We Built Our Organizations on First Adulthood
And mistook one age of adulthood for adulthood itself.
A CEO, asked about his senior team, went through them one by one.
The commercial chief who delivers — but everything runs through him, and the team works around him, never with him.
The supply chain head, eleven years in the role, whose every successor is somehow not quite ready.
The merchandising veteran who meets each new idea with the reasons a version of it already failed. And the newer members, speaking only when certain.
"These are all good people," he told me. Then: "I keep wondering what I'm doing that makes holding back feel like the safe choice."
The CEO and his team are still playing the game of First Adulthood.
I have approached this pattern from several directions over the years:
- Senior teams that struggle to become enterprise teams after years of succeeding as functional leaders.
- Executives who find it difficult to let go of solving problems.
- Coaching that serves younger leaders far more than experienced ones.
- Employees told to take ownership while still kept on a short permission leash.
- And organizations that continue to relate to adults through a parent-child dynamic.
I had treated these as separate questions. Increasingly, I see them as expressions of the same underlying assumption: we built our institutions around one age of adulthood and mistook it for adulthood itself.
Most of us grew up on the same shelf of leadership books, and most of those books taught success as a structure — stages, levels, pyramids, with a summit that was hard to reach, seemingly by design. Call it the gamification of adulthood: work hard enough, climb cleanly enough, and you arrive somewhere with a name — Level 5, self-transforming mind, executive presence.
Put a room full of high performers who grew up on that structure together, still running those same gaming instincts, and something predictable happens. They don't relax into being one team. They get more protective of their own function, because protecting your function is exactly what the game rewarded on the way up. It's the same instinct that built a career, aimed at the wrong target now that the career has arrived somewhere new.
Here’s the thing — a remarkable number of the books that shaped how we think about leadership were written by people who were, themselves, still climbing when they wrote them. Michael Porter was 33 when he published Competitive Strategy. Robert Kegan was 37 when he introduced his model of adult development in The Evolving Self. Patrick Lencioni was 37 for The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Tom Peters was 39 for In Search of Excellence. Jim Collins was 43 for Good to Great, Peter Senge 43 for The Fifth Discipline, Peter Drucker 44 for The Practice of Management.
These works emerged from First Adulthood, 25 to 45 — an age when much of life rewards proving yourself, building capability, becoming the person with answers, and being clear, directive and resolute.
But ask a leader in Second Adulthood, 45 to 65, about Level 5's humility-plus-iron-will, or Kegan's self-transforming mind. By then, it often feels less like a summit and more like what happens when you’ve lived long enough, absorbed enough loss, enough responsibility, enough repetition to stop needing to win every exchange. The frameworks describe it as an achievement. For a lot of people who've lived beyond First Adulthood, it reads more like a description of Tuesday.
We have written an entire leadership canon for First Adulthood readers, and mistaken it for leadership full stop.
Imagine opening a book called The Art of Executive Presence, hoping for something that finally speaks to where you actually are — and finding, instead, instructions for clearing up acne and managing an awkward voice change. That's roughly the experience of a 58-year-old CxO reaching for what the industry has published about people at that stage of life. Your C-suite leaders have outgrown the frameworks on their bookshelves. Most of them sense it. Few say it out loud.
I have come to think of adulthood as four ages: First Adulthood, 25–45, when much of life is organized around building the self; Second, 45–65, when the question increasingly becomes what we can contribute beyond our own performance; Third, 65–85, when role and identity begin separating more decisively; and Fourth, 85 onward, when creation itself can take unfamiliar forms.
Being in the early years of Third Adulthood, I find myself meditating on a question I'm leaving deliberately open: what is it that we create in our 60s and 70s? I expect Third and Fourth Adulthood hold forms of contribution we have barely begun to articulate. I am enjoying living without an answer. At least for now.
Age determines which adulthood you are in. It does not determine how you will experience it or how you will respond. The vast majority of our organizations are built for First Adulthood.
Look at coaching, my own industry. Sixty percent of coaching clients are under 45, according to the International Coaching Federation, and ninety percent are under 55. Coaching drops off a cliff after that. And yet, a Stanford Business School survey of 200 CEOs and senior executives found that nearly two-thirds weren't being coached, and nearly all of them said they'd welcome it if offered.
The topics that do get coached give it away. A 2022 ICF study found that coaching most often focuses on improving communication skills (37%), work/life balance (35%), and self-esteem/self-confidence (35%). Notice their centre of gravity: improving the individual’s effectiveness, confidence, and experience of work. First Adulthood concerns.
Even work/life balance, which sounds age-neutral, carries an assumption that the problem can be solved through better techniques for managing competing demands. It reflects the same climbing logic that runs through much of the leadership canon. In my own coaching, the phrase appeared frequently when I worked with people under 45. When I focused exclusively on executives over 45, it essentially disappeared.
Different questions dominate Second Adulthood. What is my value if I am no longer the one with the answers? What do I need to stop carrying? How do I build something that no longer depends on me? What becomes possible when there is less left to prove?
We have built an entire coaching industry for First Adulthood clients, and mistaken it for coaching full stop.
And the assumption goes much deeper than leadership development. It is built into the architecture of the corporation itself.
Look at the formal documents through which major corporations describe how people are expected to exercise responsibility. Governance documents describe the roles of board members and senior executives. Codes of conduct describe the rules employees are expected to follow.
One says, here is the authority entrusted to you, here are the responsibilities you carry, here is how you exercise judgment. The other says, here are the behaviours required of you, here are the boundaries you must not cross.
One assumes an adult capable of exercising judgment. The other assumes a person whose behaviour needs boundaries, with authority provided on a tether.
And then we complain about lack of ownership.
Boards are predominantly composed of people in Second and Third Adulthood, while the employee population spans all ages — yet our organizational documents implicitly treat employees as if they are all in First Adulthood.
Where is the corporate governance handbook for employees, written in the same adult-to-adult style as the one for board members?
We have built entire organizations for First Adulthood employees, and mistaken them for organizations full stop.
Consider the CEO’s dilemma:
"These are all good people. I keep wondering what I'm doing that makes holding back feel like the safe choice."
He inherited an organization built for First Adulthood. What he leaves behind does not have to be.