Generation Z is driving a generation of bosses to quit our jobs

I don’t know at what point I became frightened of my own team. Perhaps it was the moment I overheard my personal assistant refer to me as a “stupid old Boomer” to someone on the other end of her mobile phone. (For the record, I’m 48)

Or maybe it was the day one of them went running to HR with “mental health” issues after I commented that their work “wasn’t up to the usual standard”.

Then again it could have been the time I was summoned to a meeting by a terrifying 25-year old middle manager who presented me with an entire PowerPoint presentation of why he deserved more money – despite having had a pay rise six months earlier.

All I know is that one minute I felt in control of the office that I had calmly ruled for close to half a decade; the next I felt wildly out of my depth with a generation of work staff that I neither understood, nor, in the end, wanted to.

I have worked in the “creative industries” my entire professional life – and been a boss for almost half of that time.

That is to say, I have always had someone to manage since I was about 26.

I had wanted to be a boss. Not because I understood what it entailed exactly, but largely because of what it represented.

A boss felt like progress. A boss was the place you landed when you were doing things right and pushing yourself forward.

A good boss demanded respect. (Of course in the end, none of this felt true any more.)

For the first few years I enjoyed being a leader. I really did. Most of my colleagues were hard-working Gen- Xers or hustling older Millennials.

We generally spoke the same work language.

If a project needed finishing, they graciously worked late. If criticism was given they saw it as a sign of progress rather than a mental health assault.

Of course there were differences. Millennials in particular appeared to need a huge amount of reassurance, for a start.

I presided over an office of about 30 young men and women and almost all of them demanded constant “check-in” time.

Where did I see their career going? Could I recommend a mentor? Was there ever any more money on the horizon?

Still, millennials craved success in the same way most of my generation were. And so I understood them. Sort of.

The difference being they needed, nay demanded, success very quickly.

They wanted to be a manager by 25 (the PowerPoint presentation colleague had basically spent two years literally harassing me for a promotion).

They wanted big flashy titles. (You do know ‘director of digital affairs’ doesn’t mean anything I said to one junior who had spent all weekend brainstorming a new title with her mother, who had never worked a day in her life.)

Meaningful experience, meanwhile, was not something they were interested in, despite me explaining that a slower and steadier ascent to the top might serve them better.

But still, we muddled by.

It was only a few years pre-COVID that things started to change as a harsh new type of worker entered the corporate world.

More defiant, more aggressive, more demanding and far more sensitive, these were younger millennials, some even straying into Generation Z territory – the generation born between 1997 and 2012.

Newspapers and academics called them snowflakes: coddled, entitled individuals whose method of assault was online “clap backs” – a sharp, often public response to even the mildest disagreement – and who treated HR like a drop-in centre.

We were warned, mainly from “cancelled” academics who had found themselves jobless after mixing up a student’s pronouns by accident, that they were entering the workplace and they were bringing their new, bewildering (translation: terrifying) ways with them.

By 2019 I had an entire blizzard of snowflakes in my office.

As millennials had hustled their way to greater heights, I was left with a work-shy, bolshy group of individuals who believed companies should work for them rather than the other way round.

The first thing that struck me was how vocal they were.

They moaned about everything: the company they had chosen to work for (“stuffy”, “boring”, “not very cool” I was told on more than one occasion).

They moaned about all the senior men in the building, branding them “pale, male and stale” – though I did have to remind them that the pale, male and stale man that owned our company was in fact paying their wages.

They eye-rolled when I said the wrong thing – “guys” instead of “folk” or “them” instead of “he/her”. They also spoke in a weird therapy-speech that made exactly zero sense to me.

They needed to “process” everything. They felt “triggered” by the slightest thing – changes to a deadline, presentations, clients who raised their voice occasionally.

They constantly needed to “peak their truth” or “own their space” and everything seemed to be “toxic” – men or everyone in senior management.

At least a third of my team appeared to have one of the ‘A’s as me and my older colleagues took to calling it, which is to say autism, ADHD or anxiety.

And not one of them had formal diagnosis from a doctor.

And so I spent my days tiptoeing round them.

No one stayed late even if we had pressing deadlines. (I was too scared to ask them in case they went scurrying to HR citing “unreasonable work demands”.)

Often I would find myself alone in the office working on a pitch they’d not bothered to finish, when I could hear cackling from the pub across the street.

Still, they didn’t care what I thought of them because none of them wanted my job.

Instead they thought I was a corporate slave who had handed over my entire life to “the man”.

Wanting to be the boss was about the uncoolest thing you could admit to.

So what did they want? I wasn’t sure.

We saw the world of work so differently that managing them and their careers was impossible.

I was brought up to believe it was what you could do for the business that mattered; they on the other hand believed it was what the business could do for them.

Post COVID most refused to come into the office. So most days of the week it was just me and senior managers with a bunch of empty desks.

Two colleagues had decided to move to the other side of the country, meaning they could only come into the office one day a week. (HR told me I had to try to make it work.)

Another informed me she was WFI. What does that mean? I asked. “Working from Italy,” she told me.

They wanted a salary without responsibility as well as the freedom to work how and where they wanted.

For them it seemed a job was just a way to pay the bills and fund a life they wanted to live.

There was also an expectation that the company’s ethos had to align with theirs.

After George Floyd’s death in the US, managers who failed to put a black square on their Instagram in support of Black Lives Matter were deemed racists. (I only have 159 followers and they are mostly family and neighbours who thought my account was broken when I put my black square up.)

They demanded gender non-specific toilets even though 80 per cent of our company was female and after-work “mental health” support groups for which we had to buy snacks and non-alcoholic wine. (Four people turned up to the first one.)

I tried to explain to more senior managers that a company where everyone’s beliefs were identical was not a company, but a cult.

No one was interested.

They were all too scared or had teenagers back home who were filling their heads with the same nonsense.

Managing them was exhausting. And I wasn’t alone in feeling this way.

One female leader in my company left to become a yoga teacher. She told me she had spent so long supporting her employees’ mental health, she needed to sort out her own.

And I can give you at least ten other stories that ended the same way.

In the end I too walked away to set up my own business.

I felt overworked, under-supported and unprepared to deal with a workforce that I had not been trained to deal with.

But underneath it all, I also realised that maybe, just maybe, some of them had a point.

Was being the boss of a large corporation really the answer to a life well lived?

Was ambition such a great thing?

Was working a ten hour day ultimately going to serve me and my family? These are questions I’m still trying to figure out…