Managing staff who are more seasoned than you

Churchill Fellow 2025. Insights on leading people who've been doing the work longer than you have.

Nobody warns you about this one either. You get the promotion, and on your team is someone who has ten, fifteen, twenty years more experience than you do. They were doing this work before you finished your degree. And now you're the one signing off on their leave requests.

Across the sixty-five plus interviews for my Churchill Fellowship, this came up as its own distinct anxiety, separate from the general nerves of first-time leadership. It's not just "can I lead," it's "what right do I have to lead someone who knows more than I do."

What people told me actually happens

One Principal Social Worker at a UK local authority described this anxiety directly, supervising colleagues who were older, more experienced, or simply more senior in practice than the org chart suggested they should be. She hadn't seen leadership as something for her, having thought of herself at the time as not especially assertive. What pushed her to apply anyway wasn't confidence, it was frustration with watching poor leadership from below, and a belief she could do better.

A related but sharper version of this shows up when the seasoned colleague isn't just more experienced, they're someone who applied for your job and didn't get it. One leader in Canada described stepping into a role a colleague had applied for three or four times before her, with no context on that history going in, and gradually understanding where the friction and quiet resentment in the team was coming from once she did.

She's since managed this more than once, and described her approach with colleagues who'd been passed over as one of gentleness: understanding the frustration is real and legitimate, without letting it change what's expected of them going forward.

Alyssa Berge, Deputy Division Director of Child Welfare and Adult Protective Services at Denver Human Services, described a variation again: the particular weight of coming in as an outside hire, stepping into a team that may well have included people who'd hoped for the role themselves. It shaped how deliberately she approached building trust in her first year, rather than assuming the working relationships would simply fall into place.

There's a reverse version of this worth naming too: seasoned staff themselves getting overlooked in favour of someone newer. One leader in a Northern Ireland health and social care trust described applying for a role after ten-plus years on her team, only to be told a recently arrived male colleague had already been promised it. She had to push hard and go unsupported to get the opportunity that eventually became her route into her first team leader role.

What helped, in their own practice

Get explicit about what you don't know. The Birmingham leader's turning point was learning to state plainly what she wasn't across yet, and inviting the team's expertise into the conversation rather than performing an authority she didn't have. She described the moment it clicked as a genuine turning point, once she stopped needing every answer and focused on building relationships, she felt she could manage anything.

Separate the skill gap from the relationship. Being newer to the role doesn't mean being newer to the work. Several leaders found it helped to be explicit about what kind of authority they were actually claiming, operational and developmental, not a claim to know the practice better than someone with twenty years in it.

Understand the resentment without excusing poor performance. The Toronto leader's approach with colleagues who'd been passed over: acknowledge the frustration is legitimate, without letting it change what's expected of them going forward. Empathy and accountability held at the same time, not traded off against each other.

Build relationships deliberately, not automatically. Seniority differences don't resolve themselves through time served in the role. The leaders who navigated this well treated relationship-building as an active practice, site visits, one-on-one time, asking questions, not something that would just happen because they were technically in charge.

Notice who's being quietly passed over. Tenure doesn't guarantee visibility, and sometimes it's the newest person in the room who gets the opportunity by default, simply for being the one who asked or the one already front of mind. Worth actively checking who on a seasoned team has been waiting, and for how long, rather than assuming the loudest or most recent request is the fairest one to act on.

What the research adds

This turns out to be a well-studied problem in organisational behaviour, just rarely framed in social work terms. A few findings worth knowing:

The size of the experience gap isn't actually the main driver of friction, suppressed emotion is. A large study of supervisors and subordinates with inverse age gaps (Kunze & Menges, 2017, Journal of Organizational Behavior) found that negative feeling among more experienced staff only translated into worse team outcomes when those staff suppressed how they felt rather than expressing it. Teams where people could actually say something were fine even with a large gap. The practical implication: don't just try to close the gap or prove yourself, build real channels for people to say when something isn't sitting right with them.

Less experienced supervisors show a measurable bias against more experienced staff in how they rate their performance, independent of the actual quality of the work (Perry, Kulik & Zhou, 1999, Journal of Organizational Behavior). Worth treating as a genuine blind spot to check for, not just a hypothetical one, particularly around performance reviews and decisions about who gets developmental opportunities.

Being explicit that your role is different, not superior, matters more than proving competence. Management literature on this dynamic consistently recommends stating plainly that your job is to coordinate and support, not to out-know the people doing the work, and then actually asking for their input on decisions rather than assuming it'll be offered unprompted. The same literature also flags that less experienced supervisors tend to under-manage more experienced staff out of misplaced deference, skipping the ordinary feedback and goal-setting that everyone benefits from, which ends up shortchanging the very people whose experience is being respected.

The point isn't to earn the right to lead

You don't out-experience someone who's been doing this longer than you, and you don't need to. What you're building is a different kind of authority, one based on how you use the role, not on matching their years in practice.

If you've navigated this, I'd love to hear it: what actually helped you lead someone who'd been doing the work longer than you had?