What's Wrong with Gen Z?

In case you have not paid too much attention, Gen Z, young people born after 1997, is a living, breathing calamity. Everyone complains about them, perhaps because they do nothing but complain about themselves.

If you think that we have a rosy future ahead of us, a glance at Gen Z will disabuse you of the notion.

So, now we have Suzy Welch offering a few words of wisdom about Gen Z. Welch teaches in business school and consults about business matters. The bio offered by the Wall Street Journal neglects to point out that she was married to the late Jack Welch, justly famous Chairman and CEO of General Electric. One must keep in mind that Jack Welch was a hard-nosed, hard-assed manager. He had no problem laying people off and closing factories. He did not favor stability.

And yet, Suzy Welch did not offer up the ultimate career move-- marry an alpha male.

Anyway, Welch herself belongs to the Boomer generation and she is slightly shocked by the fact that young people today seek stability more than they want to be part of a growing enterprise. They are more afraid of being laid off than they are desirous of advancing in business.

She explains:

I am of the generation that thought work was what you did, even when it was hard. You pushed through. Burnout wasn’t an option. Self-care is what you did when you retired.

And also,

Handshake, an employment site for Generation Z, which asked 1,800 new graduates what they wanted most from their future employers. The overwhelming majority—85%—answered “stability.” High pay and benefits also ranked high, but both of them in my estimation are proxies for the same thing. The desire for “a fast-growing company,” on the other hand, garnered only 29% of the vote.

So, the younger generation lacks ambition. It does not really want to grow and prosper. One might say that its goal is to become bureaucrats, to have a stable job leading to a stable pension. 

Dare one say that Welch does not specify whether she is offering the views of men or women. One suspects that the cohort she is reporting on has more women than men. If it does not, one suspects that the male members have been feminized, to the point where they have little ambition left.

Many of my students say they feel as if they’re at their limits. “You’re always hearing the world is filled with opportunity,” one student told me last semester. “And then you turn around and there are layoffs everywhere, and everyone is saying AI is going to make us all obsolete.” She confessed there were days she wished she could crawl under her covers to escape the static and ambiguity of it all, not to mention—as she also did—the threats of global warming and nuclear war.

In short, they are afraid. As it happens, their fears cause them to be indolent and distracted. They do not work very hard, do not hand in assignments, take more time off… and seem mostly to need therapy. They are risk averse and want to be coddled. They would not have survived under a boss like Jack Welch. Then again, perhaps a tougher management style would have knocked some sense into them.

It is not an accident the therapeutic campuses we have reported on here have produced a cohort of young people that is self-absorbed, self-involved, lazy, sloppy, lacking discipline or ambition. To call this a management challenge is to state the obvious:

“I spend half my time basically doing therapy, cheering people up, getting them going,” a Fortune 50 CEO recently told me of his experience with his staff. He doubtless has a heart for his company—he tenderly referred to his workers as “mentally depleted”—but he said he wasn’t happy about the drain on his time. He also noted that he was often goading on employees whose definition of “full-time” diverged from his own. “Who works 40 hours a week?” he lamented. “No one under 35 suddenly does.”

Welch was married to Jack Welch. One understands that neutron Jack would never have tolerated the whiny young people who constitute Gen Z.

When you are running a business, you want to, well, run it. You don’t want to fill your calendar assuring people that life is going to calm down, that stability is coming, that things will eventually be normal. Especially when you know such things will never come to pass.