“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”—Jack Welch
When you’ve worked a corporate job as long as I have, one of the issues that inevitably comes up is generational tension.
What do I mean by that?
Well, a 2023 PRRI survey found that 42% of Gen Xers and 37% of Baby Boomers believe “Young people are too lazy to hold good-paying jobs.” A more recent survey of hiring managers found that 81% believe Gen Z lacks work ethic.
But younger professionals often tell a different story. They feel isolated, unsupported, and expected to perform without receiving adequate guidance.
One client said it best: “I feel like I’m being evaluated, but no one is actually helping me succeed.”
This client was extremely capable. Organized, thoughtful, hardworking—the kind of person organizations say they want to develop.
But within a few months of being promoted, she was struggling. The team she had inherited was quietly resistant, and her senior leader expected her to “figure it out.”
In a situation like this, we tend to start taking sides and pointing fingers. Depending on your personal experiences, you may sympathize more with one person or the other.
But stop and ask yourself, how true is the story I’m believing?
Because I think there’s a lot more to the narrative that gets overlooked.
Understanding the Structural Shift
Years ago careers moved more slowly. People stayed at organizations longer. By the time someone stepped into a leadership role they had already absorbed a lot just by being around—how decisions actually got made, who influenced outcomes, when to push and when to hold back.
As a general rule of thumb, you figured things out on your own.
There are a lot of benefits to learning this way. Experience is still an unbeatable teacher.
But the workplace has changed over time.
The work environment has sped up. There’s more cross-functional work and ambiguity about authority. People change roles more quickly. Teams are distributed.
And perhaps the biggest change: Younger professionals are often stepping into leadership responsibilities much earlier in their careers. Yet once they step into leadership roles, the assumption is that they should already know how to navigate everything that comes with it.
What happens next is a huge breakdown in communication.
The senior leaders think, “They’ll figure it out.”
The new leaders think, “No one is actually helping me succeed.”
In this situation, neither person is happy.
But to change the situation, we first need to start changing the story we believe around it.
Less Criticism, More Curiosity
When younger professionals approach work differently in how they communicate, how they question ideas, or even how they think about boundaries around work, it’s easy to interpret that as inexperience. When they ask for help, it’s easy to interpret that as a lack of resiliency or work ethic.
And sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s just a reflection of the fact that the workplace has changed.
So before you make a judgment, I would encourage you to first be curious. Because most often what I see is not a lack of talent, work ethic, or motivation in young leaders. It’s context.
If you’re a senior professional, this is where you have the opportunity to step in. You carry an enormous amount of institutional knowledge that never appears in onboarding materials or job descriptions. You understand the informal system—how things actually move.
When you notice a younger leader floundering, you can be the one to say:
- Here’s how decisions actually move through this organization.
- Here’s what’s happening behind the scenes that you might not be seeing yet.
- Here’s where you probably have more influence than you realize.
That kind of guidance doesn’t weaken people—it helps them become effective faster.
At the end of the day, leadership isn’t just about succeeding in your own career. It’s about making the path a little clearer for the people coming next.
