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GenZ, bossing isn’t worth it

GenZ, bossing isn’t worth it

The Robert Walters survey that named conscious unbossing

The expression conscious unbossing came out of a recruitment firm, Robert Walters, which at the end of 2024 asked young British professionals how they felt about running a team. Among those under 28, 52% want no part of a middle management slot. A further 72% would rather build a career on their own skills than on the coordination of other people, and 69% dismiss those posts as draining and poorly rewarded. Flat structures appeal to 30% of them, while a mere 14% still see sense in the classic pyramid.

Employers read the situation very differently: 89% of them insist that a company seizes up without a middle layer. That gap between the two perceptions is the heart of the matter, and in Vanity Fair Andrea Colamedici and Maura Gancitano framed it in a way I share. The youngest cohort is weighing up, quite carefully, the terms on which guiding someone is worth the trouble.

What the Deloitte 2026 report says about careers and senior roles

The picture fills out with Deloitte’s annual study, run on 22,595 Gen Z and millennial respondents across 44 countries, with fieldwork between 24 November 2025 and 15 January 2026. Only 6% name a senior position as the main goal of their working life. Steady advancement appeals to 44% of Gen Z and 45% of millennials, roughly a quarter chase fast promotions, and one person in five would happily move sideways, or even down a rung, in exchange for a better fitting assignment.

Anyone filing this under laziness should read the next figure. Some 76% of Gen Z and 67% of millennials admit they do want a position of authority sooner or later. The ambition survives; what shifts is the moment they agree to pay for it. And the price carries precise names, again according to Deloitte: stress and exhaustion hold back half of those questioned, the weight of responsibility stops just as many, and the balance with private life troubles 41% of the youngest and 46% of millennials.

The stress of running a team, measured by Gallup

Gallup confirms how uncomfortable that middle layer has become in its State of the Global Workplace 2026. Among people with a group to coordinate, 45% report a great deal of stress the previous day, against 39% of those who answer for nobody. Daily anger touches 25% of team leads compared with 21% of everyone else, loneliness 23% against 21%. Engagement among them stalls at 22%, a meagre figure even if it beats the 19% recorded for colleagues without supervisory duties.

Whoever runs a department sits between two fires, receiving targets decided elsewhere and having to make them credible to the people who will execute them, absorbing the bad mood travelling in both directions. In Italy the phenomenon tangles with a market where promotions arrive late and the money arrives later still. I wrote about this when covering realistic goals at work and toxic positivity at work, two habits that make the job even less appealing. I lived it firsthand, too, in my startup disillusionment.

Why adapting your style to each colleague is the hard part

Here my own view comes in, formed over years of teams and shared projects. Managing people is a complicated craft, though rarely for the reasons listed on training courses. The real obstacle lies in the fact that a single register works with nobody.

Some need meticulous instructions and feel abandoned in front of a vague brief. Others experience those same instructions as an intrusion and perform far better when handed a problem and left alone. A few ask for frequent feedback, others read it as mistrust. One person needs to hear thank you out loud, another prefers a private message. Expectations also shift with age and professional upbringing, as I observed while writing about different generations at work.

Anyone guiding eight people, in short, has to hold eight relational modes at once and remember which belongs to whom. All of it while delivering their own projects, because in lean organisations the middle lead produces exactly like everyone else.

Active listening takes time, and time is scarce

The competence holding up the whole scaffolding goes by the name of active listening. It means staying quiet while somebody lays out a difficulty, resisting the urge to offer a fix after four words, restating what was understood and checking that the understanding is real. Simple enough to describe, gruelling in practice, above all on a day already fragmented by meetings and notifications.

Listening costs minutes, and minutes are the resource missing from anyone with a group to follow. My suspicion is that the deeper reason behind the disaffection recorded by the statistics hides right here. Young professionals watch their leads racing between commitments without ever finishing a conversation, and conclude that the model holds no interest for them.

What my son taught me about handling a group

I have to admit that my most useful abilities in this area arrived through no master’s degree. They arrived through motherhood, which trained me to recognise the right moment to step in and the one where keeping quiet works better, to tell a request for help apart from a request for company, to negotiate without humiliating anybody, and to hold someone else’s frustration without throwing it back. I already told this story while writing about how to be effective with kids and teams, and the overlap still strikes me as substantial.

The insight is not mine alone. In Italy the MAAM programme, devised in 2012 by Riccarda Zezza and Andrea Vitullo, works on exactly this ground and turns parental leave into a training path on relational skills. Among its first two thousand participants the abilities involved improved by up to 35%, and 85% declared they felt better resourced afterwards. Given that Italian companies invest around a billion euros a year in soft skills training, according to the Istat data the project cites, valuing a gym that already exists at home strikes me as anything but eccentric.

Authority is moving from the title to recognised skill

The conclusion drawn by the Vanity Fair writers convinces me. Standing is migrating away from the org chart towards demonstrated expertise, and whoever controls their own calendar weighs as much as whoever carries an impressive business card. As a freelance, that shift concerns me closely, and I watch it play out every day among the clients I work with.

An awkward question remains. If nobody accepts the middle layer any more, that buffering function either disappears or lands on somebody else, perhaps on people less prepared for it, or on software with little grasp of active listening. The generation refusing command on today’s terms has a very strong case. Making those terms acceptable, though, falls to whoever designs organisations, and so far I see very few building sites open.

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Chiara Bonifazi