effectively leading and managing older workers, which is something that I find especially younger leaders and managers often have some concerns and anxiety around. And here David Rock's Scarfe model can really help. So, as a very quick recap, SCARF is an acronym which talks about five domains that can act as as triggers for people's behaviour at work, creating a positive, helpful response or more of a negative unhelpful response. And those domains, the S stands for status, C is certainty, A is autonomy, R is relatedness, a sense of connection and sort of belonging to, and F is fairness. So how can we use this when leading and managing older colleagues? Well, the first thing is to think about which of the scarf elements might be important to them, what might be going on for them at any one time? And as always with a scarf model, it's about thinking how can I top up people's bucket in one of the five domains and how can I make sure I'm not kicking their bucket over? So older colleagues, more experienced colleagues, will often really value their sense of independence. So here, the autonomy element of the Scarfe model is going to be really, really key. What can you do to give them choice, freedom, control and allow them to work independently. Ultimately, how can you give them lots of autonomy and avoid the situation where they feel autonomy and freedom and choice is being taken away from them? That's really key. So make them feel as though you are valuing their input, giving them choice and not micromanaging them, but being there to support them as and when they need you. Another thing to consider potentially with older colleagues is fairness. And the key here really is to be wary of any assumptions that we might be making, because assumptions are often untrue, right? We need to test those assumptions. It's important to treat all of our colleagues, regardless of age or experience, in a fair and equitable way. Now, situations where this might play out is let's take a situation where perhaps you've invited, you've organized some drinks after work, and over the course of a couple of weeks, when you've done this, an older colleague has both times said, no, they can't come for whatever reason. So you make the assumption, therefore, that they're not interested at all, and you pin that to some sort of perhaps unconscious bias linked to their age. And as a result, you stop inviting them to other events and then they start to feel left out. So you just need to make sure that fairness is key and you are considering treating everybody in the team, regardless of age, fairly. So there's two elements of the Scarfe model and how it can help. I'll leave you to think about the other elements yourself, how you can use them, how they apply to yourself, your team, your colleagues. As always, hope it's been useful. Look after yourself, look after those who've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. Till next time, lead on.