Maybe a little of context first.
I'm getting close to 50 but have always looked older than my age. I started losing my hair at 15 and started shaving my head at 25. 6' Male 215lbs. I live in a cold climate and wear flannel a lot. Married 27 years 2 kids empty nesters soon.
I own my own business. I have been in management for over 25 years. I make more $ than the average 30 something and you could say I have a dominant personality. I also love to cut up, laugh, have a good time at work and enjoy myself regardless of the situation.
I don't want to bash the younger generation because I can't change them. I want to know if I should adapt in any way to fit in better. I'm worried that my age is starting to affect how people see me.
My primary income comes from my business but I also contract for another company. A buddy of mine owns the company and they get easy contracts in cool places and from time to time I go work for him. It's kinda like a free vacation. Hawaii, Paris, Italy, Sweden, Japan, Iceland and many more including in the states. It's contract work I don't really want to lose.
The challenge is the people I go work with (for only a few days) are all 10-15+ younger. I don't "fit in" like I used to. I'm there in a leadership role and direct work with local crews. The unfortunate power dynamic is my role is to make sure they do the work as agreed in advance according to the documents. Not a lot of room for interpretation.
It is common practice for everyone to write reports about the experience. I give feedback on the local crews and they give feedback on me. I have never struggled to build rapport until more recently. Let's say post COVID.
I only do about 8 of these jobs a year and over the past 2 years I have gotten 4 bad reports (3 in the states 1 in Mexico). The owner doesn't want to let me go because we have more than 10 years under the bridge but he is concerned about the high number of negative reports. I'm starting to feel generationally targeted.
Our humor is different, our dress is different, our commitment to following directions is different. Hell, our ability to receive directions is different.
If I went through each scenario you could see that these are petty complaints but that would take too much time. Most recently I got called "Non- Collaborative" "Too Direct" "Cared more about the contract then working together" The main problem is they changed several things that were not documented so when I arrived I had to question tons of stuff before we even got started. Definitely got us off on the wrong foot because I called it into the owner and he said the changes were not agreed and then needed to change it back according to the documentation.
So then I got another negative write up.
Here's the questions: Is this all in my head? Is ageism real? Am I supposed to make efforts to act younger? Am I supposed to act less confident? Am I supposed to take everyone to the bar and buy them all beer so they like me?
The owner wants me to hold everyone accountable to the contract but also told me I clearly need to work on my people skills. He just turned 40 this year.