We Are Way Too Valuable To Waste.

By Karen and Erica

Two of our friends—different people in different locations with different backgrounds, both of whom had very high level jobs for several decades, have recently retired. Both were approached by organizations that wanted to hire them, declaring that their skills were perfect for the organization. In each case, the jobs at issue were full time, and the organization could not see any way of making them other than full time—even though in both cases the jobs involved discrete projects that could have been assigned one at a time. In both cases our friends turned down the jobs because they are not interested in working 24:7.

Our friends, like many of us, are quite happy to work full-on while a project is live, so long as it is not followed by a new assignment for a couple of months. In some other cases, we know of people who would have been happy to work a few days a week, or a few hours a day. Those proposals were also rejected.

Does this make any sense? We think not.

Those of us who worked for several decades have distilled knowledge and experience that allow us to react to situations much faster than we could have before we had those years of experience. For that reason, we should not have to work the same hours that newbies must in order to learn the ropes. A personnel problem erupts? We’ve seen it before. A supplier fails to supply? We’ve seen that before, too. Half of our time is worth the full time of a newbie. At least.

So what’s going on?

We think it is a lack of imagination.

We understand the value of organization charts. But they should not be barriers to flexible thinking. At the moment, the org charts of most organizations do not admit the existence of people like us—women who joined the workforce in large numbers in the late 1960s and are now retiring.

Why? Because we are new on the scene. We are not interns. We’re not climbing the ladder. We don’t want to run the company. And we’re not going to work 24:7, like people in all of these existing positions.

What we do want is to keep connected and stay relevant. For us that means a curated position that allows us to to work on a schedule we like, on projects we like, reporting sideways, to the person in charge of the project, rather than upwards, like those on their way up.

We’re no threat to anyone. Once the project is done everyone can regroup. The organization can decide if they want more work from one of us, and she can decide if she wants to do more work for the organization.

We don’t see too many prototypes. One is the job held by Wendy, a character in the long running series Billions. She is smart, experienced, skilled. She is embedded within the firm, but she does not have a regular reporting channel. She is available to those who are in the daily scrum, but she is outside of the fray. She keeps confidences, and she dispenses frank advice to those who are caught up in the quotidian machinations of money-making.

Those of us who have had long careers would make perfect Wendys. We have the specific knowledge required by our careers, but we also know what a crisis looks like, we know how to strategize, and we recognize muddled thinking when we see it. We have solved many problems over the years. We can evaluate which risks are worth taking and which are not. We can dispense advice based on our experience, with no agenda other than keeping people’s heads on straight.

Any workplace with managers who were creative about how to use the experience and knowledge we represent would profit. Younger people moving up the ladder would benefit from what we know—they would not have to learn the hard way everything that we had to learn the hard way. More experienced employees would be able to bounce ideas off someone experienced.

It’s time to talk to us about how we can work with you. Don’t waste what we can offer. Think smart. And be creative.