Simon Sinek discusses generational change in the role of work and how Gen Z struggles with stress, confrontation, and emotional professionalism. He argues that diminished community institutions have shifted social needs onto workplaces, leading younger employees to expect purpose, friendship, political alignment, and therapeutic support from employers. Consequences include confrontation avoidance, poor stress management, over-reliance on empathetic coworkers (who can burn out), resignations, and a need for employers to "hold space" with empathy amid ongoing societal uncertainty.
Chapters
Millennials were difficult, but this younger generation, they're more activist, which, when it's, you know, when it's like climate change, we love it. But, like, when you're like the intern and you're sending an email to the CEO going, I don't think that you like. It's like, you know, there's other ways to do that.
It starts with empathy. It starts with empathy. And we have to understand.
It doesn't. It's for better or for worse, the changing nature of what work has become in our lives. If you go back a bunch of decades, it used to be that you got your sense of purpose from church, you got your sense of community from bowling league.
You knew your neighbors, you barbecued with them on the weekends. And work. I was loyal to work, and work was loyal to me. At some point, I'd get a gold watch aside, there's an entire generation that when I talk about the gold watch, they have no idea what I'm talking about. Right? That's how much the world has changed.
And work was simply a place that I made a living to pay my bills, but I still enjoyed my. It was still loyalty. Over the course of time, church attendance is down. Bowling clubs don't exist anymore. We don't talk to our neighbors. We become very insular. And what's happened is all of that pressure is now being put on the office. I now expect my company to be the place where I get my purpose, the place I get my friendships, the place I get my community, the place I get my social life. Now we've also added the place. You have to agree with all of my politics. Right? That's a new one. And it's even now, especially during COVID it's gone up even higher, especially for this young group, where you also have to be my therapists, my therapy. I'm going to bring all of my problems to work. And where the idea of emotional professionalism seems to have gone away, you know, you actually see people sitting in meetings like this, and you're like, what's going on? Having a bad day, Right? That's emotionally unprofessional. Right? You can. I want you to bring your emotions to work. I want you to bring your whole self to work. But for the same reason that we exercise emotional professionalism in other aspects of our lives, we also do it at work. So one of the struggles of this young generation is they are not equipped on how to deal with stress. They're just less equipped than previous generations for various reasons, including social media, Internet, and All parenting and all the rest of it. There's many reasons for it, but they're really not good at dealing with stress. They're really bad at dealing with confrontation. They're so confrontation avoidant that they would rather ghost someone, then break up with them after dating them for six months. Right. That they would rather quit their job than ask their boss for a raise. And usually in spectacular fashion, like, you don't value me, you don't pay me enough. You're like, if you just asked, I would have given you a raise. We love you. But they quit because they're just afraid of the conversation. So they're very intimidated by confrontation. They're ill equipped to deal with stress. There is an emotional immaturity, emotional unprofessionalism. Right. And it's not a good thing or a bad thing, it just is. And so us having empathy and understanding that is important. And so it raises the question, how are they dealing with their stress? Not well. And so there's a new phenomenon that I'm seeing happening in a lot of offices where especially young people are finding the one or two empathetic, the empaths on the team. And they're going to them with all of their problems. And it's not the traditional, I hate my boss, I hate my job. Venting about work is fine, I have no issue with that. But it's, I hate my mom, I don't know what I want to do with my life. When am I going to leave my house?
My boyfriend's not working out, my girlfriend's not working out. Every problem in my life on this one or two people at work and we've had it happen on our team. We had three people quit and I got a little team. I got three people who quit because they said they were burnt out. And I was like.
I know how much work you do. What do you mean you're burnt out? So I'm like, do you have another job on the side?
How can you be burnt out? You know.
What I discovered is they were the empaths on the team and everybody was calling them to unload. They were burnt out because they were taking on everybody's stress and they were exhausted. They couldn't take it anymore and they just quit. And when I talked about this publicly, I had a 23 year old come up to me in one of the companies and said, I do that. And so we have to recognize they are struggling in a changing, chaotic, crazy world right now where there's so much uncertainty in this world. Like the world is always uncertain, but my God, it's war and the country's at each other's throat and there's challenge and the global warming and it's just insane. These poor kids and they have no outlet. They don't know how to deal with it. So my, my big challenge, my big. It's a challenge for all of us is how do we hold space for them. And the problem is, is they don't even recognize when we're doing the right thing for them. That's the hardest part. A lot of anger.
But it's, it's gonna, the problem is it's gonna take a bit. Like we're in a period of extreme flux and it's not going to settle for a little bit. It's going to be very bumpy, a very bumpy road for the next few years. There's no right answer and.
