Gen Z-ers are becoming bosses. Here's what that means for everyone else

Members of Generation Z are now in their late 20s — and they're climbing the corporate ladder with their own expectations about the workplace

It was an unwritten deal for decades: do good work, keep your head down, stay loyal, and you’ll eventually be rewarded.

Generation Z isn’t playing by those rules. The group, which includes people born between 1997 and 2012, has its own expectations about the workplace.

“The future of work is barreling toward a collision point between Gen Z’s expectations and the old guard of corporate culture,” said Anthony Onesto, author of "The New Employee Contract: How to Find, Keep and Elevate Gen Z Talent" and vice president at performance management software company 15Five. 

“Gen Z isn’t afraid to challenge norms,” Onesto said. “Their approach to work, boundaries, and transparency is rewriting the rulebook." Meanwhile, he said, AI is ramping up pressure from boards and investors who want leaner workforces and bigger margins.

But leaders should beware, he added. Cutting too deeply doesn’t just trim costs — it risks eroding the company’s entire customer base. This shift isn’t just about technology or demographics, he said, but a fundamental change in how organizations create and maintain value.

“Companies that ignore these realities will struggle to retain both talent and customers,” Onesto said. “The organizations that survive will be the ones that recognize people are not just resources to be optimized away, but are core to the business itself. Gen Z’s demands for purpose and flexibility aren’t a passing trend; they’re the new baseline for what a healthy workplace looks like in this era.”

Why Gen Z leadership is different

With the oldest Gen Zers now 29 years old, it's becoming more common for them to move into leadership positions — in addition to founding their own companies.

This young generation has plenty of critics.

"Gen Z really are the hardest to work with — even managers of their own generation say they’re difficult," reads a 2025 headline in Fortune. 

Sometimes “different” feels difficult. Maybe it’s less about Gen Z being difficult, and more about them being shaped by different conditions, including:

Almost unlimited access to instant information

The Covid pandemic and remote work

Some economic instability and seeing institutions fail

Constant technological change and the emergence of AI

“Many Gen X $TWTR leaders were shaped by scarcity, bureaucracy, and delayed recognition,” said Robert Bates, a business strategist and author of "Why We Can’t Stop Caring." “They learned to read the room, manage ambiguity, and survive systems they did not fully trust but still believed they had to navigate."

Gen Z, he said, enters the workforce to a very different arrangement. “They came of age inside public feedback loops," said Bates. "They're more accustomed to immediacy — immediate access to information, immediate comparison, and immediate visibility of inconsistency. That does not automatically make them wiser, but it does make them less patient with symbolic leadership.”

Older leaders might interpret it as entitlement, but Gen Z would say it’s simply a demand for logic and clarity. Gen Z expects to know why decisions are made.

The coming leadership tension

“The coming tension is not simply older leaders versus younger workers; it is a clash between two leadership formation environments,” Bates said.

This tension is something most organizations are going to have to navigate for the next several years.

“Gen Z often learned that credibility comes after endurance,” Bates said. “Gen Z is more likely to believe credibility must be legible now.”

That difference matters, he said.

“A Gen X CEO may think, ‘You earn trust over time.’ A Gen Z leader may think, ‘If the system is opaque, politically distorted, or emotionally tone-deaf, why should I trust it long enough to earn anything inside it?’” Bates said. “That is not just impatience. In many cases, it is a rational response to the world they inherited.”

People seem to overcomplicate Gen Z’s desire for more transparency, said Brennan Kolar, the 28-year-old founder of tax advisory and financial insights firm Atlas CPA Index.

“This generation leads with openness because salary data and company reviews are available on their phones before they walk into their first interview,” Kolar said. “They don't understand why a manager would hide information from a team that can Google $GOOGL it anyway. A lot of senior leaders built their authority on being the person who knows things other people don't, and I'm not sure how many of them are ready to give that up. 

The firms that get it right, said Kolar, post compensation ranges before anyone asks. "They explain the reasoning behind a policy instead of citing how it's always been done. The companies that are getting it wrong are still running orientation the same way they did in 2014 and wondering why people leave after 18 months.”

For current leaders, adapting to the influx of Gen Z leaders and workers starts with reframing the many stereotypes about them, Onesto said.

“When older generations see laziness, entitlement, or job-hopping, what’s really happening is ambitious boundary-setting, a hunger for personal growth, and a non-negotiable demand for work-life balance,” Onesto said. “Be curious and learn more about the generation before making assumptions or labeling these folks. What they are asking for aren’t weaknesses; they’re high-performance strategies that raise the bar for everyone.”

The future of the C-suite will "resemble a group chat," said Chris Bajda, founder of wedding retailer GroomsDay. "Companies that continue to hold onto rigid hierarchical structures are losing younger talent to organizations that are flatter and faster," he said.

Bajda said he's seen this happen in his industry, with vendors that gave Gen Z employees a seat at the strategy table earlier being able to retain them longer — and create better, more in-demand products.

“If you're a current leader who is still treating your youngest hires like they need five years to have a real opinion, you are losing out on a great deal of value," he said. "You should give them [an opportunity] and see what happens.”

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