Guest: Kyle Karnes, a coach at CEO Coaching International.
Quick Background: If you’re skipping over Gen Z workers because you “don’t want to deal with them,” you’re letting stereotypes and social media memes cloud your judgment. Gen Z is mission-driven and tech-savvy, and they crave strong leadership that can teach them how to channel their passions into Making BIG Happen.
On today’s show, Kyle Karnes explains why Gen Z may be the most misunderstood and undervalued generation in the workforce and shares best practices for hiring and developing your company’s next wave of talent.
Keys to Managing Gen Z Workers From Kyle Karnes
1. Adapt Your Leadership Model
“ I think that the leadership models that the previous generations are more comfortable with, more familiar with, they really don’t work for Gen Z,” Kyle Karnes says. “The old top-down, hierarchical ‘marching orders’ model really doesn’t work with Gen Z because it doesn’t get them to where they want to go, which ultimately is to make a difference in the world through their work. As a leader, if you want to excite and motivate Gen Z, you have to be transparent and you have to communicate often and consistently. You need to show an authentic interest in them, in their personal development, and you must show them a career path that allows them to visualize how they can develop their skills while making a meaningful impact on the world. Older generations, we tend to compartmentalize work and our personal lives a lot more than Gen Z. It’s really important to understand that they’re bringing their whole self to their work environment.”
Instead of replicating the kind of leadership you experienced as you climbed the corporate ladder, create an environment where that “whole self” can flourish. Opportunities for mentorship and collaboration can help younger workers feel connected to a greater vision and mission. Include younger workers in decision-making so that they feel like they have a voice. And use scoreboards, a strong meeting rhythm, and one-on-one check-ins to make sure your workers understand how everything they do makes a meaningful contribution to BIG.
2. Be Mindful of Life Experiences
You know the stereotypes: Spoiled. Entitled. Short attention spans. Too demanding. Too soft and touchy-feely.
But the reality is that Gen Z has been shaped by some pretty extraordinary real-world events that had a profound impact on how they view the world and their place in it.
The first is the digital revolution.
“These are people who, as long as they can remember, have had the world in the palm of their hand,” Kyle Karnes says. “So at any moment, any question they had, any information that they would like to get access to was readily available. That really has a lot of implications for business leadership today. When I was coming up, I really didn’t expect much communication from the C-suite. But this generation, because they’ve grown up with information at their fingertips, they want, and they expect, to get that communication from the C-suite. And in some cases, if they are not getting that communication, if they’re not getting that information, it makes them question why they’re not getting that information. And that starts to create all sorts of trust issues within the organization.”
That’s not entitlement. That’s inquisitive minds understanding that they don’t know everything and looking to leadership to fill in the gaps. Give Gen Z the knowledge and guidance they’re looking for and they’ll bring that curiosity and creativity to their daily work.
The second BIG Gen Z life event, of course, was COVID. It might be hard for CEOs who spent the pandemic managing pivots and growing through obstacles to appreciate how traumatic the pandemic was for young people, especially if you don’t have kids. Again, strong communication is key to connecting to Gen Z and connecting them to meaningful work.
“If you’re a parent of somebody who’s Gen Z, who was in high school or college when COVID hit, you know how terrible it was,” Kyle Karnes says. “In the middle of such an important developmental phase in their life to basically be locked in their room and separated from their friends, separated from their academic community — it was really hard for them. And there’s a lot of stuff coming out these days that talks about how lonely this generation is. So it’s this paradox where, on the one hand, they’re uber-connected with the world, but on the other hand, they also feel extremely lonely and alone in the world. And I think that drives a lot of the dynamics in the workplace in terms of Gen Z and interactions with the older cohorts. It’s a lack of understanding or a misunderstanding of generational differences, and that often leads to poor communication, which oftentimes leads to a lack of trust. Gen Z need and want to be connected to something bigger than themselves where they can find their place and make their contribution to making the world a better place. As a leader, you need to lean into that.”
3. Hire the Best
On his first day as CEO of an Educational non-profit that exclusively employed college students, Kyle Karnes walked in at 8AM expecting to be the only one there. He found 20 student employees who had been hard at work since 6AM.
“The student president, the student general manager, the assistant managers were all running this huge operation,” Kyle remembers. “There were a handful of students on the phone with customers answering questions, resolving conflicts. There were 15-20 U-Haul trucks being driven around campus by the students, and about 60 students out in the field. And I had nothing to do with it. I just walked in. And they’re already doing this on their own. That was really eye-opening for me because it really showed me how hard they work. And it showed me that they weren’t afraid to try. That’s the thing about this generation that I love.”
While Kyle credits the previous CEO for the company’s training and onboarding, there was also a very rigorous hiring system in place. If your company has had bad experiences with younger workers in the past, you’re probably not working hard enough to weed out the stereotypical Gen Z worker and identify potential superstars.
“ When we hired the students for these roles, we had a process that encompassed four rounds of interviews and took multiple weeks to complete,” Kyle says. “If you were hired as one of our students, that meant that you probably beat out another 20 students for the job. I always made sure that I personally sat in on every final round interview. You need to understand if the Gen Z worker you are interviewing is one of those people you read about or one of the people that I’m talking about that have this amazing potential in them that just needs to be drawn out.”
4. Coach Up Their Soft Skills
A potential downside to Gen Z bringing their “whole self” to everything they do is that sometimes work isn’t what the “self” is prioritizing. Because Gen Z doesn’t build the same kind of work-life boundaries that older workers usually do, they might allow other concerns to push work priorities to the side, even during work hours.
Kyle experienced this difference in how Gen Z views work when he spent an afternoon waiting for a student employee who missed a scheduled shift:
“On Friday he showed up and I said, ‘Everything OK? You were on the schedule Wednesday and you never showed. I was a little concerned.’ And he gave me a quizzical look and said, ‘That’s when the big protest was on campus.’ So I brought him into the conference room and explained to him, ‘If you’d come to me last week and explained that there’s something important going on and you wanted to shift your hours, that would have been totally fine. You do what’s important to you and we will work it out. Make no mistake about it: if you’re supposed to be at work and you don’t show up, that’s not acceptable.’ He looks at me and says, ‘Really?’ He was surprised that it wasn’t acceptable to skip work to go to a protest because all the inputs in his life were telling him that this is the most important thing. He needed a kind of resetting. But once we reset, he understood.”
As a CEO, you may cringe at the idea of helping younger workers learn to “adult.” You’ve made it this far, in part, because you always showed up on time, dressed appropriately, left your emotions at home, and acted like a professional.
On the other hand, at some point in your long career, you probably sat down in front of a computer screen wondering what a “Google” was. Your next Gen Z hire isn’t going to have that problem with ChatGPT and whatever tech comes next.
Everyone needs coaching at some point. Gen Z may just need more help with the soft business skills that previous generations take for granted. Great leaders meet their people where they are, without judgment, so that they can bring out the best in the whole team and Make BIG Happen.
“ Show interest in them in tangible ways,” Kyle Karnes recommends. “Get up from your desk, go walk down the hallway, stop in the cubicle of one of your junior employees, and spend 15 minutes with them. Ask what they’re working on, how they’re doing, what their experience has been at the company. And most importantly, try to find out what motivates them because if you can draw alignment between what motivates them and business interests that you have in the organization, it’s going to be amazing. They’re going to work their tail off for you. You do that for two weeks, and I guarantee you, as a leader, you’ll have a much different perspective on your Gen Z workforce than you have today.”
Top Takeaways From Kyle Karnes
1. Look past Gen Z stereotypes or you might overlook valuable additions to your workforce.
2. Appreciate differences in life experience so that you can harness Gen Z’s unique strengths.
3. Communicate clearly and openly to build trust and set expectations.
Links:
How to Align 4 Generations of Workers to One BIG Vision – CEO Coaching International’s Lew Jaffe shares why your corporate culture should appeal to baby boomers, Gen Zers, and everyone in between.
7 Ways You Can Up Your Leadership Game as a CEO – If you feel like your performance has plateaued, incorporate these seven strategies into your work routine and get back to Making BIG Happen.
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, the firm has coached more than 1,500+ CEOs and entrepreneurs across 100+ industries and 60 countries. Its coaches—former CEOs, presidents, and executives—have led businesses ranging from startups to over $10 billion, driving double-digit sales and profit growth, many culminating in eight, nine, or ten-figure exits.
Companies that have worked with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have achieved an average revenue CAGR of 25.9%, nearly 3X the U.S. average, and an average EBITDA CAGR of 39.2%, more than 4X the national benchmark.
Discover how coaching can transform your leadership journey at ceocoachinginternational.com.
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