- A perfect storm may soon hit leadership in corporate America, with baby boomers retiring and Gen Z unenthused about climbing the career ladder. However, experts argue that slashing development budgets and stereotyping young people as lazy is only making matters worse.
Who wants to be the boss anymore? According to the headlines, not Gen Z.
The bright young minds of tomorrow are just not striving to climb the corporate ladder as much as their older colleagues, but it’s not coming from a lack of interest in management.
Instead, a generational disconnect in how leaders should wield their power is to blame. Gen Z employees are concerned about leadership’s basic interpersonal skills, and nearly half of them want better communication and teamwork training, according to a recent Korn Ferry report. Major companies like Amazon are cutting middle manager roles, leaving early-career employees left without a model of leadership pathways. About 41% of employees say that their organizations have done away with middle management, according to the same Korn Ferry report.
The pool of future leaders continues to shrink, with layoff uncertainty and disengagement leading to low morale among workers just getting their feet wet in the working world. Over half of Gen Z employees don’t even want to become managers, according to recruitment company Robert Walters. After seeing their bosses get burned out and laid off, it’s not surprising that the youngest generation of workers doesn’t want the same fate. As boomers look to hang up their badges and retire, this growing leadership vacuum threatens the modern workforce.
Gen Z does want to lead—just not the way boomers did
Katie Trowbridge, a multi-generational workplace strategist, is trying to help bridge the leadership gap. She spent twenty-three years as an educator, working with millennials and Gen Zers and identifying their core values, how they work best, and what motivates them.
“[Younger generations] want to have a purpose, and they want to see how what they’re doing matters and has relevancy,” she tells Fortune. Trowbridge argues that this mindset can differ from their predecessors, many of whom were taught to “put your head down and get to work.”
Young people lead with curiosity, Trowbridge argues, and that curiosity should be fostered, not discouraged. She stresses that leaders are failing to coach young staffers because they’re buying into stereotypes around Gen Z’s work ethic.
“We tag them as lazy. They’re not lazy. They are far from being lazy. They just are curious and they want knowledge,” she says. “They’re just asking us to teach them how to do it.”
While Gen Z may be asking, Trowbridge doesn’t believe that today’s leaders are answering.
Corporate investment in leadership development has been dropping substantially, with average budgets dropping 70% from January 2023 to January 2024, according to recent data from LEADx. Budgets have slipped even further, with a 15% drop from January 2024 to the same time this year.
What bosses can do to connect with young workers
Leaders shouldn’t assume that their workers have the same priorities as they do, especially when it comes to work-life balance. Trowbridge notes that long gone are the days when a job takes precedence over all else.
“One of the things that millennials and Gen Zers are getting right is that they are not allowing work to be the thing that defines them.” It is in the best interest of current leaders to abandon much of the rigidity that has defined work culture for the past few decades, she argues.
Another solution that Trowbridge touts is thinking small. Gen Z workers are leaning more and more into the gig economy, and one way to gain back trust is to run individual departments as their own small businesses, with a more personalized approach that emphasizes individual career growth.
“[Companies are] going to have to make sure that there’s that mentorship, that coaching going on, that there is that connection [and] team building really happening.”
