How not to manage Gen Z

I don’t like personality tests and I don’t like generalizations about generations

I frequently see articles on LinkedIn and elsewhere about how to manage Gen Z, or (most recently) things like why managers complain about this or that with Gen Z.

I don’t like those articles, because I don’t believe that every Gen Z person has all those characteristics, and – in my experience – that’s where this stuff leads.

It’s like saying that all men are a certain way, or all Germans are a certain way.

There are averages. I’ve been told that men like things and gadgets one standard deviation more than women do. But a female friend loves to drive race cars and owns a shop that specializes in Porches. She likes gadgets and machines and stuff more than most men.

An anecdote – like my story about my friend – doesn’t make the average false. It just shows that you can’t apply the average to every individual in the group.

I’m sure there are perfectly true averages about Gen Z, and I’m also sure there are plenty of Gen Z people who defy those averages. Both things can be true.

The same concept applies to personality tests. I don’t like it when people are pigeon-holed because they scored such and so on Myers Briggs.

Just because you lean towards extroversion doesn’t mean you’re always an extrovert in all situations. Things are more nuanced than that.

Now that I’ve criticized this whole business, I do believe there are two ways these sorts of articles can be valuable.

First, transform the question from “how do you deal with Gen Z?” to “how do you deal with people who have such-and-so characteristics?”

For example, people who were quarantined during a particularly consequential part of their life – like their last couple years of high school, for example – are very likely to show certain symptoms. Some people say they lack soft skills.

But not all of them. You can’t say, “You’re Gen Z, therefore …”

You can and should learn how to manage someone with poor soft skills – whether they’re in Gen Z or not. Similarly, you can learn how to deal with different personality traits without having to pin labels on people, or force them to take unscientific personality tests.

I can learn how to manage a sensitive person without making grand generalizations about which demographic group is more sensitive than another.

That’s exactly what you don’t want to do, e.g., “You were born this year, so you must be like this.”

That’s horrible. Don’t treat people that way.

Second, these kinds of articles can alert you to potential problems that aren’t on your radar at all.

For example, my friend Janet Granger tells me that Gen Z (on average, of course) has different values than other generations. They may not believe in putting in extra hours to get ahead, and they may not accept the idea of doing the grunt work to climb their way up the hierarchy.

It’s too easy to assume that everybody is like you and values the things you value. These “what Generation Whatever wants” articles can point out important possible differences so you can keep your eye out for them.

But to reiterate my main point: by all means learn different management tools to deal with different sorts of situations, but don’t prejudge people based on what group somebody puts them in.