On the four ways current leadership keeps reaching for surface fixes, and the work the moment requires.

Reflecting on the younger staff I hired over the years, I empathize with the leaders adapting to Gen Z entering the workforce. Each wave of younger talent stretches us to find new ways to coach, train, mentor, inspire, and communicate. It is like learning a new language. When done well, the connection pays unlimited dividends.

Last week I wrote about what Gen Z is already changing — the workforce demands, the consumer shifts, the four domains where they are exercising leverage the previous generations did not. That piece sat with what is. This piece sits with what to do about it.

Or rather, what current leadership seems to fail to do about it. Because across the four domains where Gen Z is reshaping the conditions, the same failure pattern keeps surfacing in older leadership. The pattern is recognizable enough that it can be named, examined, and corrected. Not all leaders are making the mistake. But enough are that the cost is showing up in attrition, in market share, in talent gaps, in the slow erosion of organizational capacity that no one announces but everyone eventually notices.

The mistake is reaching for surface solutions while refusing to examine what is producing the need for the solutions. It looks different in different domains. The substance is the same.

Four versions are worth walking through.

The Lazy Gen Z Narrative

The first version of the failure is the “lazy Gen Z” narrative itself. It has become cultural shorthand among traditional leaders. The premise is that Gen Z doesn’t want to work.

The premise is wrong in most of its specifics. Workforce participation data shows Gen Z working at rates comparable to or higher than previous generations at the same age. The hiring difficulties many small and mid-sized businesses report are real, but they are not Gen Z refusing to work. They are specific roles, wages, and conditions that the post-2020 labor market has made harder to fill across all generations.

What looks like “not wanting to work” is, in most cases, not wanting to work the way you worked. Different positioning entirely.

I am hearing in coaching that leaders are responding by putting stricter constraints on how the individual is managed. Or worse, by not addressing the concerns at all and going silent on them. They know something is wrong. Pushing them to work the way you worked only deepens the disengagement.

The leader who confuses them will lose the talent that would have shaped what comes next. Current leaders should be cultivating what Gen Z brings to the table rather than complaining about how little they want to work in the old configuration.

Access to fast training isn’t a perk. It is a requirement. This is the generation that can look up almost anything and find a how-to video in seconds. They don’t care about production value. Create the how-to content. Clearly explain what success looks like. Then set them free to do it.

The lazy framing is doing a specific job. It allows leaders to dismiss the deeper question Gen Z is actually asking — about purpose, conditions, follow-through, the relationship between effort and outcome — by collapsing it into a character defect. Once Gen Z is lazy, the problem is them. Once the problem is them, no examination of the workplace conditions is required. The lazy frame is the avoidance, not the explanation. The price is talent that dies on the vine.

The Return-to-Office Mandate

The second version is the return-to-office mandate. In a recent episode of The Curiosity Shop, Brené Brown and Adam Grant make the argument that most return-to-office conversations are stuck at the wrong level. The question isn’t how many days in the office. The question is what problem you are actually trying to solve.

The research on hybrid work has been clear for over a decade. Studies in MIT Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, and peer-reviewed journals consistently find that well-designed hybrid arrangements don’t damage performance and improve retention. The honest counter-evidence is that fully remote work can dampen breakthrough innovation; the answer to that is intentional togetherness, not mandated togetherness. The presence-as-proxy-for-productivity assumption is a mental model, not a strategy.

“Butts in seats” is a proxy for productivity. It is not productivity. The leader who confuses them is losing the people who notice the difference. And the people who notice are disproportionately the people whose work product matters most — the ones who are paid for judgment rather than for hours.

I am hearing in coaching that while some organizations took a hard stance on return-to-office mandates, employees quickly noticed that the same rules were not being applied to everyone. It left them questioning the reasoning behind the decision and eroded their trust that they would be treated fairly in the process.

While remote work does not suit every situation, it produced benefits the era of free snacks and pool tables never did. Time to exercise instead of commuting. Money saved on gas and parking. Better eating from access to a home kitchen. Less stress from office distractions. All things Gen Z values.

If innovation and collaboration are the desired outcomes, create and guide those interactions. Atlassian’s research on intentional togetherness supports this directly — gatherings work when designed with purpose, not when mandated by the calendar. Don’t assume they organically happen by putting everyone in the same building. Gen Z is comfortable finding “their people” online, but send them to a conference to network and they are overwhelmed. What Gen Z is reporting is that they returned to the office only to attend the same meetings via video that they used to attend from home.

The Bot Interview Pipeline

The third version is hiring. The bot-interview pipeline that has become standard at most large organizations does several things efficiently. It also breaks the relational infrastructure that previous generations of hiring leaders built across years of conversations.

When a hiring leader talked to a candidate, they were doing several things at once. Evaluating for the posted role. Building a relationship they might draw on later. Surfacing candidates who would be better suited for a different opening. Producing the “I like this person, let’s figure out where they fit” outcome that simply doesn’t happen in the bot pipeline. There is no human seeing the person to like. All of that vanishes when a system replaces the conversation.

Both sides lose. The organization gets fewer good matches and watches its relational network atrophy. Candidates talk to systems that don’t remember them, don’t pass them along, don’t make introductions. The volume problem makes the trade feel necessary — eight hundred applications per role means human screening seems impossible — but the volume problem was produced by the same systems that now justify themselves with it. Efficient screening produced more applications produced more efficient screening. Candidates and organizations both end up further from each other than they started.

In my coaching, HR professionals making transitions of their own have made it clear they did not want to end up helping candidates write resumes or prep for interviews. Even they recognized that the environment has become almost impossible to navigate effectively. On the flip side, eight hundred AI-enhanced resumes per role makes finding the actual right candidate particularly difficult. Every cover letter and resume has been optimized — but who actually possesses the skill set for the role?

Imagine navigating this landscape and landing a position only to spend the first few weeks engaging with an online onboarding program. Little to no human interaction. A real experience that left that new employee questioning if the company even cared about people at all.

Gen Z is reading this clearly. The bot interview is the surface efficiency. The structural cost is the human judgment, the relational network, and the candidates who would have been better matched if anyone had been willing to see them. They are being treated as if they are only a number, and some are showing up to work like they are only a number.

The Cry Room Without the Question

The fourth version is the most important to name carefully. The mental health crisis showing up in workplaces is real. The medication rates are real. The therapy demand is real. None of that is Gen Z being soft. It is Gen Z being honest about conditions that previous generations endured silently at significant personal cost.

And current leadership keeps responding at the surface. Cry rooms or safe spaces get added. Wellness apps get rolled out. Meditation benefits get expanded. Mental health days get tacked onto PTO. Internal coaches are used to correct gaps in behavioral expectations. None of these are wrong on their own. They become wrong when they are offered instead of an answer to the deeper question. Why do this many people need a cry room? What is the organization doing that is producing the need for the coping medication? What conditions are we creating that are chewing up talent and selecting for the pathology that allows survival?

In a recent conversation, a client told me that a co-worker had been using a nearby “quiet room” — the one everyone called the cry room — repeatedly throughout the week. When my client asked someone whether the young woman was okay, the answer came back as a question: how could she be? She was the fourth person in that position in twenty-four months. It begs the question whether this is a Gen Z worker who could not hang, or a position that is crushing whoever dares to enter.

Details abstracted. The pattern is real; the person is not identifiable.

That is the question about conditions. An organization that selects for the kind of worker who can survive intolerable conditions is selecting against the qualities that produce good work — creativity, judgment, the willingness to try, fail, and iterate, healthy pushback, the willingness to flag problems before they become catastrophes. The selection produces homogeneous talent. The same kind of survivor in every chair. Diverse talent brings a wider range of tools to the table. Survival selection narrows the range. Strong organizations don’t chew up talent and spit it out. They examine the conditions producing the breakage.

The Pattern Underneath

Across all four versions — the lazy Gen Z narrative, the RTO mandate, the bot interview, the cry room without the question — the pattern is the same. Surface optimization. Structural loss. Leadership unwilling to ask the deeper question because the deeper question would require changing something that has been comfortable to leave in place.

Gen Z is reading the surface gestures correctly across all four domains. They are noticing the gap. They are walking, and talking, and voting with their feet faster than any previous generation has.

Returning to what once was never works. The conditions that produced it no longer exist. Strong organizations change with the times. The work for current leaders is harder than the templates they reach for. It requires asking the deeper question Brown and Grant point at — what problem are you actually trying to solve. And then the even harder question — is senior leadership willing to adapt to solve it? It requires creating intentional conditions for skill-building that doesn’t happen by default. Mentorship paired with real practice. Communication skills that don’t get short-circuited by AI. Hiring conversations that produce relationships, not just decisions. Workplaces designed so the cry room is not necessary because the conditions producing the tears have been examined and changed.

The leaders who can sit with that will lead what comes next. The ones who can’t won’t. The talent has already decided.

To the Younger Generation

If you have read this far, some of what came earlier was for you specifically.

Your insistence on mental health as foundational is correct. The data supports you. The research supports you. The experience of every previous generation that suffered in silence supports you. Don’t let anyone tell you the insistence is the problem. The insistence is the correction the workplace has needed for decades.

There is a version of self-care language that has gotten performative, and you have probably noticed it yourself. That is worth being honest about, partly because the performative version is being used against the legitimate one. But the much bigger structural issue is organizations responding to symptoms while refusing to examine the conditions producing the problems. The cry room without the conversation. The wellness app without the inquiry. You are right to notice the gap. Keep noticing it.

Your refusal to work in arrangements that don’t serve actual purpose is correct. Your insistence that organizations live up to their stated values is correct. Your willingness to walk away when they don’t is the leverage that is reshaping the workforce. Keep using it.

Learn from the previous generations — they have skills you are going to need to build deliberately. Like grit and self-reliance. Communication that happens in person. Difficult conversations held without going to text. Reading a room. Receiving critical feedback without freezing or retreating. Negotiating without an AI assist. Critical thinking that doesn’t get outsourced to a chat window before you have done the thinking yourself. These are not generational deficits to be ashamed of. They are the skills that grew up in conditions you didn’t grow up in, and they have to be built the same way they were built before — by practice, with stakes, alongside people who are further along.

Find the mentors. The good ones are still there. Many of them are looking for someone who actually wants to learn. Pair what you bring — the willingness to ask hard questions, the refusal to perform exhaustion, the fluency in tools the rest of us still struggle with — with what they bring. That combination is what the next decade is going to be built by.

The anxiety you are carrying is real. The conditions are hard. Both can be true and you can still have leverage — because both are true, and you do.

Previous generations carried anxiety too. They were pushed to deal with it differently — silence, endurance, the assumption that you toughed it out and didn’t name it. That approach had its own costs, some of which we are still discovering. Your way of naming what you carry is not better or worse than how the previous generations handled theirs. It is different, and the difference is worth taking seriously.

The work is in front of you, not behind you. The generations who come after you are watching what you do with it.

What the Framework Is For

The Ambition With Integrity framework that organizes my work examines leadership across four dimensions. The WHY underneath the work. The HOW of moving through it. The WHO being shaped by it. The WHAT that gets built.

Gen Z is, in effect, demanding that leaders be coherent across all four dimensions — not just the WHAT. The trust they expect requires coherence in the WHO. The transparency they expect requires coherence in the WHY. The flexibility they expect requires coherence in the HOW. The follow-through they expect requires that all four dimensions be in alignment with what the organization claims to stand for. They are not asking for accommodation. They are asking for coherence.

That is the work the framework holds together. Most organizations are still figuring out what coherence looks like at scale. The pieces that have come before in this series — on values, on the integrity practice, on the lessons across the generations — are about building the foundation that lets this kind of coherent leadership become possible. Gen Z is the generation pressing the question. Current leaders get to decide whether to do the work the question requires.

If the conversation you have been wanting to have is about your own leadership, what is coherent across your dimensions and what isn’t, where the gap is between what you say and what you do, that is what a Discovery Conversation is for. It determines if working together is the right fit. Link on my website.

— Cheryl