Neuroscience Tips To Thrive In Later-Career Work with Dr. David Rock

Your brain doesn’t “age out” of growth. With Dr. David Rock of the Neuroleadership Institute, Pauline James unpacks the science showing why learning capacity stays strong well into our later years and how motivation, novelty, and meaningful challenge keep cognition sharp. We share the practical moves that help senior talent thrive: mentoring that activates reward networks, reverse mentoring that speeds up tech fluency, and role design that pairs purpose with autonomy so wisdom spreads across the organization.

We also tackle the AI inflection point. David lays out why knowledge capture through expert models can enhance onboarding and decision quality, yet still needs human judgment to assess context and risk. Think of AI like early cars: powerful, fast, and dangerous without rules. Used well, AI becomes a thinking partner that stretches ideas and sparks insights; used poorly, it flattens memory and voice. We dig into three habits—humility, flexibility, vigilance—that keep you creative and accurate while scaling your impact.

If you’re considering a pivot or planning for retirement, the SCARF model (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness) offers a map to reduce threat and add buffers long before a big change. Build multiple social networks, choose ways to give back that keep you in novel situations, and design mentoring or teaching roles that feel consequential. Leaders can help by creating formal coaching systems, giving rich context for projects, and encouraging people to cultivate status and relationships a year or more ahead of transitions.

We close with resources to go deeper—Your Brain at Work, askNiles.ai, and NLI programs—and a reminder that later-career work can be the most fulfilling chapter yet. Subscribe, share with a colleague who needs a nudge, and leave a review with one insight you’re taking into your next chapter.

Transcript

Framing The Next Chapter

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the HR Tech Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HMR prose, talent exhibits, tech enthusiasts, and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit HRGazette.com.

Meet Dr. David Rock

The Truth About Lifelong Learning

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Hello, I'm Pauline James, CEO of Anchor HR and associate editor of the HR Gazette. I'm excited to be here today with another episode of the next chapter. For too long, careers have been described as if they peak and then wind down, but life doesn't follow a script, and neither should our work. In this series, we explore the choices and inspirations that emerge throughout our careers and lives. Whether it's continuing to build our careers, reinventing, giving back, or choosing new priorities. This is about defining success on our own terms. It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. David Rock, the co-founder and CEO of the Neuroleadership Institute, a global research organization that has spent more than two decades helping leaders apply brain science to create better workplaces. Dr. Rock coined the term neuroleadership and has advised many of the world's leading organizations on how people learn, adapt, and thrive through change. He's the best-selling author of Your Brain at Work and other influential books. His insights on leadership behavior and performance have been featured in major outlets, including the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Rock's work is especially relevant to the next chapter series, where we're exploring how people continue to grow, contribute, and redefine their careers in later years. His research helps us understand what the brain needs to keep learning, stay adaptable, and navigate meaningful transitions, which are the themes at the heart of our conversation today. Dr. Rock, it's such a pleasure to have you with us. I'm such a fan of your work. Can you share with us what the science tells us about our capacity for learning and growth as we move through our 50s, 60s, and beyond?

SPEAKER_02 2:25

Yeah, there's a lot of misunderstandings about learning and growth, particularly in those years. The brain is very, very plastic and can learn new things right through to our, you know, 80s, 90s, probably beyond. There are many stories of people learning new languages in their 80s and 90s. And I know of several peers or academics in their 80s who are just starting to write new books. The capacity to learn things doesn't reduce. Certainly, our memory slows down, the amount we can recall, ease of recall, those things slow down. But learning doesn't meaningfully slow down. What does slow down a little bit is our desire to learn, although that's not destiny, that's possibly what can happen. There are people who maintain a motivation to learn right through their years. For a lot of people, they just sort of feel less motivated to try new things. They settle more into sort of smaller worlds, smaller life, fewer thoughts outside their normal realm. That could definitely happen. It's really important to note that there's a very strong correlation between continual learning and length of life, as well as quality of life. So, in some ways, the real, the important answer here is it's very, very healthy to keep learning a lot. And that learning should be quite difficult things, quite new things. So if you already play a lot of instruments, now try crosswords. If you've mastered crosswords, now try tennis. I was playing tennis the other day with someone, and I said, Excuse me, I apologize for being rude, but how old are you? Because you're completely trashing me at tennis. And I felt like a spring chicken. She said, Oh, I'm 79. I said, How long have you been playing? She said, Oh, you know, a good 60 years. And okay, I feel better about being trashed. But still, she was incredibly spry. And I said, How do you do that? And she said, I just keep moving. I just keep moving. I'm not going to stop moving. And mentally, it's a very similar thing. You want to keep moving. There's hints that it involves dopamine and kind of the creation of new circuits, and the creation of new circuits enriches all the circuits and helps with all sorts of functionalities. So the cliff note is we don't lose the capacity to learn. Some of us lose the motivation to learn. That's when we get less healthy and less mentally well. And it's fantastic to keep learning right the way through because of the cognitive benefits of that.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

Thank you. From a brain science standpoint, what's the cost of underinvesting employees during their later career stages, both for the individuals and for the organizations?

The Cost Of Underinvesting In Late Careers

Mentoring Loops And Reward Networks

SPEAKER_02 4:49

I think there's a real cost to getting this wrong in an organization. So people in the later stages of their careers obviously know a lot, have a huge amount of wisdom. I think I saw it recently, the peak age for wisdom and quality thinking is in the early 60s. And these people have a desire also to give back. And there's this huge opportunity to have people in the later stages of their careers mentoring people in the younger stages of their careers. And it ends up being some reverse mentoring because the early career people often teach a lot of things to the later career people, right? About technology and what's happening in the world and how customers really interact with their products and all those. So it's really a very, very helpful dynamic. The later career people receive a lot of cognitive benefits from feeling like they're giving back. It activates deep reward networks when you feel helpful to other people, separately when you actually just connect with other people. And it's very, very beneficial to have those reward networks activating to dampen the threat networks that are going on every day. So beneficial to the later career people, it's also helping them remap and reactivate all the learning they've had, which is going to have cognitive benefits. And it's very helpful to the early career people in accelerating their wisdom and their learning. So I think it's really a miss when this is lost. And I'll tell you a quick story we were working with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Lab in Palo Alto, California, a few years ago. I was out there teaching the laser physicists and the optics physicists and all these people all about the brain and leadership, these incredibly smart people. And it was fascinating. There's this beautiful campus. They said their biggest HR problem was that the late stage people basically wouldn't retire. Like they would retire, they had a mandatory retirement age. I couldn't remember what it was, maybe 75, 80 or something. And they would just not stop coming back. And the problem was these were literally Nobel Prize-winning physicists who solved some of the world's most complex problems. And it was very hard to say to them, I'm sorry, you need to stay at home now. What they were doing was taking long walks around this beautiful campus with these younger career physicists. And what was happening is they were falling down the stairs. And they were having this big HR problem of accidents of these 80 and 90-year-old scientists who just wouldn't stay at home. And so they fixed the stairs and they fixed the problem. But these people were driven to be helpful. And also it was just much more interesting and useful to be useful than to be sitting at home watching television, right? They didn't want to stop doing that. And that would have protective cognitive benefits and be super beneficial to the younger generation as well. The Slack, it's called Stanford Linear Accelerator Lab, Slack got it right in that they solved this problem by putting railings out and other things so that people could continue walking because it was just helpful to everyone, and the alternative was just horrible. If we look at that through the lens of Scarf as well, which is the five things that drive the brain, like you retire, your status drops, your certainty drops, your autonomy drops, your relatedness drops, and it feels unfair. You're getting a threat in all five. If you love your work and it builds status and you feel in control at your work and you're connected with peers beautifully, just dropping out of that doesn't feel pleasurable. It's very painful. And so we don't necessarily just want to send people out to pasture, especially if they're passionate about the careers they're giving and they could be giving back to others. Lots of research showing people pass away when they retire because they kind of lose the life force that was keeping them going.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Thank you. And I appreciate the call-out around how much wisdom there is to be shared. If someone leaves the workplace, it's difficult to replicate the decades of knowledge and expertise that they've garnered over their career.

SPEAKER_02 8:29

Unfortunately, it may not be true at some point soon. And it's starting because we've uploaded everything that we've published into an AI, and you can have a conversation with it and get probably smarter answers than you'd get from me about everything to do with leadership and the brain. So as we onboard people into our organization, we're going to have them have hours-long conversations about our research to get up to speed. They wouldn't get that time with me personally. And I think that's a trend coming in companies. You'll have these avatars of senior people that you can learn from. And that's a double-edged sword in some ways. We'll be able to do knowledge protection, knowledge sharing better, but we also don't want to have these late-stage people feel like they've got nothing to do.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

I do wonder about replicating the judgment that goes into assessing the quality of the output, where it applies, that the human in the loop, and how quickly there'll be advances in that regard.

A Stanford Story And SCARF Threats

SPEAKER_02 9:21

Yeah, it's a whole complex question. We're just beginning to play with AI really as a society. It reminds me of when cars first came into the world. There were horses go at six miles an hour. Suddenly there were cars go at 30 miles an hour. At the start, there were like no road rules, right? Drive wherever, no side of the road, no speed limits, just do whatever. And there were accidents everywhere. And eventually people were like, well, we actually need some rules and we need to put some structure in this. I feel like we're there with AI. It's the Wild West, just do whatever. We don't really care if we're going to lose a generation of employees or make another swathe of people less intelligent. We're just going to use it because it goes faster in theory. It can go faster, but you can also crash and burn faster. And I think we're at that time where we need to start thinking about the road rules and speed limits of using AI in our organizations. And it's coming.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

You've talked about people's levels of motivation. And I'd welcome your perspective on the shifts that you see in motivation, in engagement, and what can support continued momentum at work, continued learning at work.

AI As Knowledge Keeper And Risk

SPEAKER_02 10:24

What I would say is that people have really widely varying degrees of motivation later in their career. You'll have those people who are just really passionate about continuing to give back, and you'll have those people who are very much coasting, and you'll have probably every point in between. In order to maintain motivation, you want to give people meaningful work that contributes. And seeing the context of your work is super important, seeing like why you're doing the work. So the worst thing you could do is give a late-stage career person just like a meaningless, repetitive task that could be done by something else, doesn't connect to anything else, has no meaning and purpose. The best thing you could do is give them a task with a lot of clear context and a lot of clear why, a lot of clear purpose, and then let them use their best skills and their best wisdom to build that. So coaching other people internally is a fantastic practice. Mentoring people internally, which is a little bit different, educating widely, being a subject matter expert, doing training and supporting and being on call. These are sort of three of the most obvious and powerful things. In fact, at Slack at the time, we were putting in place an internal coaching system so that I think about 20 of their top, top leaders were formally coaching, I think 50 people a year between them down in the organization. So, you know, formal coaching structures. And this gave them a really fantastic practice ground to build their skills. And they found that super, super rewarding. But there are many possible directions, but I think educating the rest of the population is going to be the most motivating just because using your skills plus giving back to very solid motivators in the brain, kind of making sense of what you've done is very intrinsically motivating. And the pro-social benefits come back to you of giving to others. Those are very strong motivators. Aside from that, it would be motivation will come from being connected with other people, being part of the community, having rich conversations. But everyone's so different. For some people, like the introverts, that would be a punishment. So it's kind of letting people design a motivation strategy that works for their motivation profile because some people's party is another person's hell, some person's focus time is another person's hell. Very, very different. We all have different motivations. I think it's important to remember that.

SPEAKER_01 12:33

That underlines the importance of continuing to have ongoing career discussions with employees throughout their career and not presuming what works for them, not presuming even what stage of career they're at. With that, be interested in your thoughts on generational assumptions and how those can sometimes get in the way of supporting employees to grow and contribute fully.

Designing Work That Fuels Motivation

SPEAKER_02 12:56

Yeah, the brain loves to make snap judgments, assumptions, generalizations, approximations. We do that. Without that, we wouldn't make it past breakfast. There's just so many little decisions that we'd have to make that would exhaust us. We sort of go on the on unconscious most of the time. In fact, who was at Dan Gilbert at Harvard found we're unconscious while we're doing tasks just under 50% of the time. Like we're on automatic pilot. There are a lot of assumptions about generation. Some of them are based on some real common issues that are not everyone, but we ascribe them to everyone. The young people being lazy is true sometimes. They're wanting to live more than they want to work, but definitely not true all the time. Older people, people later into their career being not interested in learning new things, again, not true. But there's some aspects of generations, generational differences that are generally, on average, true, which is that people are more willing to learn new things earlier in their career, generally less willing to learn new things later in their career. People are more willing to take on drastic changes in their role early in their career. They're more willing to take on risk early in their career than later in their career. And those things are logical. Those things are true. And every generation complains about the younger generation and the young generation complains about the old generation. That's been going on since the beginning of time. A couple of slight differences at this point. One of them is the generation growing up with devices from when they're born with a mobile device. And this is a remote control for your life. A phone is a remote control, like that movie click. You need food, you need a bedroom, you need a friend, you need a movie, you need like everything you need is right there. And if it's not, it's about to be. So what this does is it gives people this really strong sense of control over everything. Anything I need, I place it right. So you're working in a company and you don't let people use their phone, right, for all these things. They're like, they're gonna push against that. They're used to feeling in control, and that'll generalize to beyond the phone. They're used to being able to get things done. And young people are so used to being able to get things done digitally that if they can't get something done digitally, they're probably going to invent how to do it or start a business on the side, doing that for all the rest of your employees. So they're very, very autonomy-driven. They've been primed by these devices to expect autonomy and to create autonomy. The second thing is that the folks who grew up through the pandemic, particularly who were like maybe five, 10 to 15 years old during the pandemic, they've got some scarring, some really strong social scarring. That'll probably never leave them. And many of those people just experience such strong kind of psychological trauma from being isolated that it affected who they are. And some of those people just their social skills never built really properly. They're just not used to being with people. On average, most people have come through that and it's not a big deal anymore, but there's still traces of that. And I think that's gonna leave a certain trace in the younger generation that we'll see evidence of in lots of ways going forward. In a similar way, that the Great Depression of 100 or so years ago massively influenced the older generation entrepreneurs of today and the way they invest and save and hoard and everything else. We'll see this for another hundred years in how people work.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

For those who are interested in taking a step back, in looking at their career differently, pursuing something different at a later stage, do you have a perspective on how they can navigate that well?

SPEAKER_02 16:15

Yeah, there's a lot of people going through that kind of situation where the industry's changing, maybe the technology is changing, or they're just getting to retirement age, and they do need to think about other ways of kind of living and working. And I think it's helpful to think this through from the scarf perspective. It's a status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness. I mentioned this earlier, but the having to change careers or even complete your career and move on to other things is a really strong threat response. And it's not something you can just kind of ignore. It'll feel like physical pain for most people. So you want to do things that offset that. It might be a status thing. It might be you start doing public speaking, maybe you write a book, maybe you start doing something that builds your status outside the organization you're with. A very important one is relatedness, just having a really rich community. If you're losing your workplace community, you might be losing a lot of friendships. You need to build other communities. The number one determiner of length of life, it turns out, is the quality of our relationships and not just with our intimate partner. That's number one. But it's beyond just that. It's actually having a really rich set of relationships outside of ourselves. So, really, really important that they build that relatedness, the iron scarf with people. Probably more important even than the status. Those are probably the two really big things to focus on. If you start working for yourself, you can have a little bit of certainty. It can feel fair, but relatedness and status can really plummet. So we want to work on those two really specifically.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

Building on that, do you have any specific advice for leaders on how they can support employees effectively at this point in their life?

Beyond Stereotypes: Real Generational Drivers

SPEAKER_02 17:53

For leaders themselves, I think it's important to understand that these transitions are really, really meaningful. These transitions are not managed well, people literally fall into depression and just really suffer. And you can have someone who is thriving in life, suddenly depressed and on antidepressants and not doing well in a matter of months because they just haven't managed it well. They weren't planning for it. So I think leaders need to recognize that folks need to buttress or buffer themselves against that transition well ahead of time, not in the weeks or months before, but like a year ahead, two years ahead, be thinking about that transition and getting involved in other activities, finding other meaningful work, and really, you know, encouraging, supporting, championing at least a year ahead that people build these relational networks as well as status networks so that they still have a sense of standing in the world and they still have a rich community to connect with. Those two things I think are the prime thing to really focus on.

SPEAKER_01 18:47

Dr. Rock, you mentioned AI and how it may displace the need for extensive mentoring in some circumstances and the advances that you have made within your organization of being able to upload your work, your organization's research, so people can tap into that more readily and have long conversations. Your work in many ways has been codified and the research. And as we think about this transition with AI, I wonder if there is an opportunity for folks in their 50s, 60s to engage with AI directly and have an opportunity to really build out their legacy within organizations in a way that many don't have access to.

Navigating Transitions With SCARF

SPEAKER_02 19:27

AI offers tremendous opportunities for people in late stages of their career because it's used well. It just radically accelerates your capacity to do things at pretty much anything. The proviso is used well. If you just use AI to write emails for you and summarize documents, you actually won't remember much and you become a worse performer. Your work starts to sound like everyone else's. But if you use AI the right way, you get smarter, more effective, more creative. The key is to use it to challenge your thinking, not to think for you. So you're using AI to stretch your thinking, to teach you new things, and really importantly, to help you have the insights. Insights are this aha moment that we all experience as we're waking up, as we're showering, it's like this sudden idea. They're really the stuff of life and they massively energize us. Similar to the cognitive benefits of just learning, insights have this wonderful preventative benefit of giving us positive energy, new connections. And they're really the active ingredient in learning in many ways. We want to use AI to stretch ourselves, challenge ourselves, learn more, learn faster. If you suddenly have hours a day, you can spend those hours a day being creative in the space that you're interested in using AI, learning more things and not just learning a language, but learning a whole new business you might start, or a whole way of traveling through the world, or there's all sorts of things you can do. So I'm passionate about the potential for the key is that we have to think a little bit more about our thinking and learn to challenge our thinking, learn to see our biases, learn a bit of humility, learn more about cognitive flexibility, learn to be more vigilant about what comes out of AI as well. Those are some habits we've been working on as sort of central to using AI, humility, flexibility, vigilance. As you learn to use it well, you do get smarter, you do get much more effective. And you're gonna have this sparring partner that can really keep your brain very, very fresh. We're gonna see a time very soon, it's probably happening now in pockets. There's that saying the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. There's probably places in Japan or South Korea where robots now spending time talking to people in retirement and helping them with all sorts of things. As they get very ubiquitous, we're gonna have very clever robots, very ubiquitous very soon, like a few years. Certainly 10 years, most people will have one and find them incredibly useful. And I think those can be fantastic tools for enriching your thinking, enriching your communications, but at the same time still making sure you're actually interacting with other humans, not just with that device, because the cognitive benefits. Of relationships probably won't come from interacting with non-human devices, you're at some, but you'll still want to be part of a community and part of that network of people. So that'll be important to maintain that as a goal.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

Those are tremendous principles. If you could help organizations reimagine the later stages of work through the lens of neuroscience, what would that look like? What change would you most like to see?

What Leaders Must Do Ahead Of Change

SPEAKER_02 22:24

I would most like to see like five years before you're thinking of, say, retiring, if we can use that word, right? Five years before you're already thinking deeply about building meaningful social networks of many types, rich social networks, and not just one type. You're not just starting bridge. That's what people sort of think of, but multiple types. And fantastic if some of those involve physical activity that you do together, walking groups, all sorts of things. But at least five years before retiring, because it takes time to build social networks. It really does. So a good five years before you're thinking about building a whole range of really meaningful social networks. It's really important. And then thinking about what you want to do that feels like you're giving back. And that could be in any kind of way. But giving back activates status networks, certainty networks, relatedness networks, autonomy networks, fairness networks, all of them, right? And it's this rich reward from being pro-social. It's feeling like you're giving back is just one of the most rewarding things that there is. So those are the two things. And the giving back can look really, really different for different people. For one person, it's finally spending time coaching your grandkids' football team for someone else. It's coding and teaching next generations about how we used to code for someone else. It's starting a painting class and teaching people how to paint. It's very, very different for individual, but finding that way that you can give back in a way that helps make meaning from everything you've learned and truly helps other people, that's gonna be the most rewarding and stimulating thing. And I keep saying rewarding not just because it feels good, but reward networks in the brain, the stuff of learning, the stuff of insight, the stuff of motivation. Giving back is going to involve learning. It's gonna involve constantly learning new things, making new connections. It's a lot about just keeping the brain connecting. The last thing you want to do is fall into repetitive patterns where there's nothing new. You want to keep the brain connecting, keep the brain in novel situations. The sort of best way of doing that is in a way where you're also giving back. Earning plus giving back. So those are the two sort of big buckets. Sounds like maybe three, but really taking time years before to think about rich network of social communities and how you'll give back in a way that also keeps you learning.

SPEAKER_01 24:36

Thank you. Your insights have been practical, for which I'm very grateful. For those who want to follow you, your organization's work, how are they best to do so?

SPEAKER_02 24:47

We have a really big podcast over a million downloads now. It's called Your Brain at Work. Don't start from the beginning because there's like 500 episodes now. Pick and choose. There's some really fascinating episodes. Some of them are very science focused, some of them are organizationally focused. They vary, but it's a wonderful podcast. My most recent book is called Your Brain at Work. That's a really helpful one for understanding just how the brain works day to day when we're trying to get work done. And we just recently launched our AI to the public, which we've spent really 26 years building and the last couple of years in terms of tech. That's at asknials.ai. N-I-L-E-S stands for Neurointelligent Leadership Enhancing System. So askNiles.ai is our platform for making people smarter, particularly making leaders smarter through conversations that generate insights. That's worth checking out. Otherwise, neuroleadership.com has lots and lots of content there. We've got a huge, huge blog, hundreds and hundreds of topics and articles and lots of other resources for individual education. Actually, there's a really fascinating someone late in their career might do our certificate in foundations of neuroleadership, which is a six-month program explaining everything about the brain and change and learning for people interested in creating change in the world. There's some individual education programs like that and brain-based coaching that give people a chance to practice giving back and driving change and those kinds of things.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

Thank you. And as someone who's benefited personally, I'm really excited about leaders having direct access to the information and guidance that's available through your brain at work, through the research the organization does so well.

SPEAKER_02 26:24

Thank you. We created Niles because we want to give access to a lot more people to be able to have conversations about the brain and what's going on as we try to lead and manage and parent and partner and all the things. So thank you. I'm working on a new book. I'm motivating myself to get up at 5 a.m. every day to write. My new book is called Good with Humans, and it's double click on Scarf for kind of self, others, difficult conversations, and kind of teams and relationships and everything. So I'm deep in that. It's a terrifying journey. Terrifying, exhausting, overwhelming, exhilarating. It's a lot. But hopefully, fingers crossed in the late stages of that.

Using AI To Stretch Thinking, Not Replace It

SPEAKER_01 26:59

Oh, wonderful. I'm looking forward to reading and learning from your latest work once it's available. Thank you for joining me for this conversation with Dr. David Rock. I've followed his work for years and his clear practical approach for how our brains work has shaped my own thinking. I'm excited for more leaders to have access to the kind of insight his research offers. We created the next chapter to help us rethink how we grow, adapt, and make meaningful contributions at every stage of our career. I'm interested to hear if anything stood out for you. What are your thoughts on your own next chapter? I'm Pauline James, and I'd love to hear your perspective. Connect with me on LinkedIn or through our Anchor HR community. Thank you again for listening. I hope you'll join me next time as we continue reimagining work and life on our own terms.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette? And remember, for what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit hrgazette.com.