What Gen Z Wants: Empowering Collaboration
For the first time in history, there are five generations in the workforce. You have Builders, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z all sharing the same workspace. This historic moment represents a diversity of experiences, but also a variety of, sometimes, competing expectations.
As life and technology have changed through the generations, so, too, has the way that people relate to each other. This translates to different expectations of employees from leadership.
Generational Differences In Leadership
Builders and Baby Boomers - Managers
The Builders and Baby Boomers had a very top-down, militaristic approach to leadership. The manager controlled and directed the activities of the people they were in charge of. They were very goal-oriented, authoritative, and decisive. Jack Welch, CEO of GE, famously said that the bottom 10% of employees should be fired every year.
Gen X and Millennials - Leaders
Between the Baby Boomers and Gen X, there was a shift in the concept of leadership. No more was the leader sitting at the top giving orders. Now, the leader was the center of a connected, more collaborative team. It was the leader's job to support the team in a flat leadership structure. Millennials adopted a nearly identical leadership concept.
Gen Z - Collaborators
Then Gen Z comes along and changes the whole game. They are the team where the leader is on the outside as a mentor and a guide to help them make their own decisions.
I had my first experience trying to lead a Gen Z team member last summer. At the time I was a one-woman marketing team at Leadr and the suggestion was made that I take on an intern. I love interns and I kind of pride myself on being able to lead them well.
So, my intern joins the team and I present him with his first task. I needed him to turn some quotes into social media content using Canva. I figured it would be an easy project that allowed him to display creativity and take ownership.
During our next 1:1 meeting, I asked him about the social media graphics. He didn’t have them done. Instead, he had a 10-page document of proposals for our social media. I didn’t understand. I had asked him to make these graphics and provided him with the details that he needed to be successful, but he kept coming back with a new way to do it.
I was leading like a Millennial. I’m the leader. Here is the directive. We can collaborate and coordinate.
What he was expecting was for me to give him the problem that I needed to have solved and for him to come up with the solution. I’m there to mentor and guide and support.
That is the way that Gen Z has grown up. They have been able to curate and make decisions about their entire life. They can control what their social media looks like. Even for family vacations, they come with the suggestion of where to go because they’ve got that information at their fingertips. Whereas I had no idea where we could go on vacation because I just didn’t have access to that information.
Gen Z Wants Empowering Collaboration
The kind of leadership that Gen Z is looking for, I call “Empowering Collaboration.” Rather than having my intern carry out the solution I had developed for a problem, I wish I would have presented him with the problem and asked him for 3 proposals for how to solve it. He would have felt like he had a much bigger voice in the process. Ultimately, you still get to make the decision, since you were guiding them, but they were able to be part of the process and journey.
Empowering Collaboration relies on three principles:
Feedback - Since Gen Z wants to be a part of developing the solution, they will need you to let them know if they are going in the right direction through consistent feedback.
Ownership - Gen Z workers value their autonomy and they understand the trust that is demonstrated when a problem is handed off to them.
Accountability - Letting Gen Z work with autonomy doesn’t mean leaving them entirely to their own devices. Show them how their work has an impact on the larger mission of your organization and hold them to a standard of excellence that pushes them to grow.
As a generation that has information at their fingertips and regularly turns to their peers for advice, leading Gen Z requires a shift in the traditional views of leadership. Embracing the role of mentor and guide will help you to attract and retain the best talent that Gen Z has to offer.
For more on Gen Z, check out my other post here.