At What Age Do Leadership Abilities Peak? A New Study Offers a Surprising Answer
Take a guess—and then check out the scientific answer and see how off you were
By Jessica Stillman
If you’re a fashion model or a professional athlete, you’ll probably reach your professional peak before age 30. Research confirms genius wunderkinds in fields like math tend to reach the pinnacle of their careers early too. But how about leaders? At what age do leadership abilities peak?
It’s a question that doesn’t lend itself to a clear answer. Sprint speeds are simple to measure, and we all have first-hand evidence of the toll time takes on our bodies. But leadership excellence requires a complex bundle of skills, including raw intellectual horsepower, emotional intelligence, wisdom, and accumulated experience.
Measuring all those traits, figuring out at what age they usually peak, and bundling that information together meaningfully is a complex task. But it’s one a team of researchers recently tackled. The end result is an estimate of when leaders are generally at their best. The results might surprise you.
The skills that make a great leader
What does it take to be a great leader? According to University of Western Australia psychologist Gilles Gignac, the answer is a combination of no less than 16 different traits and skills. For their recent research, Gignac and his collaborators sifted through previous studies to determine the key abilities for leadership success and compiled a list, which includes:
Processing speed
Executive functioning
Emotional intelligence
Emotional stability
Moral reasoning
Resistance to cognitive biases
They then looked at previous studies that measured these traits at different ages to see when people’s performance peaked. The accumulated evidence showed that some of these skills, like raw intellectual processing power, are strongest when we’re young. Others, like conscientiousness, just keep going up well into our seventh decade and beyond.
But when do we have the best bundle of mental abilities to give us the best shot at leadership success? Combining all these factors, the researchers were able to estimate the age at which people hit peak leadership ability on average. What did they find?
“Overall mental functioning peaked between ages 55 and 60, before beginning to decline from around 65,” reports Gignac in The Conversation. “Our findings may help explain why many of the most demanding leadership roles in business, politics, and public life are often held by people in their fifties and early sixties. So while several abilities decline with age, they’re balanced by growth in other important traits.”
Leadership abilities peak at 55-60?
In a culture that fetishizes youth (and allows some leaders to continue way past when they should), the fact that our overall mental and leadership ability peaks right before retirement age might come as a shock. But there is plenty of other research that suggests Gignac’s study isn’t some crazy outlier.
One of the clearest comes from the field of entrepreneurship. Top founders are often portrayed in the media and on magazine covers as hoodie-wearing 20-somethings. But an analysis of exits of investor backed companies show the average age of a successful startup founder is actually 47. That’s a lot closer to Gignac’s peak than it is to the current cultural stereotype.
A recent Stanford study tracked the performance of individuals on various cognitive tests over decades and found that overall intelligence tends to peak in your 40s. If you continue to stay intellectually active, your intellectual skills don’t decline until retirement age. Other research has found self-esteem, empathy, and conflict resolution skills all keep improving deep into middle age.
Time to check your biases
All of this should comfort you if you’re worrying that you’re intellectually over the hill. Yes, we gain wrinkles, aches, and memory lapses as we add more candles to our birthday cakes. But science is pretty clear that, on average, we gain more than we lose intellectually.
But if the results are a comfort to middle-aged professionals hoping to stay on top of their game, they are also a caution to employers. Gignac stresses that his findings should nudge companies to take a hard look at any age-related biases in their organization.
If you’re running an NFL team, ageism might make sense. But in most instances, the idea that people lose a step as they get older is probably costing you talent. As Gignac concludes, “Perhaps it’s time we stopped treating midlife as a countdown and started recognizing it as a peak.”