"I'm never hiring a Gen Z again..."

“I’m never hiring another Gen Z ever again…”

“Why’s that?”

“They can’t hack it. They don’t have a work ethic. They just don’t understand what this job requires. I’m sick of picking up the slack.”

She was an intelligent, successful, hard working Gen X business owner. 

Like all of us, she noted how busy, busy, busy she was, citing growing industry competition and relentless client demands alongside the push pull of home life. 

It made perfect sense to cut emerging generations out of the equation. Given the frustrations they caused, it was her most profitable and productive path forward.

• Gen Z = pain point. 

• Pain = inconvenient. 

• Remove pain point = problem solved.

I have this conversation in one form or another every single week - usually with frustrated, tired executives. Good people who’ve had a gutful. 

Of what, though? 

My experience is that these executives are 3-5 clarifying questions away from the realisation that they have made a whole bunch of ASSUMPTIONS that are not serving them - or their staff - well.

Here are a few of the things I ask in response to comments like these:

• What, specifically, are you asking Gen Z to ‘hack’? Was this explicit in their terms of employment and onboarding?

• Is this ‘what the job requires’? Or is it ‘this is what we’ve always tolerated.’?

• Is it possible that the issue is not generational so much as FORMATIONAL?

• If you could have advocated for yourself as a graduate worker to make your professional experience more positive/psychologically safe/rewarding, would you have done it?

• Who is responsible for coaching and scaffolding younger workers who don’t have the benefit of 10-30+ years experience like you?

The pace and competition of the marketplace don’t leave a lot of time for pressured executives to interrogate their premise. Surely they’ve earned their perspective? Lived experience, 10K hours, busy, busy, busy and all that…

It’s easier to pathologise an entire generation than it is to stop and consider what their choices, behaviour and presenting skills-gaps are actually telling us…

What if Gen Z isn’t resisting work so much as interrogating the design of work?

The problems in today’s workplaces - burnout, disengagement, AI atrophy, attrition, multigenerational tension - are not disconnected symptoms. They are structural feedback loops that reveal how leadership and workplace systems have lost moral imagination, trust, psychological realism and operational coherence.

But we can fix it. I’d love to talk to you about how. 

K x

Generation Z is the future and the best feedback loop.