We’ve Been Wrong About Gen Z

They’re not the problem. We are.

Every conference. Every dinner. Every WhatsApp group of senior professionals after 10 PM.

Someone will bring it up.

“These Gen Z kids, yaar. No loyalty. No patience. No respect for hierarchy. They’ll ghost you mid-project and post about work-life balance on Instagram the same evening.”

Heads nod. Chai gets sipped. The lament continues.

I’ve been in those rooms. I’ve nodded too. And I’ll be honest — I still do, sometimes. But somewhere between the nodding and the drive home, a question started bothering me. We’ve been having this conversation for five years now. Same diagnosis. Same frustration. Zero prescription.

So either Gen Z is a problem with no solution — or we’ve been asking the wrong question all along.

Let me start with what I think is actually happening, because I don’t think it’s entitlement. Not entirely. Every generation looks at the next one and says: too soft, too comfortable, too much handed to them on a plate. The seventies said it about the eighties. The eighties said it about the nineties. We got called entitled too — I promise you, we did — and we rolled our eyes and got on with it.

So the complaint isn’t new. What is new is the speed.

Earlier, the generation gap was ten, twelve years. Siblings five years apart were reading the same books, watching the same shows, using the same slang. The world moved, but it moved at a pace humans could absorb. Now? The world is changing faster than a generation can form. If you’re forty and your intern is twenty-two, you’re not one generation apart. You’re five, maybe six generations apart — in terms of technology, information access, cultural reference points, even the apps on their phone. A twenty-year-old today and a twenty-two-year-old from three years ago are already living in slightly different worlds.

We went from bound books to Google to ChatGPT to Claude in twenty years. The last two of those twenty were the most disorienting. And we’re asking why a person who grew up in this acceleration doesn’t think the way we do?

That’s not a Gen Z problem. That’s a physics problem.

Which brings me to the part I find hardest to say out loud. I was sitting one-on-one with an intern — maybe six months in — working through a cross-border transaction with some tricky transfer pricing implications. I’d made an assumption early in the discussion, the kind you make after twenty years, almost on instinct. We kept building on it. Twenty minutes in, he paused.

“Sir, I think there might be an issue with that starting point.”

Politely. Almost apologetically. And then he walked me through exactly why. He was right. Not because he’d seen more deals than me. Not because he had deeper experience. But because he hadn’t yet learned to trust assumptions the way I had. He still questioned everything. And in this case, that beginner’s eye caught what my expert eye had smoothed over.

I didn’t say much in the moment. But I sat with it on the drive home. Twenty years. And a six-month intern had just shown me a room in the house I thought I knew completely.

Was it uncomfortable? Deeply. Was it, quietly, also the most interesting professional moment I’d had in months? Also yes. And that’s the thing nobody says out loud in those conference rooms. We’re not just frustrated with Gen Z. We’re a little unsettled by them. Frustration is what we reach for when we don’t want to admit we’re unsettled.

Here’s what I think is actually true, even if it’s hard to say. They’re not waiting for our permission anymore. Not for knowledge, not for opinions, not for confidence. Information that took us a decade to accumulate — they have it at twenty-two. The judgment, the wisdom, the scar tissue that only comes from being wrong in front of a client — that still takes time. That part hasn’t changed. But the raw knowledge gap that used to keep juniors quietly deferential? That gap is gone. And we built a whole culture of authority on top of that gap. No wonder it feels shaky.

So what do we do? I’ll be honest — I don’t have a clean answer. I run a boutique firm. I tell myself we’re better placed than the large ones to figure this out — fewer layers, faster feedback, real problems from day one. Maybe. But I haven’t cracked it either. Most of our systems — appraisals, hierarchies, how we define growth — were designed for a world where people stayed fifteen years and moved up slowly. That world isn’t coming back.

What I’ve found works, even partially, is much simpler than a new HR policy. Just — actually talking to them. Not mentoring. Not managing. Talking. Asking what they see that I don’t. And then sitting with the answer even when it stings — the way it stung that afternoon, in that one-on-one, when a six-month intern quietly dismantled an assumption I’d carried into the room with full confidence. I’ve walked out of conversations with interns about AI, about the future of practice, about where entire industries are going — with more questions than I walked in with. At forty-plus, that doesn’t happen often. It’s disorienting. It’s also, if I’m being honest, a little energising.

Because the problem isn’t that they’re unmanageable. The problem is that we’re trying to manage them with tools built for a different era. And when those tools don’t work, we blame the material instead of the tools. Our frameworks need to change. Our HR systems need to change. The way we define loyalty, growth, contribution — all of it needs rethinking. I know how big that ask is. I know how much of our identity as senior professionals is wrapped up in the way things have always been done.

But every generation that came before us thought the same thing about us. That we were too much. Too fast. Too unwilling to pay our dues. And eventually — reluctantly, uncomfortably — they made room. Now it’s our turn. The question is whether we do it gracefully or get dragged into it.

You can’t manage a generation you haven’t tried to understand. And understanding — real understanding, not the performed kind — requires something most of us spent twenty years not needing.

Humility.

Not as a strategy. Not as a leadership framework. Just as a simple, honest admission that the room got bigger while we weren’t looking. And there are people in it who see things we don’t. That’s not a threat. That’s actually the point.

Are we ready to be handled by them?