Two Percent Is A Pretty Scary Number. Go Ahead, @ Me.

God, that music is so nice and soothing, which, whoa. This week has not been at all. What a week. Can't think of any analogies for it because my head's just all stirred up by it. Hi, I'm Susie Welch. This is the Becoming you podcast. I'm incredibly happy that you're here. Thank you. I love you. And we've got a. Well, here I go again, telling you we've got a really exciting podcast. But this one is because this week has been a week of weeks, and I want to tell you why. And I want the whole podcast is going to be about what happened this week. And look, just to sum it all up, I literally, literally, like five minutes ago, just got off the phone with a national politician whose name you would know. I didn't ask him if I could talk about him on the podcast. So I'm not going to say he called me up randomly because he read op ed that I wrote in the Wall Street Journal about my research, which has a very shocking finding. That's what we're going to talk about this week. And you know, that doesn't happen every day that a famous politician calls you up and says, hey, your finding means so much to me. I really want to talk to you more about it. I actually want to build something around it. I mean, I was, you know, just floored by it. But it's not like he was the only person calling me today. I've heard from about, you know, about 10,000 people this week, all who've had very strong opinions about a very little number. And that little number is 2%. 2%.

So. Well, 2%. Let me tell you what it means. That number was at the center of this piece I wrote for the Wall Street Journal. It ran a few. It ran like, in the middle of the week, but it keeps on running because it's the number one editorial, and they just keep it up there. It has about 1600 comments on it right now. Probably by the time you hear this, it will have 2,000 comments on it. And the 2% is a finding that I had with my research. And we have this because of the values bridge. And the research says if you take a look at the values of Gen Z and then you look at the values that hiring managers want in their new hires, only 2% have the values. Only 2% of Gen Z have the values that hiring managers are looking for. And the headline in the Wall Street Journal, which I did not write, okay, you don't write your headlines. You don't choose your illustrations. The headline Was is Gen Z unemployable? And people's heads exploded. So I want to talk a lot about that today. What I want to do is I'm going to start from zero. I want to tell you what this podcast is about. Very briefly explain the article to you, because not everybody reads the Wall Street Journal and quickly explain to you what the piece said, how it's related to becoming you. And then I want to talk about the comments that came at me. There were four general buckets of them. There were lots and lots of comments. I got lots of emails and phone calls, lots of texts. And then I want to opine about buckets. I want to tell you what I think about what was being said at me. And at the end, I want to tell you something very personal about what this experience has taught me about myself. And so let's get going. At the beginning, as I said, I'm Susie Welch. I'm a professor of management practice at NYU Stern School of Business, where I teach a class about management. But I also teach a class called Becoming youg. And that is what this podcast is about. It's a methodology that helps you discover your purpose. It's about self discovery. It's about career, career planning. It asks you to excavate three data sets. Your deeply held values, your cognitive and emotional aptitudes, and your economically viable interests. It's a methodology. And when you take that data, you put it all together and either on your own in an analog way, or using one of our tools like the Career Catalyst, which is still in beta, you find out what you should do with your life. And that's really good data. Have. That's really good information to have because you don't want to live by default. And maybe you can sprinkle some deliberation on it, but I'm gonna suggest that living by design is a really good place to go. It's when you feel exquisitely alive. I think all of us, our whole lives are in pursuit of what our purpose is. And this feeling like Joan of Arc, who I love so much, whose sword said, I'm not afraid. I was born to do this. And that's a pretty great place to live your life. So becoming you. My class started off with me just up in front of my students, sort of teaching and helping them kind of manually excavate this d data values aptitudes and economically viable interests. But after a couple of years, I began to think about ways that we could, for all lack of a better term, scale, becoming you so more people could Take it. Because there was a lot of interest in it. And one of the things that we needed to scale was the discovery of how you figure out what your values are. So just a second to say what values actually are. Values are your motivations and desires. They're the reasons that you do things. They galvanize your decisions and your actions and behaviors. And you can have values and not live them, or you can have values and you can't live them. And that's. We call that difference between those two your authenticity gap. So a few years ago, I got together with some really smart people and we created a tool called the Values Bridge, which asks you 100 questions and then ranks your values for you 1 through 16. And if you've been listening to Becoming youg for a while, you've maybe taken the Values Bridge. Thank you. You can take it@the valuesbridge.com or you've just followed along with me. You've read the book, and you figured out what your values are. And again, there are 16 values. A lot of times people, when they talk about values, think, wait, aren't there just really two values? Financial security and family? And the answer is no. There's a lot more decisions that we make, a lot more data that we have going on in our mind and becoming you codifies that information and helps you say, okay, these are my top values. These are my moderate values, and these are my peripheral values. I don't really care about that. Well, it so happens that about 67,000 people have now taken the values bridge, and this has given us so much unbelievable data.

Who knew in my life, as a girl reporter and eventually sort of a professor, that I would become such a data nerd? And the answer is, I became one. The data has been fascinating, and people are always talking about the different generations. They're always talking about what people want, need. And people are often making a lot of assumptions about what other people want and need and what other people's motivations are. And not only that, they do a huge amount of judging. Have you ever felt judged for your values? Well, so has everybody else. And we judge, judge, judge. I'm a total values agnostic. Values are not virtues. Virtues are social constructs. They're behaviors that we all agree are very good. All right, nobody's gonna think that kindness is bad or courage is bad or integrity is bad. And so we judge people a lot on virtues. But values are just choices. How much you want to work, that's a choice. How much time you want to spend with your family, that's a choice. How big or small a life you want in terms of how exciting it is, that's a choice. How much you want beautiful things around you, that's a choice. These are all values. All right, long story short, we had a lot of data from the values bridge. My team and I decided it would be very interesting to cut it by generation. And. And we did. We took a look at the top 16 values of gen Z and the data's results were no surprise to me. It showed that the top values for Gen Z. Number one was eudaimonia. That's a Greek word. We use it to describe self care, pleasure and leisure, recreation. All right, and the reason why we use eudaimonia is that if we use the word self care, people will just judge too much. And I'm trying to make my work at least kind of a judgment free zone. So number one for Gen Z is eudaimonia. Number two is voice. Authentic self expression. You want your inside to be on the outside. And then the third top value for Gen Z is non sibi. This impulse to help other people, it's sometimes called altruism, but it's a desire to help others. That's very nice. Right? I mean it sort of touches with the virtue that we all have. Altruism. So.

Then we went and we did a totally separate survey where we found 2,100 hiring managers, people who are definitely in the position to be hiring Gen Z Z in knowledge industries, sort of office jobs, tech, you know, consulting, banking, business in general. And we gave them the list of all the values and all of their definitions. And we said choose out the top values that you're looking for. And it just so happens that they. Again, not really a gigantic surprise, right? What they're looking for in people they hire is achievement, which is the value that says I want success. Other people can see. They want people who really want to learn and grow. That's a value called scope. And number three, they want people who love work for work's sake. Yeah, that's a value. It's called work centrism. I've got it really, really high. I love work. I work eight days a week if I could. So when you crunch those numbers together, as my op ed in the Wall Street Journal reported, it actually ends up being only 2% of Gen Z have those three values in their top values. Okay? So that sound you hear is everybody's head exploding when the piece ran. And you know, I said to my kids before the piece ran, I'm begging you don't read the comments. My kids, they can't stand it. Because the thing is people who have nice thoughts, they don't really generally write in the comments. People have nice thoughts either send you an email or they turn to the person they're having coffee with and say, oh, did you see this interesting article in the Wall Street Journal? But the people who have very negative nasty thoughts or very, very contentious thoughts, they get out their fingertips and they put them on their keyboard and they write them. So you know, there wasn't, it wasn't a big love fest there. But I did get, I did get dozens, if not hundreds of emails as well. And I spent some time with my team going through all the responses to this 2%. This 2% data point which I think has so many gigantic implications. It has implications if you're Gen Z. It has implications if you're a person who hires Gen Z. It has implications if you're a person who works with someone in Gen Z. And it really has implications if you're a parent of somebody who's Gen Z. Okay, so there's not actually a person I can think of for whom this data just doesn't have some kind of importance. So there were a lot of opinions. And so let's go over the different types of responses. So we have a couple of buckets and we're going to hear of the voices of people who sent these comments in. You're not going to be listening to me non stop but I'm going to describe what the buckets are first and then we'll hear some of the comments. So the first bucket and I'm happy about this bucket by the way. There were just gobs and gobs of people who frankly just agreed with the point of the piece, which is that Gen Z has values and they do not, except for 2% overlap with the values that hiring managers are looking for. And there are going to be consequences of that. And it's for Gen Z to decide whether or not they want those consequences. It's going to be harder for them to get jobs or if they take jobs at companies that have the values that they want, they may not have as much affluence as they seek. And there were a lot of perfectly nice comments where people said I see this all the time and I agree with you. And it's, it's something to, that's kind of concerning and we're thinking about. Unfortunately a lot of these comments were not in, published in the Wall Street Journal because as I said, the nice comments Usually come by email. Let's hear from a few people who just generally agreed and then we'll move on. I'm the president and CEO of a large law firm. These people just don't get it and don't want to get it. Yep, this is a very common tone that I got. They're just. They're angry. They're like, yep, I can't stand them. And, you know, here's my feeling about Gen Z. I think I'm often. I'm sometimes, not often, but I'm sometimes accused of not liking Gen Z. I love Gen Z. I teach Gen Z. I couldn't go into that classroom every day. They perplex me. They're not. We don't share the same values. But in general, I mean, even the people you disagree with are your brother and sister. I mean, we cannot be hating on other people in this world. And so I agree with my data. Of course, I don't share this kind of antagonism quite so much, but I get it. And it can be frustrating. I totally get it. And I will say this. I can't stand the Gen Z stare. I get it all the time in class. And I just, I. I just don't. I don't get. I don't get that part of being Gen Z where they just stare at you like, later. Boomer. I don't know. I'm old. I just think it's rude. Okay, all right, here's another one.

Your article in today's Wall Street Journal is spot on. It shocks me how many of these kids think they can disagree with an order and get listened to. They don't get it. They're being paid to do a job, and how they perform will directly affect their continued employment. I've had them be 30 years old and younger. When I told them they were no longer employed, they were first shocked and then started arguing. Incredible. The arrogance.

Here's another one.

I talk to employers. I watch the young employees. I see one in 50 that I.

Would want as an employee. They want money. They dislike the idea of having to work. They were never taught the value of an earned dollar.

They have very little responsibility showing up.

But they all want breaks and raises. All right. To these two people, again, I say thanks for, you know, not challenging the data, which I would is rock solid, by the way. You know, I've observed this, as I've said, I've observed this kind of, you know, this dynamic that's being described here. But you know, the point of my article, I want to be very clear was not to criticize Gen Z. The point of this article was to point out a phenomenon, a cultural economic phenomenon, which is that businesses are looking for one kind of person and the people showing up are a different kind of person. And there needs to either be a bridge built or something needs to happen to address this. Okay? Because that's a big gap. A 98% gap is something that we can't all go oh well about. So I wasn't passing judgment on Gen Z with this piece at all. I was simply stating a phenomenon. That's my job. All right, let's talk about the second bucket. This is the bucket that I would call. Old people have always complained about young people. This is nothing new bucket. All right? And there were lots and lots of messages to the Wall Street Journal to this effect. Try to remember that people said the boomers and millennials were unemployable as well. This article could have been written anytime by any generation. The youth are always bad, according to older folks. Here's another one. You might as well have picked up an article from 20 years ago and 20 years before that and 20 years before that, all the way back to the time of Socrates and slapped a new date on it. I roll my eyes at this kind of hackery that caters to the get off my lawn generation. I suppose this is true that oldsters have always complained about the new stirs. I guess that's always true. Maybe when I was coming up and along that behind closed doors the oldsters were complaining about my generation. I do think a couple of things. There's a magnitude issue going on here. Magnitude. Maybe in the olden days there was a gap with 50% of the newsters coming along. That 50% just were so disconnected from the values of what was being sought. But 2% is a very, very remarkable piece of data. So I think that that's one thing. It's a magnitude issue 98% are presenting without the values that hiring managers are looking for. Only 2% are. Maybe this is as old as Socrates, but I think it's a size issue. But here's a second issue, and it's big, and that is that jobs are going away. Okay, with AI, maybe some jobs are going to replace them, but we don't know where this economy is going. And so if you've got this magnitude of a problem and business may not be able to absorb it because the economy is changing so much, it kind of puts a certain urgency on this data that was not present 10 or 20 years ago when the economy was steadily, the GDP was steadily growing, except for some bad years here and there. You know, Gen Z is saying it's a really brutal job market out there and it is because of what's going on with AI, companies are.

Hiring more slowly because they don't have visibility. And then you put this 2% number up against it. That's where this argument, like, yeah, she's just an old boomer complaining about the youngsters kind of falls apart. That's my reply to this, this very large, I might add, bucket, which is just stop complaining about the young folk. They're going to grow up. Maybe they will. All right. Then there was a third bucket. And I got a lot of this in my DMs on Instagram and there was a, a bit of it on the Wall Street Journal. And basically, to sum it up, this bucket was Gen Zers themselves saying, essentially, don't blame Gen Z for this phenomenon, you oldsters, you bummers, you ruined the world for us. And we're just responding in the only way it makes sense. So in other words, look, this is your bed and you now got to go sleep in it. That's what we're hearing from people who are in Gen Z. I got a DM on Instagram and it upset me so much I deleted it. So I can't. We can't read it to you exactly, but let me paraphrase it. And basically it said, stop writing these horrifying articles. I think it said that essentially to start, it was, I was arrested, so I hit delete. It says, your generation gave us climate change, school shootings, terrorism, racism, LGBT hate. You did this to us and now you want us to live by your values. No, thank you. I think I've captured that pretty well. And I'm. Okay.

I'm processing that. Before I comment on all of this bucket, let's hear from some others who wrote me about it. Here's one from a 23 year old from Los Angeles who wrote me an email. I think achievement and scope should be top values for all generations. But is work centrism a realistic top value for anyone other than, like, hiring managers? I'm excited to build a career and I've been raised to believe that work is work and not necessarily my passion. I know the importance of work, but work centrism seems void of meaning or fulfillment. All right, before we go on, let me just comment on this one. I think this person is basically saying, how can work centrism even be a value? And it is. I was giving a lecture the Other day in class and I had in a guest speaker a person who been in business her whole life and she had just taken the values bridge and she pointed out to the class that work centrism is her top value. It's in my top five values. I know this strikes a whole generation is very odd that you could just love work and that work could have meaning and fulfillment. So I want to push back on this Gen Z' er who shares some values that I have, but also says get out of here on work. And that's really generationally different. I love Gen Z and the changes they are making in our work, culture and society. It's radical and needed. They question the status quo and make their own paths and are very stubborn in doing so. A culture less focused on performance and achievement might be a negative for investors and profits, but it's a positive for humanity in general. Not saying profit or performance is a bad thing, but there is a balance. No one dies happy they spent their life achieving more. People want fulfillment and meaning, not financial growth at any cost to their actual lives. Okay, I have to push back on this. I have to push back on this. I hate the line that everybody always has, which is no one is ever on their deathbed saying, I wish I worked more. You know what? I might be on my deathbed saying that. I mean, I don't like the presumption that everybody's on their deathbed saying the exact same thing. Okay, you know, I wish I'd been with my family more. Some people, yeah, but this is the whole thing about values. Values are choices and they're not for you to impose on anybody else. So here we have a person saying, you know, no one wants to, no one dies wanting they achieved more. I don't know. I think my husband died wishing he had kept on achieving. I mean, if achievement is a top value and it truly is a top value, you may very well be on your deathbed wishing you were achieving more. So don't put your Gen Z doesn't want us to put our values on them. Don't put your values on me. And then people want fulfillment and meaning, not financial growth at any cost. Well, that's not exactly true because lots of people have affluence as their number one value. And who are you to judge if they're not hurting anybody? So this presumption that Gen Z's values around self care and voice and balance should be shared by everybody is just as doctrinaire as telling us that we shouldn't have the values that we have. So I kind of push back on this. Gen Z has every right to their values. What I don't think anybody has a right to is to tell any other generation what their values should be. But we should all accept that there are consequences to our values. There are consequences to my values. I saw my kids less than they probably would have liked. All is forgiven. But every value has consequences. And if your values are self care and voice and helping people, then maybe there's going to be a consequence that you're not going to also have maybe the wealth that you want somewhere in your list of values. So there are trade offs in life and I don't think we should be mad at each other about the trade offs. But if you also want to have a meaningful high paying job.

Whether or not you can hold fully express the values you have, it's a question you have to grapple with where you end up. I don't care. Not my business. But it is a question to grapple with. All right, the fourth bucket was about blame, blame, blame. And the bucket was who's to blame for this phenomenon. And well, it's a big wide net that everybody cast. A lot of people blame parents. Then there was the blaming of education and then finally the blaming of government or politicians. Let's hear from some of the finger pointing people who responded to my Wall.

Street journal piece achievement 61% wish they had less of it in their lives. The consequence of a generation of parents giving gold stars and trophies to everyone just for showing up. People crave honest feedback. An entire generation has been let down by not giving it to them.

Okay, so that's the very typical of the comments blaming the parents. Parents coddled their kids. The thinking goes, they never made them work hard, they never made them understand there were consequences. And now you've got kids who are, who want to, you know, take care of themselves and lay around and blog about their personal lives and then they wonder why they can't get jobs. So a lot of blame on parents. It's possible. It's definitely possible. I mean, but you know, parents aren't the only thing that raise you, friends, raise you, raised your culture, raises you, society and your times raise you. But I'm not going to take parents off the table. My kids are not Gen Z. I definitely had an impact on them and their values. But I think one thing that most parents don't do is even talk to their kids about values. And if parents are to blame, parents are going to be the ones holding the bucket anyway. Because what's going to happen is the kids that they raised to not want to have high achievement are going to be needing their help financially to live in this world. So if parents reaped it, they're going to sow it. All right, here's somebody else blaming education.

No surprise here. The younger generations have not been STEM and have not been taught the realities of the physical or economic world. They have been indoctrinated to believe that the wonderfulness is derived from liberal fantasies. They have been declared by liberals to be the most educated people in history because they have been awarded college degrees. As in every everybody is a winner, just as they were taught as children. But most degrees are useless in reflecting practical education. Further, due to the destructive appearance of social media and constant video gaming, they are socially incompetent. What could they possibly offer someone that is trying to create and market products and or services? The only thing that they are good for is an education as determined by other educators demanding that they be able to regurgitate their indoctrination or the government.

All right, I don't agree with everything in this comment, but I certainly agree with some of it, and that is that education is not very practical these days. And in my classes at nyu, they are taught a lot of and look, NYU is a fine, fine business school and they're taught a lot of theories about leadership and about managing. And then they come into my class on managing with purpose and I'm like, let's just take off the gloves here and talk about what it's really like. And I think that it's very important that they learn the theories that they do. Their education would not be complete without it. But I'm very happy to be there and say let's talk about what it's really like when somebody screws up at work and you have to let them go the right way. And let's talk about how hard it really is to hire and fire properly and everything else that's messy about really being in business. And I think that just in General, K through 12 education does not do a good job of giving kids language to talk about what they should do with their lives. So I'm not like breaking any news stories here by saying that education is kind of a mess. Whether or not it's the reason for this dynamic that we're seeing, it's going to be right along there with parents. I mean, something caused it. So let's throw education in while we're at it. And then finally we have some people who blame social media, video Games has been making people socially incompetent. And this is the territory that my esteemed and colleague John Haidt, who I truly revere, writes about in the Anxious Generation. He has incredible data. Hard to argue that social media and gaming have not played a role in where people find themselves today. And then there's people who just sort of blame the economy writ large. And I spoke to this a little earlier when saying jobs are going away with AI and they basically say this is happening because jobs are going away and they're throwing up their hands and, and saying why should I fight and change who I am to go after jobs that don't exist anyway? It's a very meta blaming but they basically say that almost the Gen Z has no choice in this matter. They're just responding to gigantic economic forces that are out of their control. And you know what? All of the above may be true. And again, I didn't write the article to sign blame or responsibility. I didn't. That's not my area of expertise. My area of expertise, such as it were, is to help people identify their values, their aptitudes and their economically viable interests and in doing so create lives of design, create lives that they want to live, that make them feel exquisitely alive in a very tough time in a very, in a very complicated economic environment. You know, that's my lane and I'm staying in it. I'm not going up to the lane where I say and now I want to explain why the world is the way it is. But I can and do have data that says, hey look, this phenomenon's going on. Hiring managers are looking for these three values and Gen Z has these other values over here and there's only 2% overlap. The fact that that number and the size of it is making people so rattled is even more data for me. It makes me want to dig deeper into our data. But I'm not, I'm not here to address the root causes. I'm only here to help individuals get to their area of transcendence to their purpose. That's, that's, that's my, the role I'm playing in all this. And it was a little bit, you know, this week it really felt like a little bit like please don't shoot the messenger. And I think that this is the last thing I want to talk about which is kind of this firestorm, this, you know, being at the center of people just coming at you left, right and center with strong opinions and, and then there's sort of people like, who come out Sort of like my academic credentials and ask, you know, isn't she just the wife of Jack Welch? Why would we ever listen to what she had to say? I was like, well, okay.

You know, I've done some other things in my life, although I'm very proud to have been Jack's wife, you know, I have the credentials to have conducted this research. And so there's always a number of people who even just come at me that way, you know, and.

It actually made me think about this thing I've done with becoming you, which is I put myself in a certain place in the conversation where people end up talking about me and they talk about my work. And I didn't have to write this article. It's not like I was stupid. I understood that this article with this data point was going to certainly cause conversation. And I even, you know, the day before it came out, we knew it was coming out, I actually said to my team, buckle your seatbelts. Don't read the comments. And so I knew it was coming. But there's a value called luminance, and that's the desire for fame to be known. And for me, it's kind of a moderate value. It's not like I, I don't, I, I'm. It's not a peripheral value. It's not like I don't, I want to, I don't want to be off the grid. I like being part of the conversation. It's one of the reasons I admire, say, Martha Stewart so much or Oriana Flachi, as these were women who, who were willing to take with a certain kind of fearlessness, take the, you know, the shit that comes with saying, I have an opinion and I have something I want to say. And when you stand up in male or female and say, I have an opinion, I have something I want to say. You have to be ready for people to say, I really disagree with you. And I don't like the fact that they say, I disagree with you and I hate you. I just think we all should stop saying that. I think part of what the values bridge language does is it allows us to say we have different values. Let's see if we can build a bridge between our understanding of them. I mean, that's part of what I want to do. But I think that if I'm going to keep doing with what I do.

And people are going to keep talking about it the way they've been talking about it, there's such a big upside to that, which is it's really exciting. It's wildly gratifying, you know, to have people say to you, your work really matters. I love what you're doing. But you know, what comes in with that is that people always say crummy things, too, you know, And I come to peace with it. I'm doing this thing. I believe in this thing. And actually a wonderful thing happened towards the end of the day when I was feeling kind of overwhelmed. I got this message. I want to read it. It's from a person who I actually know because I gave a speech to her organization and she wrote me saying this. Susie, comments received on your Wall Street Journal opinion piece today confirm my belief and personal experiences that in one's professional life, one, it's never easy to be out on the leading edge or here, substitute bleeding edge due to the ferocity of the comments. And two, those who feel most threatened tend to be the most condescending and hurtful and actually more accurately, snarky in their comments. Susie, take them all as compliments. You hit a nerve and are pushing the boundaries. So I'll take that. I'll take being on the leading edge. I'll take them all as compliments. And I think that's where I'm going to land with this. And actually.

When you are in the process of becoming you, you are stepping out of your comfort zone by definition, and you are kind of on the leading bleeding edge of becoming you. And there are going to be people who come for you, and they're going to be people who challenge you, and they're going to be people who are threatened by what you are doing and discovering about yourself. And either you're in or you're out. Either you believe in you and what you're doing or you don't. And so I'm going to hold myself up as kind of a case of a person who finally got the courage to do something scary and what I believed in. And I'll take it. I'll take it. You know.

That number is 2%. I say a lot of other things that make people uncomfortable. Go ahead me all you want. I'm ready to talk. I'll see you next week. I'm Susie Welch.

And this show is produced by the amazing, amazing and fabulous Mikey Robley, Aliza Zinn, Issa Lampson and Hallie Reiner. And if you liked what you heard, and I'm on my knees praying that you did, follow me at Susie Welch across all my platforms, Everywhere, Instagram and LinkedIn and even TikTok, although somehow TikTok doesn't seem to work for me. And don't forget to leave a rating and a review below because a lot of people have. And I love you people who have. It's not all my children, because there's just too many of them. I will see you next time. And until then, keep becoming you.