Starting your career in a big company is tough. Whether it’s a bank, super fund or insurer – you’re the smallest fish in a gigantic pond. Both of us have spent our careers navigating these tumultuous waters, riding the waves of success and bracing ourselves when the storms hit. Becoming a leader before 30 is enormously rewarding but a steep learning curve. Big companies that support young leaders drive a competitive edge by providing a platform for everyone to contribute ideas, thinking and energy but allow room to make calculated mistakes (without punishment) and learn from the wisdom of others (without being patronised).
Why does this matter? Consider the customer revolution at the heart of most corporate transformations. Insurers and funds service a broad spectrum of the community – their customer base is truly diverse. Because of this, there is pressure for leadership teams to represent the communities they serve.
But how can a Board get into the head of a 25 year old that grew up with a supercomputer in her pocket? The answer lies in more cognitive diversity in leadership teams. Young and old, side-by-side, respectfully challenging each other to future proof the business. Young leaders straddle the divide between an analogue and a digital world because their mental models have been shaped under a rapidly evolving technology landscape.
So after over ten years climbing the corporate ladder, here’s what we have learnt about young leaders and what big companies can do to make the most of their strengths and their weaknesses.
1) We’re naïve but not yet cynical
We’ve both had to pull ourselves up at times when graduates in our team have come to us with bold ideas and our gut reaction is cynical dismissal. We already know better, don’t we?
From our experience, a younger leader tends to:
- be more optimistic about the likely success of the task at hand
- underestimate the timeframe and budget required to achieve the task; but
- be more willing to explore riskier or unorthodox options.
This may be due to the planning fallacy but this thinking often leads to real change, innovative solutions, higher return and more motivated, passionate and energised teams. Through this lense, it’s interesting to reflect on different cultural attitudes towards young leadership. For example, we’ve both been fortunate to work in overseas markets. One of us, in particular, has spent a big chunk of her career in South Africa’s entrepreneurial culture.
“In South Africa, times have changed so much in my lifetime – the customer, the environment, the regulation and government, the technology. Countries like South Africa and Israel don’t value the benefits of hindsight as much as other countries because the context is so different and always changing. Adversity and rapidly changing external environments require different thinking, adaption, agility, positive energy – some of the things that young people inherently bring.”
By contrast, Australia is known as the “lucky country” with almost 30 years of unbroken economic growth and strong stable government and social institutions. With less historic adversity to overcome, Australian companies are naturally more cautious and incremental in progressing change than our entrepreneurial South African or Israeli cousins. This has meant radical new business models aren’t a necessity yet and perhaps why young leadership hasn’t been promoted as actively.
Furthermore, the Australian business culture values deeply the wisdom of hindsight. Experienced business leaders know that our world is cyclical. The past repeats itself. Whether it’s old products that come back in fashion (hello, velvet), organisational restructures going back to the future, or dusting off competition strategies that have worked before. These cycles are what many consulting firms rely on – finding a method that works and repeating it for multiple clients with subtle nuances.
The same applies to an older leader, she has probably ”seen it all before” and has the benefit of hindsight to quickly change tact to better achieve success, lower the risk or make the task more efficient.
Young leaders need to learn to look to the past and listen to the wisdom of more experienced leaders to inform the way they do things or we risk being inefficient or ineffective in reinventing existing processes, products or systems.
2) We’re biased to build for the future
We remember growing up with an Encyclopaedia Britannica on our bookshelf. Looking up information at school on a CD-ROM. Tentatively referencing Wikipedia in a university research project. To now having the whole world’s information at our fingertips with trusty Google.
We live in a society shaped by Boomers and Gen X, we grew up through the digital revolution of Gen Y and we are glimpsing Gen Z’s fully automated future. This gives young leaders an insight into the lived experiences of an increasingly digitised generation of consumers. Coupled with the inherent optimism of youth, we challenge the status quo (for better or worse) and our minds are extremely future-oriented.
For companies looking to set a long-term strategy that engages digitised consumers, it’s imperative that some of the leadership team have lived that experience rather than just learnt that experience.
The flip side of this is that young leaders often don’t appreciate the real challenges of building the future in an ever-changing consumer and technology landscape. Wiser hands are needed to steady the ship and help constantly evaluate the trade-off between managing the now and building for the future. There’s been many times when we’ve both had to take a step back and realise that there’s a lot of truth to the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” (even when it applies to creaky legacy systems).
3) We’re still finding our balance
For most of our careers, we’ve had no work speed other than 11/10. This is typical of many ambitious young people. Work till midnight? Anytime. Weekends? Sure, I don’t have kids yet. Day after day, week after week and year after year.
This culture of hard work and dedication is the hallmark of many young leaders. This is what makes them crucial to the productivity of organisations (and good value for money). Eventually though, personal circumstances change and this momentum becomes unsustainable. More importantly though, many leaders eventually learn how your personal behaviours impact the cultures of the teams you lead.
Answering emails until midnight. Working on Sundays. Individual actions become expectations become team culture. Young leaders need to be conscious of this and realise that being a top performer isn’t about being top of your game all the time – it’s about being on the top of your game when it matters. This is the same mentality that championship winning sportspeople adopt – you save yourself through the grind and train to hit top gear on the big stage.
And when it comes to the big stage – be it Board meetings or client presentations – it’s important to remember that being on your “A game” doesn’t necessarily mean being the loudest person in the room. Young leaders often have an unspoken sense of anxiety when you’re given a seat at the table with older and more experienced leaders. There can be a tendency to overcompensate and show that you belong. More than once, CEOs have remarked to both of us: “You need to learn to stop talking once you’ve got the decision you wanted.”
Sometimes planting a seed and keeping quiet is far more powerful. Young leaders would do well learn this, just like we had to.

We have both always worked in big corporates or consultancies, so this is our reference point for the experiences we’ve shared. Often, it can feel like big companies are caught in the Ice Age but the opportunity to learn from wiser and older heads is a powerful thing.
If big corporates maintain homogeneous leadership teams whose ideas are frozen in their historic and personal life experience, then young employees will end up either conforming to orthodoxy, butting up against an “ice ceiling”, or pursuing less rigid and more thrilling experiences through small start-ups.
We believe that if companies put the right young people on leadership teams, this creates a crack in the ice which allows all employees’ ideas to blossom and brings to life a “bias for the future”. With this, companies can remain ahead of the curve and experimenting with new business models and ways of working.
Given some of the challenges we have personally experienced with young leadership – this cannot be effectively implemented without making young leaders feel comfortable sitting at the table and being on equal footing with more experienced leaders. Young leaders want to embrace, learn and benefit from the experience and wisdom around them. So create space for them, filter dismissive cynicism, actively sponsor them and foster a culture which balances complements with constructive criticism.
Financial services in Australia are undergoing radical changes, particularly in community expectations. Past experience and behaviours might not be as valuable as it has been. Perhaps this is the time to embrace what was previously considered naïve young leadership?