The New Reality: Evolving Succession Planning for Today’s Workforce (Part 2)

Disclaimer: We use the term Gen Z to describe broad workforce trends. These observations are not meant to overlook the individuality of each person from this generation. Respecting each individual’s uniqueness is a value we strongly hold.

Gen Z: Who Are They?

Gen Z workers were born between 1997 and 2012. Their expectations of work, leadership, and career progression have been shaped by a distinct set of formative experiences:

• Economic instability—including the 2008 recession and the financial impact of COVID—created family stress, rising student debt, wage stagnation, and hiring freezes. As a result, Gen Z places a high value on security and risk awareness.
• COVID-19 disruptions occurred during key developmental years, interrupting education and socialization. Early exposure to remote work and heightened mental health strain normalized expectations for flexibility, well-being, and adaptability.
• As the first fully digital generation, Gen Z expects speed, access, and personalization, with little tolerance for inefficient systems. They lead all generations in AI adoption, while simultaneously worrying about AI’s impact on their jobs.
• Constant exposure to global crises and social issues through social media has heightened their focus on ethics, sustainability, and inclusion.
• Watching others experience burnout, delayed milestones, and empty culture promises, Gen Z has redefined success away from title and hierarchy, setting clearer boundaries around workload and availability.
• As the most diverse generation in history – race, gender identity, family structure, and worldview – inclusion and psychological safety are not preferences—they are expectations.
• Growing up with public, continuous feedback of likes, follows, and comments has increased self-awareness, but also anxiety, shaping how they experience performance, recognition, and criticism.

What This Means for Leading Gen Z

Meeting Gen Z’s need for clarity, purpose, and psychological safety can feel inefficient or overly accommodating to some leaders. Yet failing to meet these expectations risks disengagement and attrition—particularly among high performers.

Gen Z tends to be less loyal to organizations, extending trust only when their well-being is visibly supported. This includes:

• Ongoing feedback
• Transparent and fair performance criteria
• Clear separation between coaching and evaluation
• Explicit connection between individual roles, team outcomes, and organizational purpose

Their tenure is typically shorter unless work is purposeful, flexible, and development driven. Skill acquisition matters deeply—but only when it is clearly linked to future opportunity.

Rather than viewing careers as a linear climb, Gen Z evaluates work as an ecosystem. Many prefer expert roles, project leadership, or flexible advancement over traditional people-management paths. They resist control and respond best to leaders who coach rather than manage.

Gen Z is highly capable and motivated—but unlocking that motivation requires leaders to rethink long-standing assumptions about authority, advancement, and success.

Gen Z in the Leadership Pipeline and Succession Planning

Gen Z is already in the leadership pipeline. According to a recent McKinsey study, many hold first-line manager, project lead, and informal leadership roles. Yet only a small percentage aspire to senior leadership.

They are willing to lead work, but they are acutely aware of the cost of leadership. Burnout, emotional load, and the expectation to manage people on top of individual performance make traditional management roles less appealing.

Research consistently shows that Gen Z brings strong succession potential when intentionally developed, including:

• High emotional intelligence
• Inclusive leadership behaviors
• Comfort with complexity and change
• Digital and AI fluency
• Strong ethical awareness

The challenge is not capability—it is timing, design, and framing. Succession planning must account for how Gen Z experiences leadership, not how prior generations assumed it should be experienced.

An article by Korn Ferry describes ways for organizations to make leadership more attractive to Gen Z: https://www.kornferry.com/insights/featured-topics/leadership/how-to-develop-a-generation-z-leadership-pipeline

• Clearly define the manager role—and mean it. People leadership cannot be a side job.
• Reframe leadership as coaching, focused on unlocking potential and enabling collaboration.
• Reduce administrative burden through automation so leaders can focus on people, not paperwork.
• Develop the skills that matter most, using experiential, relevant training rather than sink-or-swim expectations.
• Measure what motivates, such as engagement, connection to purpose, and contribution to outcomes—rather than relying solely on financial KPIs.

In Conclusion

Gen Z brings energy, creativity, and perspective that organizations cannot afford to lose. Their experiences highlight an opportunity to redefine leadership in healthier, more sustainable ways.

They seek purpose, flexibility, inclusion, and skill development—along with clear expectations and boundaries. Their openness around mental health and ethics challenges organizations to modernize leadership models from ways previous generations may have tolerated, but never truly endorsed.