The Mistake Senior Leaders Make With Ageism

How decades of experience literally rewire your brain for better judgment — and the conversation framework to make that obvious in every room.

Sep 04, 2025

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42% of hiring managers admit to taking a candidate's age into account when reviewing job applications.

Even worse?

48% of employers say they're worried about older workers' tech skills.

More broadly, one-third of hiring managers admit to age bias against senior candidates, with 64% of those believing it's beneficial to their company to avoid hiring them according to a 2024 survey by ResumeBuilder.

Pretending age discrimination doesn’t happen is off the table. The real question is, what are we going to do about it?

Too often I’ve found that senior leaders are left feeling like they must placate to the prevalence of age discrimination—but how they respond to it—often allows the biased problem to perpetuate.

Does the digital age hate the aged?

I've watched executives with 25 years of career dominance, nine-figure P&Ls, and teams of 120+ people shrink themselves to compete with 28-year-olds on technical proficiency and tactical supremacy.

I've seen Fortune 500 leaders profusely apologize for their "lack of experience" with the latest “growth hacking” frameworks.

Are you kidding me?

If top senior leaders are not up to snuff, the rest of society must be a hopeless mess.

Listen, I know what you're thinking: "What the hell does this kid know about getting old?"

Fair question—albeit ironic.

But here's the thing—I don't often work with professionals in their twenties or thirties. Rather, I've almost exclusively worked with executives between their late forties to early sixties for my entire career.

Why?

Because I find immense value in learning from people smarter than me.

And every single day, I watch these brilliant leaders with “too much horsepower” sabotage themselves by playing a game they're designed to lose.

It’s like bringing a nuclear warhead to a water balloon fight, then apologizing because your balloon isn't colorful enough.

Your age isn't a liability. It's your unfair advantage.

And I'm about to prove it to you with neuroscience, then give you the exact conversation framework to make that advantage obvious in every room you enter.

Because the moment you stop competing on their terms and start playing your game, everything changes.

The Neuroscience of Why Experience Makes You Smarter

Let’s start with a healthy dose of good news for senior leaders.

Your brain has been upgrading itself for decades. While many hiring managers worry about your tech skills, neuroscience reveals something fascinating.

There are two types of intelligence, and you've been developing the one that matters most for leading executive decisions.

Fluid Intelligence is raw processing speed—the ability to solve new problems quickly, think abstractly, and adapt to novel situations. This peaks in your twenties and gradually declines. It's what helps someone master a new app in minutes or pivot to the latest marketing trend.

Crystallized Intelligence is accumulated knowledge, pattern recognition, and wisdom gained through experience. This remains stable or actually improves into your 60s and 70s. It's what helps you see through the noise, anticipate market shifts three moves ahead, and avoid costly mistakes that less experienced leaders can't even see coming.

Research from top business schools consistently shows that older executives with higher crystallized intelligence demonstrate superior strategic decision-making abilities.

They excel at combining complex existing ideas, interpreting new concepts within broader contexts, and making accurate evaluations of their own knowledge—something younger leaders consistently overestimate.

I know I’m a younger leader guilty of this.

While fluid intelligence declines, crystallized intelligence doesn't just compensate—it often exceeds what younger brains can achieve. Your decades of experience have literally rewired your brain to become a "superb pattern recognition expert."

You've seen market crashes.
You've navigated industry disruptions.
You've watched competitors make the same mistakes repeatedly.
You’ve survived the dot com boom, Lehman brothers, COVID, whatever we’re in now…

That's not just experience—that's a neural network trained on real-world data that no MBA program can simply replicate.

The younger candidate might learn faster, but you know faster. They can process new information quickly, but you can instantly recognize which information actually matters.

This is why companies desperately need senior leadership, even when they don't realize what they're looking for. They over index hiring for fluid intelligence when they should be hiring for crystallized intelligence as well.

And that's where most senior leaders screw up the positioning.

Why Senior Executives Keep Losing at the Wrong Game

Too many senior leaders respond to age bias by trying to prove they're not old.

Wrong move.

You're essentially saying, "Please ignore my greatest competitive advantage and judge me on the criteria where I'm more of a commodity."

It's psychological suicide.

I've watched this play out hundreds of times.

A seasoned leader walks into a room full of younger leaders discussing some hot trend—blockchain, AI, growth hacking, whatever the latest shiny object happens to be.

Instead of steering the conversation toward long-term strategic outcomes where their experience dominates, they try to compete on tactical knowledge of the trend itself.

They start sentences with phrases like:

"I'm still learning about this, but..."
"I know I'm not as up to date as you all, but..."
"This might be an old-school perspective, but..."

Stop. Right there.

Every time you use qualifying language like this, you're reinforcing their unconscious bias that experience equals obsolescence. You're training them to discount your expertise and playing the wrong game.

You're giving them permission to see your decades of hard-earned wisdom as a liability rather than an asset. You're playing defense when you should be playing offense.

Research shows that older executives are significantly better at avoiding the influence of irrelevant options and discontinuing less effective strategies.

You have what behavioral economists call "superior strategic filtering"—the ability to separate signal from noise that only comes from pattern recognition built over decades.

You must own this narrative.

But when you position yourself as the student rather than the teacher, you waste this advantage.

The fix isn't to become an expert in every new trend. The fix is to reframe every conversation around the strategic implications that only experience can reveal.

Instead of proving that you’re not old—you should be asserting that you are.

Because younger leaders often can't tell you which trends will last and which are just expensive distractions. They often can't anticipate the second and third-order consequences of strategic decisions. They often can't recognize patterns that repeat across market cycles.

You can.

That's not a consolation prize. That's the whole game.

Have a friend who needs to read this?

How to Make Your Experience Obvious

Now that you understand the psychological game, here's exactly how to play it.

It's about understanding the underlying framework that lets you control any conversation and steer it toward your strengths.

I call it the ACE Method: Acknowledge, Challenge, Elevate.

Acknowledge with authority (not apology)
Challenge the underlying assumptions (not the people)
Elevate the conversation to strategic implications (where you dominate)

Let me show you how this plays out in real conversations.

Scenario 1: The Hot Trend Discussion

Wrong approach: "I'm still learning about this blockchain thing, but it seems interesting..."

ACE approach:
Acknowledge: "Blockchain is getting real attention in our industry right now."
Challenge: "The question is whether it solves a problem worth solving at scale."
Elevate: "I've seen three major technology shifts in this industry, and the ones that survived weren't the most elegant—they were the ones that created measurable business value. What specific problem are we trying to solve here that current solutions can't handle?"

See what happened?

You don’t compete on technical knowledge. You position yourself as someone who evaluates trends through the lens of impact and pattern recognition.

Scenario 2: The Strategy Meeting

Wrong approach: "I know you all are more familiar with these new growth strategies..."

ACE approach:
Acknowledge: "These growth tactics are generating impressive short-term numbers."
Challenge: "My experience has shown that aggressive growth strategies often mask underlying unit economics problems."
Elevate: "I've watched companies triple their revenue while destroying their margins. What does our customer lifetime value look like when we factor in the full cost of acquisition through these new channels?"

You're not dismissing innovation—you're bringing the wisdom that only comes from watching full business cycles play out. Where are the trade-offs?

Scenario 3: The Interview

Wrong approach: "I may not know all the latest marketing tools, but I'm a quick learner..."

ACE approach:
Acknowledge: "Marketing technology has evolved significantly in the past few years."
Challenge: "But the fundamental challenge remains the same—how do you acquire customers profitably and retain them long-term?"
Elevate: "I've built marketing organizations through three major platform shifts—from print to digital, digital to social, and social to mobile. Each time, the tools changed but the strategic principles remained constant. The companies that focused on sustainable unit economics outperformed those chasing the latest tactics every time."

This framework works because you're not trying to prove you know everything about the latest trends.

You instead demonstrate that you understand how trends fit into larger strategic contexts and what that means for long-term business outcomes.

Let me ask you, what is more valuable to the organization? Why?

A Word of Nuance

The approach presented here is powerful, but like any framework, it's not a silver bullet.

While the ACE Method is designed to reframe the conversation around your strengths, it's important to be clear-eyed about its limitations.

The principles are sound, but their application is not a complete solution to systemic age discrimination rooted in factors like salary expectations or a deeply ingrained corporate culture that simply doesn't value experience.

A confident senior leader also understands that focusing on crystallized intelligence doesn't mean becoming complacent. The ability to learn and adapt—even with decades of experience—is a non-negotiable trait.

This framework is a tool for leveraging your wisdom, not an excuse to disengage from new developments. It's a strategic move for a specific context, and its success relies on an audience that is open to a nuanced conversation about value. Acknowledging this nuance shows confidence and a deeper understanding of the issue.

Your Competitive Advantage Is Now Obvious

If a company discriminates based on your age (or other reasom)—whether they say it out loud or not—you don't want to work there anyway.

Their loss. Next.

Because somewhere out there is an organization smart enough to recognize the goldmine of crystallized intelligence you bring. That's where you focus your energy.

That's where you win.

The senior leaders I work with who master this reframe don't just get hired—they command premium compensation. They don't just get promoted—they get recruited. They don't just survive industry disruption—they lead it.

Why?

Because they've stopped apologizing for their greatest asset.

Think about it.

Too often when a 24-year-old talks about "disruption," they're describing something they've read about. When you talk about disruption, you're describing something you've lived through.

Multiple times.

When they discuss "agile methodology," they're referencing a framework they learned in a workshop. When you discuss adaptability, you're drawing from decades of actually pivoting organizations through real crises.

When they mention "customer lifetime value," they're repeating something from a business school case study. When you discuss customer retention, you've actually built the systems and relationships that compound over years.

This isn't about dismissing younger talent—they bring energy, fresh perspectives, and technical fluency that's invaluable.

The point is—we need both.

We need fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence working together.

The problem has never been your age. The problem was how you position it.

You've spent decades accumulating the kind of judgment that can't be Googled, the kind of pattern recognition that can't be taught in an MBA program, and the kind of strategic foresight that only comes from being in the trenches as full business cycles play out.

That's not something to apologize for. That's something to leverage.

So the next time someone in a room full of younger leaders starts discussing the latest trend, don't shrink. Don't qualify. Don't apologize.

Ask the question only experience teaches you to ask: "What problem are we actually trying to solve here?"

Then watch as the conversation shifts to exactly where you want it to be—where you can lean into your expertise and own the room.

Because in the C-suite, the person who can see three moves ahead often beats the person who can move the fastest.