There’s a tendency, particularly in large organisations, to assume that capability grows with seniority. That people need to “pay their dues” before they’re ready for complexity, or before they’re worth developing in any meaningful way.
We hear it less directly, but it shows up in how time and budget are allocated. Senior leaders get coaching, retreats, development that focuses on how they show up in the organisation. Early talent? They get onboarding, time management tools, maybe a personality test.
This isn’t ill-intentioned. It’s often a side effect of busyness, assumptions, or legacy programme structures that haven’t been questioned in a while. But it matters, especially now.
The generation entering the workforce now, Gen Z, is doing so in a landscape that’s fragmented, fast-moving, and often contradictory.
They’ve grown up with political instability, ecological crisis, economic precarity, and a permanent feed of curated success and social comparison in their pockets. They’re more educated and more diverse than previous generations, and they bring a real appetite for meaning and fairness at work.
But they’re also reporting record levels of anxiety, disconnection, and scepticism toward organisational life.
Some recent findings:
Deloitte’s 2024 Gen Z survey found that only 36% feel their employer is doing enough to support their wellbeing.
Almost half would leave a job that doesn’t align with their values.
And over 40% of organisations report difficulties retaining early talent.
It’s tempting to write this off as fragility, or to treat it as an issue of motivation. But it’s more honest, and more useful, to recognise this as the outcome of real structural and cultural tensions, that we beleive you can do something about.
The deeper irony is that the very qualities we say we want in future leaders, self-awareness, the ability to work across difference, systems thinking, resilience under pressure, are rarely invested in until people are well into their careers.
Yet, many of the most difficult dynamics in organisations today, siloed working, hybrid environements, brittle leadership, culture drift, are downstream of development being too little, too late.
This is especially true in multigenerational environments, where people are shaped by very different assumptions about authority, communication, and what constitutes ‘work’. Integration doesn’t just happen. It has to be made possible.
What we’re learning in our work, across sectors and organisations, is that there’s enormous potential in this generation. But it can’t be unlocked through 'best practice' modules or information dumps on learning platforms.
It needs depth.
It needs space to think and connect.
And it needs to treat early career professionals as people already having to make sense of complex situations with limited authority, lots of visibility, and few places to talk about it.
Because all of us benefit when people at every level are more equipped to navigate complexity with integrity and care.
We hear too many generational caricatures in our conversations with clients... boomers as blockers, GenZ as entitled, or fragile. We believe this framing hides more than it reveals. What we need is to take seriously the work of helping people understand themselves and others, in real contexts, with all their contradictions and potential.
That doesn’t have to wait until someone is in the C-suite.
In fact, it probably shouldn’t.
If you're interested in ways to do this, check out our Future // Now development programme