'I felt like the boy in short trousers': What’s it like to manage people who are decades younger than you?

“I was in the box in the House of Commons when I got this message on LinkedIn from a recruiter for HMRC for a deputy director role,” Nic Crowe recalls. It was early 2021 and he was working in the private office for DWP in a grade 7 post, handling ministerial briefings and parliamentary strategy. He responded to the recruiter saying he didn’t think he was right for the job: “I’m only 27 and I wouldn’t want to waste your time,” he said, thinking that would be the end of it.

But the recruiter replied, explaining they needed help with some “pretty intensive Brexit stuff”, which meant they needed to “up the headcount” quickly. The hiring director wanted to speak to him. 

And so, despite huge reservations, Crowe found himself in an SCS post for HMRC, managing a team tasked with establishing post-Brexit border controls. He had eight grade 6s reporting directly to him and 65 members of staff in total, located across the country. He was the youngest person in the team “by a long shot”. The next-youngest of his direct reports was three years older than him. The eldest was in their mid-fifties. “That’s double my age, right?”

Crowe battled with a “massive case of imposter syndrome due to the age gap,” he says. He thinks he did a good job of winning the respect of his team – helped by the fact that he looks older than his age, and perhaps also by his gender: “I think it was easier for me as a man than it would have been for a young woman in that situation,” he says. “The team was predominantly male, and possibly more inclined to accept a male boss.”

“Someone described me as a jumped-up little prick” Nic Crowe

But he describes being aware of resistance from the wider team, which he puts down both to his age and to his face not fitting in a culture that was “quite deferential”. He was trying to deliver a hugely challenging outcome against a hard deadline of January 2022 and that meant pushing people – most of whom had been in post for a long time prior to his arrival – to work very hard. Being deferential was not going to cut it and, inevitably, some people didn’t like that very much: “I was told that someone described me as a jumped-up little prick,” he says. 

Like many officials who have experienced being a “younger boss”, Crowe entered the civil service as a fast streamer. He was ambitious for promotion and had expected a career path that would take him to SCS level, although he didn’t anticipate it happening as fast as it did. 

“With the benefit of hindsight now, if I’d have been kind to myself, I shouldn’t have taken the job,” he says. “But for whatever reason, I was coded to try and give it a crack.”

As large organisations go, the civil service is not unique in the practice of dropping young leaders into environments where they need to learn fast and where they are managing people much more experienced and, often, much older than them. But it is something that many civil servants recount as a formative, and sometimes uncomfortable, period of their early career.

What are the challenges and the benefits of being plunged into this situation? And what advice would those who have gone through it give to others?

“I’ve always been one of the youngest in the room,” says Darren Jaundrill, who took on his first SCS post at the age of 35, when he became programme director for the census at the Office for National Statistics. He moved departments several times after that and says he never felt out of his depth, partly because of the senior roles he held before he joined, both for Network Rail and for the police.

Did Jaundrill ever pick up on any resistance to him as a young leader? “I certainly felt it in the peer group,” he says, referring to his SCS colleagues, rather than his team. “There was an undertone, I think, in a lot of conversations. At times, I would feel like the boy in short trousers.”

He recalls comments that were made apparently in jest, referring to television or music from before he was born. “The senior person present looked at me and went, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t know any of this, you’re too young.’ It was little things like that but it would happen a lot. And then you think, well, to do it once could be seen as jovial. But to keep on doing it very vocally, making a point of it, you start to go, hang on.” 

It was the subtlety of the comments that was hard for Jaundrill to deal with: “You have to reset yourself quickly, otherwise you’re not effective in that meeting and it can become undermining.” This was particularly prevalent in his last civil service role at Defra, he says. “I couldn’t really do anything about it. I mean, I can’t change my age. And so if anything, it just made me more determined to keep on delivering.”

Looking back, he wishes he’d challenged it overtly, rather than dealing with it privately and being brushed off: “People would say, ‘Oh no, I didn’t mean anything by it.’ So I thought maybe it was me, I was being silly.” But it kept happening, he says.

His advice to other people in this position is to ask: “Is it banter in their mind? In which case, just let them know: The first time is funny. It’s not so funny anymore. It’s becoming quite pointed. Please stop.” And if it doesn’t stop, “you put a grievance into your relevant line manager and you start there. Because otherwise, it eats away at you. You start to doubt yourself and it will affect you and your team if you let that happen.”

Hannah Keenan at the Institute for Government argues that officials need training and support to deal with these kinds of situations. She cites a July 2025 IfG report into the Fast Stream which recommends that profession heads should match every fast streamer with a mentor at deputy director level for their entire time on the programme. 

“I would question the extent to which the civil service is assessing how effective these types of postings are and what sort of support people are getting,” Keenan says. “You shouldn’t really be leaving it to chance as to whether or not they have the emotional maturity to deal with the situation.”

Keenan’s IfG colleague Alex Thomas recalls a “pet travel role” at Defra in his early 20s, where a rescue dog had been sent out to help with an emergency in Indonesia and was then put into quarantine on return to the UK, as per the rules. “The rescue person thought this was outrageous, got the local MP involved, and got a campaign going: Free Darcy.” 

The campaign to free the rescue dog from quarantine gathered ground, with thousands of people pledging their support. The late Colchester MP Bob Russell “took off his shirt in the House of Commons to show the Free Darcy logo on the shirt underneath”, Thomas says.  

“Meet the more experienced civil servants where they are and properly respect them” Alex Thomas, IfG

At the behest of his minister, Thomas went to see the – much more experienced – frontline officials in charge of the quarantine policy and said: “The secretary of state wants to find a solution so we can let this dog out.” He remembers a polite response with a subtext of: “Who the hell are you to say this? We are running a carefully thought-through disease control network, we’re doing our jobs, get lost.”

It was embarrassing, Thomas says, and a strange dynamic: “Effectively, you are instructing somebody to do something but the authority is transmitted through you from the minister and you don’t own it yourself.” 

He likes to think he handled it as well as he could in the circumstances. His message to younger civil servants in similar situations is to show respect: “Meet the more experienced civil servants where they are and properly respect them.”  

Early career civil servants have a lot to give, he adds, such as “energy, dynamism, possibly new ideas… But if you elevate that above genuinely recognising the value of the experience of the people who you are managing, then you’ll come a cropper, you’ll hack everybody off and it will be a disaster”.

Maria Tennyson* is a veteran DWP official with a frontline background who has experience of being line-managed by much younger bosses, but who has also mentored a large number of fast streamers over the years. She describes working with younger people who sometimes feel they have been “thrown to the lions” in an environment where they’re having to prove themselves.  

She takes a nurturing and supportive approach towards younger bosses, she tells CSW, asking how she can help them understand their new surroundings and get the most out of their experience. But, she adds, this “parental” attitude is not necessarily espoused by all her colleagues.

“You may have people who have been there for 20, 30, 40 years that are quite steadfast in what they do and they’re not looking to move on. But when a younger official arrives from the centre and is put into a senior position, they’re the ones that may have an issue. ‘Oh, here we go again, how did they get that job?’ – that type of thing. Sometimes people will hide their own insecurity by targeting someone who’s obviously younger; the view is they’re only in there because they have certain advantages,” she says.

Is there a class tension in the mix here? Tennyson thinks it’s probably a factor in graduate schemes everywhere. “There’s always this issue about people’s social status, educational status, where they’re coming in from, what their background is, you know. But I think in the civil service it can be more pronounced.”

The approach she advises younger colleagues to take is “to reach out and be humble and say: ‘Look, I’m new here. I’m the new kid on the block. I’m aware of my age and inexperience, so I really want to learn from you’.”

She takes a more hard-nosed approach to the grumbling old-timers when she notices them pushing back against a wet-behind-the-ears boss. “I call their bluff straight away. I go in and say to them, ‘Ah so this must mean that you really want to get promoted yourself? Do you want to take on extra bits of work so you can get on? Is that where you need help?’ And often the response is: ‘Oh no, I’m quite happy doing what I’m doing.’”

“The biggest challenge was that I was totally inexperienced and quite crap at it" Abigail Baxter

Despite the challenges, being a younger boss can be a positive experience. Abigail Baxter* is now a deputy director for a central department and she fondly recalls her time being “thrown in the deep end” as a “very green” fast streamer in charge of a job centre.

“I loved it,” she says. “It was so stressful. But I learned so much and I found it so satisfying, and it was the role that made me realise that I really like doing delivery stuff rather than just thinking in a box.”

She regularly fell asleep on the train home because she was so exhausted at the end of the day. “The biggest challenge was that I was totally inexperienced and quite crap at it. And I knew that. I think the day I gathered the most respect from the team was when the loos flooded and I turned out to be less useless with a mop and a stopcock than people had anticipated,” she recalls with a laugh.

Baxter was an HEO at the time and describes regular meetings convened by her SEO line manager where she and the other HEOs, each of whom had a team of direct reports, would share their ideas and experiences: “Those sessions were possibly the best training I have ever done,” she says. 

And Crowe – despite the harsh criticism he received – says the positives of the SCS job at HMRC far outweighed the negatives: “I made friends for life and I learned so, so much. And it’s without a doubt the thing that I am proudest of in my career.”

His advice to younger leaders is to make every effort to show you are not “aloof” or full of yourself, and to muck in: “If we needed to get something done, I was there on the coal face with them,” he says. “I just kind of thought, if I was in this position, how would I want to be treated, really?” 

*Some names have been changed