Ammarah Ahmed   

Service leadership has one metric: are the people in your team better off than when you found them? Not just financially. By career trajectory. By the roles and opportunities they take on. If the people who have been in your teams are moving upwards, you are doing your job right. If they are stuck or stalling, it might be time to start examining why. This has always been true; Gen Z is simply refusing to pretend otherwise.

For decades prior, leadership operated on a different social contract. The people entering the workforce were simply conditioned to be grateful for stability, avoid conflict, and defer authority to seniority. “That’s just how things are done” was the message passed on to every newcomer in the workforce.

Gen Z brought in a different lens. They are increasingly disenchanted with leaders who only talk about ethics; 90% of them link their job satisfaction directly to value alignment.1 For them, organisational culture is a lived reality, the environment they navigate daily, not a corporate talking point or hollow values plastered onto office walls. This is not idealism; for them, it’s the baseline.

The most consistent failure in leadership is not strategy. It’s ego. The leaders who cannot hire people smarter than themselves, as they feel threatened by the expertise they do not have, create a ceiling to their own companies’ success. When being challenged is mistaken for being disrespected, the insecurity trickles down and begins to set a precedent that shapes the hiring, development, and retention of talent.

Gen Z’s average tenure in the first five years of their career is just 1.1 years, significantly shorter than that of every preceding generation. This is not because they are disengaged; on the contrary, they simply do not endure poor leadership.

The people who understand and resonate with this will build the organisations worth staying in. The “leaders” who do not will simply keep sending Peakon surveys asking HR to figure out why their best people keep leaving.