There’s a conversation I seem to hear more and more often. Graduates aren’t work ready. Young people don’t know how to communicate. They expect too much, too quickly. They don’t have the same work ethic. Usually, at some point, the words Gen Z enter the discussion.
There may be some truth in some of those observations, but I wonder whether we are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking why young people don’t know how to work, perhaps leaders should be asking who was supposed to teach them.
Think back to the beginning of your own career. How much of what you now understand about work came from a university course, an induction manual or a formal training program? Probably less than you think. Much of it came from watching other people. You sat in meetings and noticed how experienced colleagues handled disagreement. You watched someone deal with a difficult client. A manager corrected you after you got something wrong. A colleague quietly said, “Next time, try it this way.” Sometimes somebody deliberately taught you, but often you learned simply because you were there.
Those small moments were an apprenticeship in how to work, even if nobody called it that at the time.
Now consider the workplace many young people are entering today. Some finished school or university during or shortly after the pandemic. Hybrid work is normal. Communication happens through screens. Senior people are busy, teams are leaner, and increasingly AI can produce a reasonable first draft, answer a question or solve a problem in seconds. At the same time, we are asking why younger employees sometimes lack confidence, judgement, resilience or interpersonal skill.
There is an interesting contradiction in that. We have removed or reduced many of the situations in which those capabilities were traditionally developed, then expressed surprise when people have not developed them as quickly.
Generations expert Dr Eliza Filby recently made a similar point in a conversation with Simon Sinek. Rather than continually asking what is wrong with another generation, she suggests we should pay attention to the world that generation has inherited. I think that is a useful challenge for leaders, because it shifts the conversation away from criticism and towards responsibility.
Technology gives us extraordinary efficiency, but efficiency and development are not always the same thing. It may be quicker for me to rewrite the proposal myself than explain what is wrong with it. It may be easier not to invite the junior person to the client meeting. It may be more efficient to ask AI to produce the first draft than to spend twenty minutes talking someone through how I would approach it.
In each case, the work gets done. The problem is that the learning may not.
If that happens often enough, organisations can end up with people who are becoming very efficient at completing tasks without getting enough exposure to the experiences that build judgement. That matters, particularly now. AI can provide information, suggest answers and produce competent-looking work, but it cannot give a 22-year-old ten years of experience. It cannot replicate all the moments in which someone learns to notice when something does not quite feel right, when to challenge an answer, when to say less, when to ask another question or when to pick up the phone instead of sending another email.
Those things are learned through experience, feedback, observation and mistakes.
When we talk about developing people, we often jump quickly to training programs, courses and workshops. They all have a role, but some of the most valuable development is much simpler. “Come with me to this meeting.” “What did you notice?” “How would you handle that?” “Have a first go and I’ll give you some feedback.” “I made exactly the same mistake when I was starting out.”
None of those conversations is particularly sophisticated, and most of them take only a few minutes. Over time, though, they accumulate. In a workplace where informal learning is no longer guaranteed to happen naturally, leaders may need to become much more deliberate about creating those moments.
Of course, younger people entering the workforce have responsibilities too. They need curiosity, humility and a willingness to accept feedback. They need to make an effort and understand that not every part of working life is going to be interesting or immediately rewarding. Every generation has had to learn some version of that.
But I am uncomfortable when experienced leaders talk about an entire generation as though they arrived in the workplace somehow deficient. We are the experienced ones. We know things they do not know yet. Surely part of leadership is passing some of that on.
The next generation will not work exactly as we did, and nor should they. The workplace they are inheriting is already very different from the one many of us entered. The more useful question is whether we are giving them enough opportunities to develop the judgement, confidence and human skills they will need in that workplace.
Because twenty years from now, they will be the experienced people in the room. They will be teaching the generation that comes after them. And perhaps one of the better measures of our leadership today is how well we prepare them to do it.
Rod Matthews