Intergenerational Leadership Isn't Just a Corporate Idea
A recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review by Felix Rüdiger, Kaspar Köchli, Matthew Hunter, and Nolita Mvunelo makes a straightforward observation: millennials and Gen Z now make up more than 60% of the global workforce, yet executive decision-making power is concentrating among older leaders. The average CEO age at S&P 1500 companies has increased from 54 to nearly 59 over the past fifteen years.
Department chairs across academic sectors are almost always senior faculty. Curriculum committees, hiring committees, and governance structures are populated by individuals who gained tenure when the disciplinary landscape was quite different. Meanwhile, early-career faculty and lecturers — the people most connected to current graduate training, emerging methodologies, and the everyday experiences of today's students — are often structurally excluded from significant decisions.
The authors describe three progressively advancing approaches to intergenerational leadership, each offering practical implications for a department chair willing to consider them.
Consultation: Genuinely Seeking Input
The lightest-touch approach is consultation — actively seeking input from younger colleagues. The corporate equivalent is reverse mentoring and shadow boards. In a department, this might involve inviting junior faculty to present at a retreat on emerging trends in the field or asking a recently hired assistant professor to brief the curriculum committee on what peer institutions are doing differently.
The risk the authors point out is real: consulting without follow-up breeds cynicism. If you ask a second-year assistant professor what the department should change about its methods sequence and then do nothing, you haven't built intergenerational leadership. You've just performed it. The chair's role in a consultative model is to close the loop — to show how input influenced (or didn't influence) the decision, and why.
Decision Rights: Where Things Become Uncomfortable
The more consequential move is sharing actual decision-making authority. The authors describe companies that have positioned younger leaders on boards with real roles, not just advisory seats. In academic terms, this could involve placing a junior faculty member on the hiring committee with a genuine vote — not as the department's token "early-career perspective" but as an active participant in discussions.
This is where departmental politics become interesting. Senior faculty may resist based on principle: the idea that governance authority should be earned through years of service is deeply rooted in academic culture. But the authors' point remains — experience helps recognize patterns, and pattern recognition can become a trap when the environment changes faster than those patterns can be updated. A department deciding whether to require a new computational methods course probably needs the input of someone who actually teaches with those tools, regardless of rank.
A practical compromise for deans and department chairs who cannot or will not reorganize committee membership is to create standing advisory roles with genuine access to discussions. A junior faculty member who attends every executive committee meeting and engages in discussions — even without a vote — alters the information ecosystem in which decisions are made.
Building A Pipeline of Department Leaders
The authors' most ambitious recommendation is to embed intergenerational leadership as an ongoing organizational principle, not a one-off program. Procter & Gamble's "build from within" model ensures that every top role has three ready successors, with structured development at every stage.
Departments don't usually think this way — but they should. What does succession planning look like for a department chair? In most institutions, the answer is "whoever is willing to do it next." That's not a pipeline; it's a lottery. A chair who takes the long view would intentionally rotate junior faculty through leadership-related roles: chairing a subcommittee, leading an accreditation self-study section, managing a speaker series. The goal isn't just to share the workload. It's to develop the judgment and institutional knowledge necessary for effective governance before it’s urgently needed.
The Take-Away
The research the authors cite is worth consideration. Age-diverse leadership teams show stronger performance in ambidextrous learning — the ability to exploit existing knowledge and explore new possibilities at the same time. This isn’t just an abstract business school idea for the corporate workplace. It's the real challenge that any department faces when trying to keep disciplinary rigor while adapting to new fields, new student populations, and new modes of scholarly production.
The temptation for any chair is to stick with what feels comfortable: staff committees with trusted senior colleagues, meetings conducted the way they've always been, and treating junior faculty as people who should focus on their research and tenure applications. That instinct isn't wrong, exactly — but it has its costs. And those costs grow as the gap widens between decision-makers and those who bear the consequences.