So I’m getting a promotion soon (yay!), moving up from just a line cook to sous-chef and I’ve only been with this company for a few months. Thing is that I’m still quite young (mid twenties) and will be the direct supervisor of some people a fair bit older than I am. Think 10-20 years older. It might just still be a bit of imposter syndrome, but the idea of having to tell people who have been in the business for far longer than I what to do and such really weirds me out.
I feel I wouldn’t like it if “some young brat” that just got hired almost immediately gets a promotion and becomes my supervisor eventhough I worked at the company for far longer. Though maybe not everyone feels like this.
Do other people who have experience with a situation like this have any advice on how to deal with this? It’s kinda been keeping me up at night…
The only job I’ve had where I might have been “managing” employees older than myself we never had any issues because of an age gap. In fact, I even trained a guy to operate the same machine I ran who was like 30 years older and we got along great.
The best advice I can give is simply: don’t make it a big deal and they probably won’t either. I showed them the same amount of respect I would to someone my own age and didn’t treat them like they should be “higher up” in the field because of their seniority.
In my situation the older guy I trained was a railroad worker for like 20 years before switching to the machining job; we both understood that I had a couple years ahead of him at this particular facility and he took the opportunity to ask questions learn a lot while we worked together.