How to be an older colleague

‘Today’s junior employee is tomorrow’s senior, whereas today’s senior is tomorrow’s old reject’

Twenty years ago I started work as the FT’s most junior employee. I was on the foreign desk. Every day I had to phone an angry middle-aged foreign correspondent, based in a faraway city that he hated. I was straight out of university, didn’t know how to talk to adults, and swiftly got up this man’s nose. He’d shout at me. One day, when he was telling me again how stupid I was, I said, “Yes, but you needn’t shout.” He shouted some more, then told me to put him through to my boss, where he really let go.
Now middle-aged myself, I often recall the middle-aged colleagues I encountered back then. Some were awful, some wonderful, and combined they taught me the essential art of being an older colleague. The secret: treat ignorant junior employees as humans.

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Juniors have loads to learn. At 5.30pm on my first day in the office, it dawned on me that nobody was even getting ready to go home. This is how grown-ups live, I suddenly realised, in offices where the windows don’t open. I was equally green about financial news. Once, excruciatingly, I asked on the internal messaging system whether anyone had heard of some ancient event called “the Guinness scandal”. Everyone had. It was the defining British corporate scandal of the 1980s. No matter that I was at school then.
Being a junior employee teaches you about your colleagues’ characters, because everyone can mistreat you if they feel like it. There were unsmiling pomposities who had swallowed a common fallacy among white middle-aged men: “I have a big job because I am a genius.” To them, it was an irrelevant factoid that almost all big jobs then went to white middle-aged men.
My contemporaries at other companies suffered similarly. One friend, a gifted graphic artist, once politely reminded his boss that he was terribly paid. The boss replied, “You’re only 29, and you’re already working for this company. You should be proud just to be here.” My friend thanked him, left the office with the useful knowledge that his boss was an antiquated buffoon, and soon had a top job at a rival company.
Our seniors were missing an important fact: even ignorant junior employees possess useful knowledge. In 1995 I was one of the only people in the building who had ever sent an email. I’d just learnt cutting-edge stuff at university. I had recently gone deep into foreign countries in a way that older colleagues with families couldn’t. One older colleague cannily took me to lunch and pumped me for information on a topic of mutual interest. We became friends. Today he is semi-retired, whereas I have the typical middle-aged man’s minor patronage powers. Recently, I put some work his way.

©Luis Grañena

But back then I desperately needed guidance, and a few senior colleagues provided it. One morning, my boss told me I’d made a mistake in the previous day’s paper. I almost burst into tears. She paused a few beats, then said, “It’s OK. I can see you know that making mistakes is serious.” She had taught me the FT’s underlying ideology, and earned my lasting loyalty.
Gradually, I got an education in adult life. One evening in the pub, a senior colleague told me his marriage was collapsing because his wife had joined a cult. I asked all the wrong questions, and probably made him feel worse but, slowly, I discovered the unseen dramas of office life: cancer, alcoholism, affairs . . . and people still having to show up at their desks the next morning and pretend.
. . .
Another senior colleague changed my career. Knowing I was unhappy writing corporate news, he advised me to quit the paper. (Commenters, please add witty zingers here.) I retorted: “You don’t like your job either. Why don’t you quit?” “I can’t,” he patiently explained. “I’ve got a mortgage and two kids. But you’ve got nothing, so go.” I needed the advice, because I was so inexperienced I didn’t know whether I was just unsuited to writing corporate news or to all work. (More zingers here, please.) I quit and, years later, rejoined the FT in a happier capacity.
That’s something else senior employees often miss: today’s junior employee is tomorrow’s senior, whereas today’s senior is tomorrow’s old reject. Back in 1995, most journalists still retired voluntarily, in their fifties, after decades of well-paid service. On Friday afternoons a drinks trolley would park by someone’s desk, and everyone would toast him, before he left the building for the last time, the mortgage on his London house paid off, his kids sent free though university, his contributions to journalism already almost forgotten by the time he got home. Such is the eternal cycle.
It moves faster now, especially for middle-aged men. Bosses are keen to replace us with cheap millennials. The bitter fiftysomething male ex-employee is an icon of our time. The best way to avoid this fate: hug the juniors, pick their brains, and get their email addresses as you leave the building.

Sourced from ft.com