How to Lead Young People

One spring morning not too long ago, Stef Okamoto was about to email a presentation summarizing her direct report’s work to a senior executive. Stef is a manager at ServiceNow, a large technology company, and to her it was a mundane action, like ones she had taken countless times. But to her 23-year-old direct report, Melanie Welch, it was the most nerve-racking moment of her short professional life. The presentation represented months of Melanie’s work, and her mind was racing: What if she had made a mistake? How would that affect her reputation? Without a track record at the company, Melanie thought, this moment could define her. What, if anything, should Stef say to put Melanie at ease?

Every day around the world, people face situations like this: Something they do in the normal course of business has taken on much larger meaning for a junior employee. I’ve heard this from partners at law firms, who comment on junior associates’ work, only to be told that they are too harsh. I’ve heard it from grocery store supervisors, who ask their teams to pick up the pace, only to be told that their workers resent being called “lazy.” Again and again, managers say one thing, young employees hear another, and there’s a clash over the interpretations.

Such defining moments could start young employees down a cycle of anger, indignation, and disengagement that culminates in underperformance or even separation. Because of this, many managers— even those invested in creating a positive workplace—perceive the next generation as flawed, entitled, or simply exhausting. This reflects a broader problem known as the generational divide: Older generations feel as if they are constantly catering to the needs of young people, only to be shamed or blamed for not doing enough.

Interestingly, over the last two decades, a scientific revolution has been brewing in the study of young people, and it speaks directly to the causes and solutions of the generational divide. This revolution doesn’t focus on superficial differences in “kids these days” like social media or smartphones. Nor does it claim that young people are flawed and deficient thinkers who can’t comprehend the consequences of their actions. To the contrary, it argues that the source of young people’s frustrating behavior comes from their normal—and even positive—developmental needs.

What are these developmental needs? The new consensus was spelled out in two major reports. One, “The Promise of Adolescence,” was issued in 2019 by the National Academy of Sciences. The other was issued around the same time by the UCLA Center for the Developing Adolescent (CDA) and the FrameWorks Institute. The UCLA report explained that from the start of puberty (usually around age 10) until the attainment of a stable, independent status in society (usually by around 25), young people tend to prioritize learning how to be socially successful. They desire feelings of status and respect, from both peers and mentors, earned by making meaningful contributions or demonstrating prestige.

This consensus has profound implications for how managers interact with young employees. It suggests, for example, that when a young person overreacts to a seemingly mundane event at work, it’s not a sign of a decline in the work ethic of “kids these days,” or evidence of their being overly sensitive or entitled. Instead, it could mean that the event threatened their social status or their reputation.

Because the young person’s brain and hormones made them highly attuned to that social information—sometimes in ways unforeseen by their managers—it caused a conflict that needed to be addressed.

This new consensus suggests that if we can understand their perspectives, then the same motivational drives that lead to problematic behavior can be channeled into helping young adults make important contributions to organizations, families, schools, and society. According to Ron Dahl, a University of California, Berkeley neuroscientist and a CDA cofounder, we shouldn’t fear this adolescent sensitivity to social status and respect; instead, “we should help youth learn to harness it for good.”

The Origins of Our Generational Divide

The clash between the generations has been repeated between almost every “ruling” and “upstart” generation throughout human history. In the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle trashed the young in his Rhetoric: “The young are in character prone to desire and ready to carry any desire they may have formed into action. They are fickle in their desires, which are as transitory as they are vehement....Their ambition prevents their ever tolerating a slight and renders them indignant at the mere idea of enduring an injury.”

When each successive generation grows up, it looks down on the next, as if we all forget what it feels like to be young. When most adults think about their own youthful indiscretions, they do so with a wink and a laugh. But when the same people think about those in today’s generation doing something similar, they hypocritically sound the alarm about a decline in morality in the next generation.

This illusion of moral decline, discovered by Harvard University social psychologists, causes us to think that if only we could stop the young from straying from the path of their elders—for example, by undoing advances in culture or technology—then we could return society to its glory days. But that focus blinds us to the underlying cause of our conflict with young people.

In a clever scholarly paper published in 1987, Daniel Lapsley and Robert Enright compared public writings about adolescence going back to the 1880s. During a depression or recession, they found, adults tended to endorse the incompetence model, presumably to disparage youth who were competing with adults for jobs and status. In wartime, however, we see “a more rugged, adultlike portrait of youth,” Lapsley wrote. After all, we need them to work in factories, fight in battles, and maintain stiff upper lips. Pejorative stereotypes about youth, then, are not fixed realities; they’re often used by society when adults need to regain control. Luckily, we can choose another perspective.

A Barrier of Mistrust

When people who have less power in a setting also have their status or respect questioned, Stanford University psychologists Geoffrey Cohen and Claude Steele have suggested, a barrier of mistrust is formed. They tend to assume the most unfavorable and antagonistic reasons for a questioner’s behavior. With their status at stake, they dissect each word, looking for deeper meaning.

The barrier of mistrust helps explain the generational divide. It makes young people subtly read between the lines of each comment a supervisor makes, trying to determine if the older adult is disrespecting them or not. In other words, young people focus more on the unsaid part than the said part. When a teenager’s mother asks, “Did you brush your teeth?” the child interprets it as, “I think you’re so incompetent that you won’t even remember something so simple as brushing your teeth”— even though the mother never said the second part. Given that interpretation, the anger makes sense: It is humiliating to be told you’re incompetent.

In 2014, I published a paper with Cohen on a simple but effective solution to this predicament. We call it “wise feedback.” It involves giving critical feedback accompanied by a clear and transparent statement about the reason it’s being given—namely, the belief that the young person could meet a high standard with the right support. It dismantles the barrier of mistrust.

We tested it in an experiment with seventh-grade social-studies teachers. Students wrote first drafts of five-paragraph essays about their personal heroes. Next, teachers covered the essays with critical comments and suggestions: You need to put a comma here. Explain this idea further. Rearrange this sentence. Before the students got the essays back, though, we attached handwritten notes from their teachers—either a note with wise feedback (“I’m giving you these comments because I have very high standards and I know that you can reach them”) or a neutral note.

We hoped that wise feedback would motivate students to work harder on revisions. But even we were surprised by how strongly they responded: 80 percent of students who got the wise-feedback note revised their essays, compared to 40 percent in the control group. When you hold young people to high standards and make it clear that you believe they can meet those standards, you are respecting them because you are taking them seriously, and they rise to meet the challenge because being respected is motivating. In that way, you’re working with young people’s developmental needs, rather than against them.

Mentors in Action

How should Stef Okamoto have responded to Melanie Welch’s worries about her report being filed to senior management? Many managers would think, If she were a high performer, she wouldn’t need any support. I call this an enforcer mindset. In it, a manager focuses solely on enforcing a high standard, not on supporting a young person’s potential to meet it. Other managers think that if their employee seems sensitive, it means they can’t handle the pressure. I call this a protector mindset. In it, a manager focuses on protecting the young person from distress by lowering expectations.

If you knew Melanie Welch’s background, you would realize how far those approaches were from what she needed. Melanie had been an honors student and three-year starter for the Boston College women’s lacrosse team. Every year of her career, BC dominated the competition and played for the national championship. At ServiceNow, Melanie wanted to be an overperformer. Leaving her to her own devices, without a feedback loop, wouldn’t help her meet this need. Nor would lowering expectations; after all, it’s unlikely that Melanie’s strength and resilience, cultivated over a decade of playing her sport at the highest level, evaporated the moment she entered corporate America.

Luckily for Melanie, Stef was deeply committed to the idea that young people are capable of important contributions when managed correctly. Stef didn’t bestow status and respect on Melanie; using the mentor mindset, Stef cleared a path for Melanie to earn them. First, Stef maintained exceptionally high standards. The project she assigned Melanie to was vital to gaining support from senior management for a new strategic agenda, and she expected Melanie to own it. When Melanie shared drafts, Stef was critical. No detail was too big or small. Second, Stef was supportive. She affirmed Melanie’s job well done, but she wasn’t just a cheerleader; she was also a lifeboat. When Melanie needed a second opinion on how to present to a specific executive, Stef made sure she got feedback from colleagues who’d recently pulled off strong presentations.

When Stef clicked “Send” on the report, she knew the work had been through the wringer and would make Melanie look good. She was right: The presentation is now influencing the company’s strategy.

Bridging the Workplace Divide

In interviews a few years after Whole Foods CEO John Mackey sold his company to Amazon for $13.7 billion, he had some harsh criticism for the next generation. Whole Foods had had a terrible time hiring and retaining young people in retail positions such as staffing the checkout line or the stockroom. This baffled Mackey. To his mind, he offered a good wage and purposeful work. After all, the Whole Foods philosophy is aligned with many of the values of the next generation, such as environmental sustainability and the ethical sourcing of products. Mackey even developed a term—conscious capitalism—that would seem to appeal to the Gen Z workforce. Even so, “We’re really straining to get people hired,” he lamented. “I don’t understand the younger generation. They don’t seem to want to work.”

What was happening at Whole Foods? A misunderstanding of young people. Mackey has said that when he and others from the Baby Boom generation started out, people expected to dislike their jobs for a decade. Pay was compensation for suffering. Meaning, or purpose or fulfillment, is what you spent your money on—or what you got in your thirties, if all went well. In the meantime, you put up with nonideal working conditions. For the current generation and likely future ones, however, dollars are a poor replacement for self-respect.

Interestingly, other retail companies have built management plans that put the developmental needs of young employees front and center. Meet Ole, the embodiment of the mentor mindset in retail. He’s in his late thirties, he didn’t go to college, and he manages the most overperforming branch of the Obs supermarket chain in Norway. Under Ole’s management, his branch climbed from the 50th percentile in total profits to become the third-ranked store nationwide, despite having a much smaller client base than other outlets. Ole doesn’t have a problem with slacker teens, and if he does, they shape up quickly. Ole had made his store impressively profitable while also making it the kind of place where people wanted to work. In extensive interviews with Ole, his assistant managers, and his frontline employees, I saw an eager and resilient young staff, always ready to seek out feedback.

A 23-year-old employee told me that when she first started working at the store, straight out of high school, she was paired with an older woman who was jaded. The older worker taught her bad habits, like hiding in the break room or waiting to be told to do anything. Ole called the young employee into the office one day and gave her a tough talking-to. He said she wasn’t living up to the supermarket’s standard and needed to shape up. When I asked the young employee if she’d felt offended, she looked at me like I was a lunatic. She told me that Ole was right; she hadn’t been living up to her potential, but she wanted to. Ole also made it clear to her that she had the potential to be a leader at the store. Now, four years later, she’s eager and proactive. She is shadowing her manager to prepare for a promotion and attending a leadership academy Ole sent her to. Ole’s high standards didn’t provoke a war of words because his meaning was clear: I care about you and your future, and that’s why I’m upholding this high standard.

“It’s fundamentally about trust,” Ole told me. And how does he build it? “Everyone knows I want the best for the store and the people,” he answered. Even when he’s harping on the day’s sales numbers on the walkie-talkie, the meaning is clear: “I care about you too much to give you no standards,” he says to his employees. It’s the grocery store version of the mentor mindset.

Is Ole’s success just a byproduct of Norway’s socialist culture? No. Similar supermarkets in other countries also do a much better job motivating their young retail employees than others. For example, Wegmans, a grocery chain in the Eastern U.S., leads with this philosophy: “Every day at Wegmans, you’ll have the opportunity to learn and grow. Because when good people get together and work toward a common goal, they can achieve anything.” That sounds a lot like wise feedback. Wegmans has half the proportion of low reviews that Whole Foods has on the job-search site Indeed. Frontline retail workers attest that the company “respects you as a person.”

Think about that. In the old worldview, an employer is paying you for your time, so they don’t have to respect you. If you don’t work hard, you’re lazy and violating the terms of the contract. It’s a fair economic exchange that the employer acts to enforce. But the mentor mindset values each party’s needs. It respects people and their purposes first, and so people are willing to work hard and stay loyal.

David Yeager, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the cofounder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. He is the author of 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.

From 10 TO 25: The Science of Motivating Young People: a Groundbreaking Approach to Leading the Next Generation—And Making Your Own Life Easier by David Yeager, Ph.D. Copyright © 2024 by David Yeager. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

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