In an exclusive interview with CanadianSME Small Business Magazine, Dan Pontefract, leadership and culture strategist, challenges outdated workplace models and highlights why the future of work must embrace age diversity.
Interview By Kripa Anand
Dan Pontefract is a renowned leadership and culture strategist, award-winning author of six books, and keynote speaker with three decades of experience helping organizations and leaders improve overall performance.
He has presented at five TED events and earned multiple industry awards, including Thinkers50 Radar, HR Weekly’s 100 Most Influential People in HR, PeopleHum’s Top 200 Thought Leaders to Follow, and Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers.
Dan’s best-selling books include Work-Life Bloom—the 2024 Thinkers50 Best New Management Book and the Gold Medal Winner of the Axiom Business Book Awards and The Future of Work Is Grey, his latest geared to solving the demographic issue that workplaces are about to face. He also writes for Forbes and Harvard Business Review.
You argue in The Future of Work Is Grey that many organizations are operating with “age debt” in the same way we talk about climate debt—what does age debt look like in Canadian workplaces today, and why is it such a risk for our economy and organizations?
Most of the systems running our workplaces were built for a workforce that’s already left tor about to leave the building. Annual performance reviews, static succession plans, learning management systems, and the anachronistic career ladder were designed back when populations were younger, careers ran in a straight line, and 65 meant receiving a gold watch and a Dairy Queen “Happy Retirement” ice cream cake. None of it holds up anymore. And yet too many leaders keep using the playbook as if nothing has changed.
By 2031, the World Economic Forum says workers 55 and older will exceed 25 percent of the G7 workforce. I think they’re undershooting. Birth rates across the OECD are falling off a cliff, and the buying public is greying faster than the workforce supposed to serve it.
Meanwhile, organizations hold onto hiring practices like it’s 1995. They filter for “energy” and “digital native.” They market to a 25-year-old persona who, demographically, isn’t even the target customer anymore.
Most of the demographic-related issues encompass a term I refer to as Age Debt, the organizational failure to plan for and value age. It results in capability loss and a weakened workforce. It compounds quietly, a bit like climate change.
For decades, conversations about the future of work have been dominated by generational stereotypes—Boomers vs. Gen X vs. Millennials vs. Gen Z; why do you believe our thinking about generations needs a rebrand, and what does a more useful way of looking at age in the workforce actually look like?
We have a meme problem, and it’s doing real damage. “OK, Boomer.” “Lazy Gen Z.” “Millennials who carry six water bottles at a time.” Hilarious on TikTok but toxic at work. Each one of the tropes is the velvet rope behind which workplace ageism quietly sets up shop, because the moment you can be funny about a decade, you’ve stopped having to be honest about a person.
I decided to retire the concept of generations at work into the ocean. Who cares when someone was born? What leaders need to rethink is that each and every one of us goes through three career eras, no matter when we were born: Rivers, Rocks, and Rubies.
Rivers are early-career professionals, fluid, fast, curious, and still making their way. They make mistakes, but that’s a good thing.
Rocks are mid-career workers, settled, load-bearing, and often the bassist between the drummer and the lead singer. They are also frequently squeezed by the reality of caring for aging parents and raising kids at the same time. They’re stoic, solid, and know their way around.
Rubies are late-career employees, the ones you call when the building’s on fire and no one remembers where the extinguishers are kept. They can see around corners, know what has worked (and what didn’t) in the past.
None of us should care what year we were born at work. What we need to recognize is that those three work eras can demystify age by virtue of promoting a more positive way of looking at our careers and working opportunities.
In your book and keynotes, you introduce tools like the Career Canvas, the Wisdom Wheel, and the Longevity Lens—how can these ideas help leaders redesign careers, capture institutional knowledge, and rethink retirement in a world where people are living and working longer?
The Career Canvas retires the career ladder, a relic of corporate HR. There’s never been a global stat showing “everyone gets five promotions in a career,” and yet organizations keep behaving as if Moses brought it down off the mountain. Rivers won’t queue for it, and Rocks have outgrown it. Never mind the Rubies, who want to paint sideways anyway.
A Career Canvas permits careers to move laterally, diagonally, and yes, sometimes downward by choice. It also offers internal talent marketplaces, apprenticeships, rotations, returnships, and project-based gig work that resembles actual human lives.
The Wisdom Wheel is how you stop the experience from walking out the door. It’s a mechanism that turns tacit knowledge of employees into something other team members can actually use.
The Longevity Lens is the third model from the book, the workplace conditions that let every age thrive, including the rethinking of your corporate culture, leadership philosophy, financial clarity, well-being, and workplace ergonomic redesign.
You’ve experienced workplace ageism yourself at both 25 and 50, from being told you were “too young” to lead to later feeling written off as “too old” for certain roles—what did those experiences teach you about the subtle ways age bias shows up, even in organizations that see themselves as progressive?
Ageism is the last “ism” still considered acceptable in polite professional company. Ageism, by example, is terminating Lisa LaFlamme from her role as chief news correspondent at CTV for letting her hair go grey.
I know how it cuts at both ends because it’s happened to me when I was in my mid-20s and early 50s. Once, I was told I was too young, and another time, I was told I was too old. I can assure you that both situations of ageism against me still sting.
Now think about a Rock team member, a sandwich-generation worker putting in 28 hours of childcare and 22 hours of eldercare a week, on top of the actual day job, who is quietly passed over for the stretch role because somebody has decided they’ve “peaked” and can’t handle the extra pressure or responsibilities. Peaked? Peaked. Ageism doesn’t pick a lane. It can come for the youngest professional, the middle-aged, and the oldest professional in the same building on the same Tuesday afternoon, which is precisely why it can come for absolutely anyone. Including you.
For Canadian leaders and SMB owners who are worried about skills gaps, succession, and engagement across age groups, what are one or two concrete steps they can take this year to start turning their “age debt” into an “experience dividend” and build truly age-diverse, future-ready teams?
Here’s the good news for small and medium-sized business owners. You don’t need a McKinsey deck to battle and dismantle Age Debt. You’ve got a coffee maker and a few dozen humans who actually know each other’s names. That turns out to be a serious advantage when the Age Debt bill arrives. And arrive it will.
Three moves I’d make if I were running a small to medium-sized business:
One: hire on contribution, not generation. Stop reaching for “we need young energy” or “we need a steady hand.” Both are lazy. Ask instead: is this a River, Rock or Ruby opportunity, and what is my current talent composition? Multigenerational teams are proven to be more innovative and
Two: build your Wisdom Wheel before your best Ruby retires. You’ve probably got one or two people walking around carrying the institutional memory of the entire business in their heads. That tacit knowledge needs to be captured before the customer is negatively affected. Maybe it’s the supplier who always needs handholding or the regulation everyone forgets exists until your firm gets audited. Whatever the case, give them an afternoon and let them record short videos showing how things actually work. The technical term is “cognitive task analysis” and it just might save you buckets of money.
Three: design for longevity. Consider your long-term talent planning options, including flexible hours, phased retirements, and alumni returnships. What about smaller, micro-roles for caregivers? An SMB can put any of these in place almost overnight, whereas an enterprise needs a year and a steering committee with a colour-coded RACI chart. Use your nimbleness to create what may be the most underrated competitive advantage possible.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CanadianSME Small Business Magazine. Our platform is dedicated to fostering dialogue and sharing insights that inspire and empower small and medium-sized businesses across Canada.
