There is a particular kind of leadership frustration that has become one of the most common conversations in organizations right now. A manager who has done everything right. Consistent check-ins, sets clear expectations, open door policy, and genuine investment in their team’s development. And still, the Gen Z employees on their team feel distant, disengaged, and difficult to reach in ways the manager can’t fully articulate or resolve.
The frustration is real and it is almost never the manager’s fault. It is the result of applying a proven playbook to a generation for whom the foundational assumptions of that playbook no longer hold.
Fortune reported on a Workday study earlier this year that quantified what many leaders have been feeling without being able to name. Gen Z employees are the least connected among all generations in the workplace. They are 12 times more likely to feel completely disconnected from colleagues compared to Gen X coworkers, and 16 times more likely to say they don’t trust the people they work alongside. More than four in ten Gen Z employees rarely or never have conversations with coworkers about anything other than work-related topics. gen z more disconnected distrustful of coworkers than older colleagues so lonely taking off work +2
Most coverage of this research focuses on Gen Z, but this post is about the leaders responsible for changing it.
What The Playbook Assumed
Every management approach is built on a set of assumptions about the professionals it’s designed to lead. The assumptions that shaped how most current managers were trained to build trust, develop talent, and create team cohesion were formed in a specific professional environment.
One where new employees arrived in a physical space and absorbed the informal culture of that space over time. Where the relationship between a new professional and their manager developed through the accumulation of small, often unplanned human moments. The hallway exchange, the post-meeting debrief, the lunch where someone senior said something real, and the gradual, organic process through which a new professional came to understand the unwritten rules of the environment and felt, eventually, that they belonged in it.
That process was never explicit, as it was never documented or designed. It just happened, and leaders learned to trust that it would. Gen Z missed it entirely. The cohort now entering and moving through the professional workforce spent their formative career years onboarding over Zoom, building professional identity in isolation, and developing their understanding of what work looks like through a screen rather than through shared physical experience. The informal infrastructure that every prior generation absorbed without realizing it was simply not available to them.
And then they walked into offices where the expectation was that connection would happen the way it always had. Organically, over time, and through proximity. The isolation crisis is so bad that Gen Z employees are taking time off work to cope with their loneliness. Fortune The playbook didn’t fail because it was wrong, it failed because the starting point had changed.
What The Research Is Actually Measuring
The Workday data documenting Gen Z’s disconnection is frequently interpreted as a generational indictment. A sign that this cohort is less committed, less resilient, or less equipped for the demands of professional environments than the generations before them.
That interpretation is both inaccurate and strategically unhelpful for any leader who actually wants to solve the problem. What the research is measuring is the consequence of a specific structural gap, not a character flaw. Gen Z professionals didn’t choose to miss the on-ramp. They entered the workforce at a moment when the on-ramp didn’t exist. And they are now navigating professional environments that were designed for people who had it.
The 16x distrust figure is not a measure of Gen Z’s attitude toward their colleagues. It is a measure of how much informal trust-building they missed, and how much they are still trying to compensate for its absence. The leaders who understand this distinction lead Gen Z very differently from the ones who don’t.
What The Leaders Winning With Gen Z Are Doing Differently
Across more than twenty years of observing leadership inside global organizations, the pattern I watched most consistently was this: the leaders who built the strongest teams were almost never the ones who found the right management style and applied it universally.
They were the ones who understood that trust-building is always contextual, and that meeting people where they actually are, rather than where the playbook assumes they should be, is the fundamental leadership skill that every other one depends on. For Gen Z, that means several specific shifts in how the most effective leaders operate.
They make connection explicit rather than assumed. The organic moments that used to generate connection between a new professional and their team, the informal conversations, the spontaneous relationship-building that happened as a byproduct of physical proximity, don’t happen automatically anymore. The leaders winning with Gen Z create those moments deliberately. A direct conversation not about deliverables but about how this person is actually experiencing the work. A specific acknowledgment of what someone contributed, not just the outcome it produced. And a genuine expression of interest in where this professional wants to go, not just what they need to deliver.
They name the relationship, not just the role. The most disconnected Gen Z employees are almost universally the ones whose relationship with their manager has remained entirely transactional. Task in, deliverable out, review on schedule. The leaders who break through that dynamic are the ones who signal, clearly and repeatedly, that the person matters beyond their function. That signal cannot be manufactured. But it can be practiced, and the leaders who practice it consistently produce dramatically different results with this generation than those who don’t.
They treat trust-building as their responsibility rather than a shared one. This is the most significant shift, and the one that runs most directly counter to how most managers were trained. The traditional expectation was that trust developed mutually, through reciprocal investment over time. Gen Z, having missed the informal on-ramp that made that reciprocity natural, often doesn’t know how to initiate it. The leaders who succeed with this generation don’t wait for the relationship to develop on its own. They invest first, deliberately and visibly, before there is evidence that the investment will be returned.
They create psychological safety before they expect performance. The research makes clear that Gen Z employees are not withholding connection because they don’t want it. They are craving social connection but not finding it with their office peers. What they are withholding is vulnerability, because they haven’t yet seen enough evidence that vulnerability is safe in this particular environment. The leaders who create that evidence early, through consistency, through genuine acknowledgment, through the willingness to be human rather than just authoritative, are the ones Gen Z trusts fastest. Fortune
The Leadership Evolution The Moment Requires
The Workday research is not a generational verdict, it is a leadership signal. It is telling every manager and senior leader in every organization where Gen Z employees are working that the informal trust-building infrastructure that prior generations relied on is no longer functioning as designed. And that the leaders who wait for it to self-correct are going to continue experiencing the disconnection, distrust, and disengagement the research documents, not because their employees don’t want to connect, but because the conditions for connection are no longer being created automatically.
The leaders who understand this moment are not the ones who have figured out how to make Gen Z work harder or stay longer. They are the ones who understand that this generation entered the workforce carrying a deficit they didn’t create, and who have made it their personal leadership priority to close it.
Not through programs and not through policies. Through the specific, deliberate, repeated practice of making every Gen Z professional on their team feel that they are genuinely known, genuinely valued, and genuinely safe to invest their full professional capability in the environment they’re in. That is what great leadership has always looked like. It just requires more intention now than it used to.
The Distinction That Changes Everything
Gen Z is not disengaged, they are disconnected. Those are different conditions with different causes and different solutions. Disengagement is a motivational problem. Disconnection is a relational one. And the leaders who treat them the same way, who respond to disconnection with performance management, with accountability systems, with the tools designed for an entirely different diagnosis, will continue to get the same result.
The leaders who recognize the distinction, who respond to disconnection with deliberate connection, with explicit relationship-building, with the patience to create the informal trust infrastructure this generation missed, are the ones building the teams that will still be intact and performing when everyone else is cycling through another wave of turnover.
Gen Z doesn’t need a different workplace, they need leaders who understand the one they arrived in.
About Isaac Adesugba
Isaac is a Southern California-based Global People & Talent Management Executive, author of The Ultimate Impression (available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese on Amazon), and Corporate Readiness speaker. He works with professionals, universities, and organizations on the trust and credibility disciplines that determine career trajectory before any formal evaluation process begins.
First 90 Coach, his free AI coaching tool built on these frameworks, is now rebranding to The Impression Advantage Coach, available on the OpenAI GPT Store.
The Impression Advantage Workshop, a half or full-day engagement for new hire cohorts, newly promoted managers, and organizations navigating transition, is available. Request a proposal at careeradvicebyisaac.com.
