(Getting Taken Seriously at Work)

Kai is 21. He’s an example, not a real person, but you may well know him. He left college with a Level 3 and took a job in a busy café at a garden centre. A year later, his manager asked him to run the Saturday shift.

Saturday means eight staff, and three of them are over forty. One of them, Bev, trained him.

Here’s how his first six weeks went, what went wrong, and what he changed.

 

Week one: two ways to get it wrong

On his first Saturday, Kai tried to sound like a manager. He gave out jobs from behind the till, in a voice he’d never used before. He told Bev to restock the cake counter while she was halfway through doing exactly that.

By the second Saturday he’d swung the other way. He apologised every time he asked for anything. “Sorry, would you mind, only if you’ve got a sec.” By two o’clock the queue was out of the door, and nobody was quite sure who was in charge.

Both are normal. Neither works.

 

Why it’s harder than it should be

It isn’t all in Kai’s head. A team of researchers in Germany studied 61 companies and nearly 8,000 staff. Where bosses were younger than the people they managed, staff reported more bad feeling at work, and those companies did less well.

But the age gap on its own didn’t do the damage. The harm came in workplaces where staff let that frustration out at the young boss. Where they kept it to themselves, the effect disappeared. The researchers didn’t think the answer was for people to bottle it up, though. They suggested workplaces make less of rank and “wait your turn”, and more of working things out together.

That’s useful for Kai. The problem isn’t that he’s 21. It’s what happens when experienced people feel ordered about by someone younger. He can’t change the age gap, but he can change how he uses being in charge. That’s what the next few weeks were about.

 

Weeks three to six: what he did differently

He asked Bev for advice, properly. Not “is that alright?” but a real question about a hard problem: “The one o’clock rush always goes wrong. What would you change?”

It feels as if asking should make him look weak. It does the opposite. Alison Wood Brooks and her colleagues at Harvard Business School ran a set of experiments on this. People who asked for advice were seen as more capable than people who didn’t. It worked best when the problem was genuinely hard, when they asked the person directly, and when that person knew their stuff. Bev has run that counter for nine years. She knows her stuff.

He did the worst job first. The bins, the mop, the thing nobody wants – once, early on, and without making a point of it.

He gave decisions with a reason, and without apologising. “Can you take the till from twelve? The rush always hits the till first and you’re the fastest.” One sentence. No “sorry”.

He made time to hear the grumbles. He started a two-minute chat at the start of each shift: what went wrong last week, and what would they change? A complaint that gets said to him there doesn’t come out in front of the customers.

He stopped pretending. When he didn’t know something, he said so, and said he’d find out. Nobody expects a 21-year-old to know everything. They do expect him to be straight.

 

Week six

It isn’t perfect. One colleague still calls him “the boy” when she thinks he can’t hear. But the one o’clock rush now runs on Bev’s plan, and Kai’s manager has asked whether he wants to do Sundays too.

Try this: if you’re about to run something for the first time, pick the most experienced person on the team. Ask them one genuinely hard question in your first week. Then use their answer, and tell them you did.

Next month, we look at the first ninety days of running a team, for anyone stepping up over people they trained with.