CURATED READS FOR GEN Z—AND THEIR Z-CURIOUS COLLEAGUES

first up

Welcome back! This week, we’re making the case that Gen Z should rethink middle management.

Nobody ever wants to be in the middle. See: airplane seats, birth order, an argument.
 
For Gen Z, the same may be true for middle management in the workplace. The oldest Gen Zers are on the cusp of advancing out of entry-level jobs and into middle management roles—and they’re not happy about it.
 
The aversion to becoming a manager has less to do with the clichéd (and wrong!) stereotype that Gen Z doesn’t want to work and more with how Gen Z feels about doing meaningful work.
 
For decades, “middle manager” was something of a pejorative term. It was as if people who worked in the middle were doing so not because they wanted to but because they got stuck there. Middle managers often have a lot of responsibility but not a lot of power, and their jobs tend to get harder when a business is disrupted, as the Wall Street Journal puts it. 

Middle management jobs don’t just get harder during volatile periods—in some cases, they get eliminated altogether. In a bid to cut costs and make operations more efficient in an uncertain economic environment, some organizations have thinned their middleman ranks (forgive the gendering).

That might seem like a smart strategy in the short run, but there are plenty of reasons to protect the middle—and, for Gen Z, a reason to aspire to it at some point. We even wrote the definitive book on it. In Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work, McKinsey partner Emily Field and her coauthors Bryan Hancock and Bill Schaninger found that without middle managers, organizations have a hard time retaining top talent, transitioning through organizational change, and connecting people and tasks to keep a business operating.

It turns out that middle managers are often a wasted resource at work. There tends to be a mismatch between what middle managers value about their role (such as developing their teams) and what they think their companies value about their role (such as individual-contributor work). That can mean a disconnect in how a manager’s performance is measured. Reconciling the real value and purpose in a management role with how success is measured in it is the key to making middle management great again.
 
That brings us back to Gen Z. Homing in on the most purposeful parts of a new job is a proven way to make nascent managers happier at work. 

“It’s a tough job,” Field said in an interview for McKinsey’s Author Talks. “But it also can be an incredibly rewarding job if the work that the manager is doing is connected to their purpose and passion. . . . Getting to drive results, getting to do more than they thought was possible. That’s a pretty exciting value proposition for a middle manager.”

VISUALIZE IT

Whether they’re a boomer or a zoomer, employees have a lot more in common when it comes to work than they think.

WAIT, DON’T SCROLL

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NOT US; STILL GREAT

Monet money. Some Gen Z art collectors are looking for a greater connection to the works they are buying rather than for monetary value alone. That’s despite spending 30 percent of their net worth, in some cases, on the art itself. [Nylon]

Snoopymania. The beloved Peanuts character is the latest icon to become a Gen Z obsession. [WSJ]

CROSSWORD

— Edited by Alexandra Mondalek, editor, New York