When I ask Kalani Leifer if it’s possible to generalize how Gen Z employees think and act, he makes a cautious observation.
“What I have found—and I think this resonates with our program model—is a desire to step up and take on leadership roles earlier in their career,” says the founder and CEO of COOP Careers.
Leifer—a millennial and former high-school history teacher—should know. At COOP, he and his team help first-generation college grads land their first good job. “Our tagline is ‘overcoming underemployment,’” Leifer tells me from California. “The way we do that is through peers and near-peers.”
Since launching COOP in New York in 2014, Leifer has tapped into younger generations’ desire to lead. Program participants, who are the first in their families to graduate from college and/or attended on a Pell Grant, get divided into cohorts of 16. Each group is led by four near-peer “cohort captains”—young professionals in tech, media, or finance who are also COOP alumni.
“Oftentimes in their day job, they’re in quite a junior position,” Leifer says. “I think one reason so many of our alumni come back to serve as cohort captains is it gives them a chance, very, very early in their career, to step up and be a leader.”
Having run its program more than 500 times, COOP has no shortage of alumni. There are now about 7,000 in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco.
Gen Z sometimes gets stereotyped as lazy and unambitious. For Leifer, that obviously doesn’t compute. “We should stop looking for ourselves in them and start seeing them for who they are and how they show up,” he says. “There’s maybe a lower willingness to play by the rules and just wait and kind of bide their time.”
So how can employers build trust with Gen Z?
Workers from this generation are willing to pay their dues if necessary, but they expect to see some sort of career path, Leifer explains. “They know that you often have to start the journey at square one,” he says. “But they want to understand what square two, three, and four are, and how do I get there? And how are you going to support me in getting there?”
Younger folks also sometimes feel cynical about how transactional the employee-employer relationship is, Leifer says. Because Gen Z doesn’t show the same deference as older generations, companies themselves must step up, he reckons.
“It’s important as an employer to show how you are genuinely invested in people’s growth and be transparent about the forces that are at play.”
For example, that means leveling with Gen Z about why layoffs were necessary. “They want to see the math,” Leifer says.
He’s transparent with his own Gen Z employees. COOP, where two-thirds of the 80 full-time staff are alumni, helps team members understand how it makes decisions. To that end, the nonprofit uses the RAPID framework for decision-making, which includes five stakeholder roles: recommend, agree, perform, input, and decide.
“What’s been very important for me is to be able to explain [that] this input [will be] deeply considered and appreciated, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to see exactly that outcome,” Leifer says.
In a nod to the COOP model, Leifer encourages businesses to find “step-up opportunities” for Gen Z. Let’s say a company has a group of employees who started last year but there are no promotions available for them—plus a batch of new arrivals.
“How can you position the last wave as near-peer leaders for this next group?” Leifer asks. “They might not be full-on people supervisors yet, but how can you equip them to support the onboarding process? Can they be a mentor?”
Most likely, what those Gen Z employees do to step up won’t perfectly match their job description, Leifer notes. “But I think it will show them that you’re investing in them,” he says. “Giving people a chance to realize their power and influence is really important.”
Definitely a step in the right direction.
Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com
IN OTHER NEWS
Store managers
Home Depot is making a change that could build trust with its most put-upon employees. To support retail team members, the company has ordered corporate staff to pull an eight-hour shift at one of its stores each quarter. (That includes you, remote workers.) This unusual move comes as Home Depot grapples with a post-pandemic slump and growing labor activism. A serious gesture by CEO Ted Decker, it should also yield comedy gold as office types adjust to their new part-time jobs.
Test drive
Want people to trust autonomous cars? Make those rides pass a national driver’s test. That’s the advice of Henry Liu, head of the University of Michigan’s autonomous-vehicle testing center, who says the rule would ensure a basic level of competence on the road. It would also boost public confidence in self-driving cars, reckons Liu, who agrees with manufacturers that they could eventually save lives and make transportation more efficient. Safety first.
Gaming the system?
Short-seller Hindenburg Research has done a fine job of deflating investors’ trust in Roblox. After a Hindenburg report accused the online gaming platform of juicing key metrics and not doing enough to block pedophiles, Roblox shares plunged almost 10%. The company might have trouble explaining away those claims, which are partly based on a study of some 30 million daily users. True to form, Hindenburg isn’t playing around.
Intelligence failure
Who, us? A group suspected of ties to China tried to launch a phishing attack on employees of OpenAI, the startup just revealed. That bid to steal sensitive info might have failed, but as Washington and Beijing duke it out for AI dominance, expect more such moves against U.S. tech players. In the current atmosphere of mistrust, China keeps denying—a tad too vehemently—that it’s a staging ground for global cyberattacks. Two can play at that game.
TRUST EXERCISE
“Our nation is at the cusp of a historic opportunity: finally rebuilding the domestic steel industry, growing jobs, and nurturing stronger communities after decades of neglecting our critical supply chains.
As the president of the United Steelworkers, North America’s largest industrial union, I see that possibility embodied in the hard work and dedication of our members at U.S. Steel. They work every day to support our nation’s infrastructure, bolster national security, and keep us safe at home and abroad.
But instead of embracing this promise, U.S. Steel last year revealed plans to sell out to Japanese-owned Nippon Steel, and it was immediately clear who would benefit: not the American people, not workers, but executives and shareholders. That’s it.”
David McCall doesn’t mince words about Nippon Steel’s proposed takeover of U.S. Steel, which he casts as a bad deal for workers and the American public. For the International President of United Steelworkers, it’s a disappointing turn of events after what he describes as a long effort to rebuild America’s steel industry and its middle-class workforce. As McCall can attest, riding out the hard times was no fun at all for him and his fellow workers.
He’s in no mood for a repeat. The planned $15 billion merger fails to guarantee job security, pension payouts, production levels, and domestic access to U.S.-made steel, McCall maintains. His forecast: Japanese owner Nippon could easily close union plants in favor of low-wage facilities in the South. Citing U.S. Steel’s running battle with organized labor, he doesn’t trust CEO David Burritt’s reassurances that workers will benefit.
With a federal decision on blocking the deal deferred until after the presidential election, McCall urges politicians to take the union’s side. His pitch—that saying no to that foreign takeover is a vote for American promise, prosperity, and security—could steel patriots on both sides of the aisle.
