Why Gen-Z Workers Are Consciously ‘Unbossing’

Company leaders aren’t happy with their Gen-Z employees. Sixty percent said in a recent survey they’ve fired Gen-Z team members that they hired this year. But these leaders could have another problem on their hands: The Gen-Z employees who are sticking around might not be interested in stepping up within the organization — otherwise known as unbossing. That’s according to recent data from Robert Walters, a global recruitment company, in a trend the company deems conscious unbossing. Fifty-seven percent of the U.S. Gen-Z workers they surveyed said they weren’t interested in becoming middle managers. Rather, 60 percent are opting for an “individual route to career progression over managing others.” Why? According to 67 percent of the Gen-Z respondents, middle management roles “are too high stress with low reward.” Managers have indeed had plenty on their plates in recent years. Seventy-six percent of HR leaders surveyed by Gartner in 2023 said their managers were “overwhelmed by the growth of their job responsibilities” — which, according to experts who previously spoke with Inc., include managing return-to-office policies, AI developments, and more. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that in a LinkedIn survey this year, 47 percent of managers said they felt burned out — more so than directors or individual contributors. Adding to this is the fact that many Gen-Zers are already unhappy with their roles. According to data from the workforce management platform Deputy, shared exclusively with Inc., hourly Gen-Z employees experienced twice as many frustrating shifts in the year’s third quarter as they did in the first. Despite their reluctance, 43 percent of Gen-Z workers do expect that they will need to move into a middle management at some point, according to the Robert Walters report. And that ascent to management is already underway: According to ADP, Gen-Zers now make up 3 percent of the managerial workforce compared with just over 1 percent in 2020, though their share remains small overall. Nevertheless, 40 percent of surveyed Gen-Z workers remain resolute in their “unbossing” and “adamant” that they will “avoid middle management altogether,” instead set on taking a career route more focused on “personal growth and skills accumulation.” This could have serious repercussions for the companies that employ these workers, says Sean Puddle, managing director of Robert Walters New York, as middle managers are often the “driving force” behind an organization’s growth: “If you’ve got a load of people who aren’t interested in moving up into that middle management function, it can actually end up limiting your growth and, or, stretching the managers that you have got really, really thin.” But there are ways that companies can boost their Gen-Z workers’ excitement about their work and thus discourage unbossing. According to Deloitte’s latest Gen-Z and Millennial Survey, 86 percent of Gen-Z respondents say a sense of purpose at work is “important to their overall job satisfaction,” and work-life balance ranks as the top priority when choosing an employer. There are also ways that companies can better support and prioritize their managers, Puddle says, and in turn make the role of middle managers more appealing to younger workers. “How are they going to give more autonomy and more decision-making power to that group of people? Are they able to make sure they’re assessing workload regularly so that people aren’t just getting overburdened?” he says. “And what are some of the mechanisms that they could deploy to try and ease that overburden, if that happens?” BY SARAH LYNCH