Managing Gen Z

Financial Times columnist Pilita Clark suggests that older people have always complained about dissolute and degenerate youth. But, is it different this time? Is Gen Z, the cohort of under 25 workers different from its predecessors?

I am inclined to think that it really is different. Young people today, the products of a broken educational system and a culture that values therapy before instruction, have become a band of insolent brats, chronic whiners who consider that work is beneath their capacious intellects.

In the midst of an economic downturn, one that seems only to have just begun, this attitude will consign these young people to poor career prospects.

Take the example of a recent meeting held by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Clark reports:

Not that long ago, Mark Zuckerberg logged in to a Q&A session with his staff that I would very much like to have seen. Specifically, I wish I had witnessed the Facebook founder’s face when an employee in Chicago named Gary asked if the extra days off that were brought in during the pandemic would continue in 2023. Zuckerberg looked “visibly frustrated” by this question, according to an account of the meeting on The Verge news site. 

He had just explained the economy was probably tanking. TikTok was a competitive menace and he’d had to freeze hiring for some jobs. So no, Gary in Chicago, the extra holidays would not last and nor would the days of pampering employees. People had to work harder and Zuckerberg didn’t care if some decided to quit. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” he said. 

Every manager today has heard the same whiny, disrespectful tone, the notion that what really matters on a job is the moment when you get off work and go out to party.

Clark explained:

As work returns to something approaching pre-Covid normality, I have lost count of the complaints I have heard from managers, most in their late thirties and forties, about their coddled, disengaged and indifferent 20-something employees. 

Quite right. Everyone who coaches managers, and at times even Gen Zers, has heard the same complaints. This time they are dealing with something new. In the now distant past no employee would have whined to the CEO about vacation time. He would have known that he was creating the wrong impression and compromising his career prospects.

As for examples, Clark has  few of her own:

There was the flummoxed investor who had told junior staff they should be in the office when clients visited, only to have those staff say: thanks for the feedback but I would rather keep working from home. There was the television executive who was told that young staff working on a long shoot would prefer shorter hours if they had to leave head office. A consultant told me of a younger colleague who refused to travel abroad to client meetings any more, insisting they could be done online. And a financial adviser who fumed about young people logging in to important internal meetings where they kept their cameras off and said nothing.

Clark says that these young people have been overparented-- a nice phrase:

The upshot of this is that a lot of younger, over-parented staff arrive in their first job with little idea of how much better it is than serving beer — and little faith it will meet their life-long financial needs.

As for how to manage them, consultant Eliza Philby recommends that managers listen attentively, but not concede to them:

Filby’s advice: listen to them. Offer great training. But do not, on any account, heed their every whim, because “you’re not actually helping them through life”. 

The unfortunate problem is that there are so many dysfunctional young people, overparented, coddled and swaddled. The good news, Clark concludes, is that those young people who are willing to work hard and to respect their managers, who do not correct other people’s pronouns, are looking at a bright future.

I also think there has never been a better time to be an ambitious, hardworking young employee. Finding a great job isn’t easy but if you can do it, you may well find yourself surrounded by a lot of people your age setting an unusually low bar.