Кризис преемственности: в Дании треть руководителей — люди старше 55 лет

On November 10, 1982, Soviet state television interrupted its programming to play Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Viewers had learned to recognize the cue: somewhere in the Kremlin, another old man had died. It was Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary for eighteen years, dead at 75. His successor lasted fifteen months before he too was gone. The man after him made it barely a year. Three state funerals, three general secretaries, in under three years. By 1981, the average age of the men running the Soviet Union was 69 – thirteen years older than Ronald Reagan’s own cabinet. It took that string of deaths, and the arrival of a 54-year-old outsider named Mikhail Gorbachev, before the pattern finally broke. It’s tempting to file that away as a curiosity of late-Soviet dysfunction. It’s less comfortable to notice that a quieter, more mundane version of the same pattern is now playing out in one of the world’s most functional economies: Denmark. In 2024, more than one in three Danish managers – approximately 35.8% – were aged 55 or above.1 A decade earlier, in 2014, that figure was 26.7%. That’s a 9.1 percentage-point rise in ten years, and with roughly 125,000 managers in Denmark, it works out to about 44,800 people approaching retirement in a single leadership generation. With Denmark’s retirement age at 67, most of these 44,800 managers will leave the workforce within the next decade – not gradually, but as a single, unusually large cohort retiring at roughly the same time. The natural question is whether this is just what happens to any aging population – a Nordic story, not a Danish one. So I turned to Eurostat’s harmonized labor force data, which lets managers across ten Northern European countries be compared using the same occupational classification, the same age band (55–64), and the same methodology. The results say otherwise: Denmark’s trend still holds even under this stricter, internationally comparable measure – the sharpest rise of the ten countries screened.2 Norway and Germany also rose, but by less. Sweden, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Finland all rose only modestly. And Iceland – a much smaller Nordic welfare state, but one facing the same demographic and economic pressures – went the other way entirely: its share of managers aged 55–64 fell, from 28.2% to 22.8%. It would be easy to explain this away with a simple story: Danes are just retiring later, so of course more managers are staying on past 55. And there’s something to that – Denmark’s early-retirement age has climbed from 60 to 64 since 2014, and the state pension age from 65 to 67, part of a reform that ties retirement age to life expectancy, automatically rising as Danes live longer. Iceland’s retirement age, by contrast, has stayed flat at 67 for years, with no such escalator built in – so if rising retirement ages were the whole story, Denmark and Iceland should never have been comparable to begin with. But when I looked closer, the story didn’t hold up as neatly. That same rise in effective retirement age has been roughly three times steeper for less-educated workers than for university-educated professionals – and managers overwhelmingly fall into the latter group.3 If anything, managers are the workers least affected by the reform, yet they’re the group whose numbers shifted the most. Something else is doing the real work here. While the full answer is subject to further inquiry, the best place to start looking is a handful of sectors.1 In the metal industry, the share of managers 55 and older rose from 28.6% to 48.2% in ten years – among the steepest increases anywhere in the Danish economy. Textiles, electrical equipment, and food and beverage manufacturing all rose nearly as sharply. Education is the one clear exception: its share of older managers actually fell over the same period, the only sector in the Danish data to get younger. Whatever is driving the leadership void, it is concentrated in specific corners of the economy. Denmark built its prosperity on being able to renew itself – a small country punching above its weight through the quality of its institutions and the people running them. If more than a third of its managers are now over 55, and its closest Nordic peer is trending the opposite way, that gap deserves more attention than it’s gotten so far. Perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at our Nordic neighbor, and ask what it is doing differently. Ebba Hansen is a Copenhagen-based Advisor at Voluntas, where she advises on leadership strategy and executive succession, and former Head of Office at Voluntas India in Mumbai. She is currently writing a book on the global leadership succession crisis. - Analysis based on data from Statistics Denmark, table KAS301, including the industry-level breakdown by age. - Analysis based on Eurostat’s EU Labour Force Survey (lfsa_egais), harmonised across countries by occupation, age band, and year. - Denmark’s retirement-age reforms stem from a 2011 law tied to the 2006 “velfærdsaftale,” which indexes retirement age to life expectancy. The finding on the uneven effect by education level is based on analysis by Arbejderbevægelsens Erhvervsråd (AE), a Danish economic think tank. The author: Ebba Hansen is a Copenhagen-based Advisor at Voluntas, where she advises on leadership strategy and executive succession, and previously spent three years as Head of Office at Voluntas India in Mumbai. She holds an MPhil from the University of Oxford and an MA from the University of Aberdeen. This piece draws on research for a book she is currently writing on the global leadership succession crisis.