How to lead when your team is older, more experienced and they know more than you

My first leadership role was managing a team of lawyers. I had been qualified for about 7 years at that point. So, I knew what I was doing on the legal side but had no real idea when it came to the managing.

The hardest single challenge for me was managing one particular team member who was much older than me and had been practising as a lawyer for about 25 years.

What is more, I had only joined the team a year before, and he had been the one showing me the ropes.

So, if you're feeling awkward about managing people who are older, more experienced, or longer in role than you, you're not alone. I know very well that this a difficult and frequently occurring challenge that new leaders face.

So, with that in mind, I’ve put together some strategies, based my own experience and backed by solid research, that I know will help.

We’ll cover the three foundational approaches this week and get a bit more tactical in next week’s newsletter/post.

You need to start by getting into the right frame of mind.

You should not feel embarrassed or apologetic about the role you find yourself in. You, quite reasonably, applied for the job and somebody else chose you to do it. You therefore have a duty to do your best to discharge the responsibilities you have been given.

But that does not mean coming out of the gate like Elon Musk. It means understanding that you can’t lead successfully unless you create and nurture the conditions that allow your team to be successful.

So, if you focus on that, rather than on how you feel about things, you’ll find that there will be a lot of common ground between what helps you and what helps the team.

When you're younger or less experienced than the people you manage, you should recognise that you need your team more than they need you. They have the skills, the relationships and the know-how to get on with the job whether you are there on not.

But that shouldn’t make you feel threatened. It should make you feel very happy. Because these people can deliver and keep delivering, even while you are finding your feet in your new role. So, it is really important to tread carefully and respectfully.

Research on millennial managers leading older staff consistently highlights the importance of courtesy, active listening, and explicit recognition of experience. The managers who succeed in these situations prioritise relationship building over positional authority.

What does this look like in practice?

If you think about it, this is normal relationship building. And, in the situation we are discussing, the pay-off is that the more you demonstrate that you respect and value the experience of older team members, the more likely they are to respect your leadership.

This might feel counterintuitive, but it certainly worked for me when I was in this position: openly learning from your more experienced team members can strengthen your position as a leader, not weaken it.

Research supports this. When younger or less experienced leaders adopt a participative approach—actively seeking input and learning from their teams—it can enhance commitment and positive behaviours across the group. Some studies specifically highlight "reverse mentoring" as a helpful strategy, where newer managers explicitly learn from older staff.

You might say something like: "I know you've seen a lot of change in this industry. I'd love to understand what you've learned about what works and what doesn't."

When you're genuinely curious about what your team knows, you gather valuable intelligence, you build trust, and you model the kind of learning culture you probably want to create anyway. The key is authenticity. People can tell the difference between a leader who's genuinely interested and one who's going through the motions. So don’t fake it.

You will find that the difficulty of leading older and more experienced team members is largely based on your own self-perception and nervousness at the situation you find yourself in. That is why you need to take heart from the fact that you have been trusted with the role and then focus on doing it, rather than on how you feel about it.

In most cases, you will find that your team members just need to know that you are going treat them well, respect their knowledge and allow them to do good work. So, the relationship building approaches outlined above will help you get off to a great start.

Of course, there are situations where you are dealing with people who are particularly difficult or unaccepting of your role, and that can be really hard for you. We’ll look at some tactics that can help with this in the next part of this series.

Gabriel, A., Alcantara, G., & Alvarez, J. (2020). How Do Millennial Managers Lead Older Employees? The Philippine Workplace Experience. SAGE Open, 10. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244020914651.

Byun, S., Yücel, İ., Richard, O., & Triana, M. (2025). The Role of Status Incongruence in Employee Responses to Participative Leadership. Human Resource Management. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.70035.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

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