As a millennial, I of course spend most of my free time worrying whether Gen Z thinks I am cringe and annoying and boring and uncool. This is the main millennial hobby, the thing that unites us all. As we lurch towards middle age, our eyes are positioned firmly over our shoulder, looking in paranoia and panic at the generation who come after us, wondering if they’re doing it right and we were wrong all along.
The concept of ‘millennial cringe’ encompasses everything from wearing trainer socks to saying ‘doggo’ and ‘smol bean’, from side partings to pausing before you begin to record your to-camera videos. It’s hell out there. What makes it all the more hellish is that there’s plenty Gen Z are correct about, plenty they should correct us on. ‘Doggo’ is stupid, trainer socks fall down inside your shoes. And, perhaps most importantly, we’ve been thinking about work all wrong.
‘Conscious unbossing’ is the latest Gen Z invention to captivate their ancestors: millennials and beyond. Although it sounds like a corporate buzzword, conscious unbossing is anything but. In fact it refers to the trend – noticed by analysts now Gen Z are workplace-age adults themselves – for Zoomers to resist the typical conveyor belt career progression into middle management roles.
At their age (Gen Z typically refers to those born between the years between 1997 and 2012, meaning the oldest among them are now in their mid-to-late 20s) these workers should be ageing out of their typical ‘grad job’ lifestyle and adopting a more resigned, boring attitude to young professional adult life. By our mid-20s, basically, we should be in our ‘Assistant To The Regional Manager’ era – a millennial cringe joke I hope you will allow me.
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But that’s not happening at all. Robert Walters, a talent solutions company based in the UK, surveyed 2,000 people across the country and found that Gen Z – across all industries, from HR to finance – are more likely than any other generation to eschew the greasy pole of professional development. They don’t want to be middle managers, and have little interest or respect for company loyalty and traditional authority, focusing on their own personal development and individual expertise instead. More than half of the Zoomers surveyed reported no desire whatsoever to hold middle management roles, while 69 per cent said that these jobs yield low reward and a huge deal of stress.
Speaking to Forbes some weeks ago, Lucy Bissett, director of Robert Walters North, said that for Zoomers, promotion spelt nothing more than “stress, limited autonomy and a poor work/life balance.”
Honestly, it’s hard to blame them. Although as a culture we’ve long passively accepted middle management as the next step on the way to the top, if we extricate ourselves from that belief and examine what it actually means, there’s little to aspire to. In modern companies it’s middle management, not directors or interns, who often catch the most strays for inter-office drama and corporate incompetence.
History’s ‘fall guys’ are littered with middle management – those expendable enough to get rid of, but important enough to absorb any external criticism that businesses or companies aren’t taking their problems seriously enough on the inside. Middle managers again and again find themselves the individual, human scapegoats for faceless corporations who want to avoid responsibility for their failings, whether financial or reputational.
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And even if you’re not dramatically sacked as a result of a White House investigation, middle management offers boredom and responsibility with little financial reward to offset it.
In another recent survey, three-quarters of middle managers admitted to feeling “always or sometimes” overwhelmed, stressed and burnt out. And 77 per cent reported not receiving any form of managerial training about their hiring or promotion, and around the same amount rarely or never received ongoing training beyond their initial onboarding. Is it any wonder Gen Z aren’t that fussed? Is it any wonder that nearly a third of them (30 per cent) would overthrow the system entirely, opting for a flat office structure over a hierarchical one?
No, it’s actually rather predictable. And yet, the backlash (or at least the sneering reaction) to conscious unbossing has been equally predictable. Gen Z, again like their millennial ancestors, have become a generational fall guy. Zoomers are invariably stereotyped as lazy and entitled, oversensitive and socially awkward. As they’ve entered the workforce, Gen Z’s negative reputation has only increased. They leave early, they job hop, and they always want more. More flexibility, more perks. More of the things that those generations before them never got, or perhaps never felt comfortable enough asking for. And rather than taking a moment to reflect on why they never felt empowered to impose a healthy work/life balance for themselves, many have instead redirected their ire towards Gen Z – “why should it be so different for them when we had to deal with it?”
Conscious unbossing is positive in that it reveals a fact we already all know to be true, even if we’re not quite ready to address it yet: the traditional way we think about ‘work’ is outdated and not fit for purpose
There is one obvious answer to the question of why Gen Z see their workplaces so differently to every generation that came before. They came of age as young professionals in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. The early, uncertain flush of a new, post-university life was denied to them, and conscious unbossing is just one of the ways they’ve adjusted their expectations accordingly to deal with that reality. Or, as Bisset puts it: “Younger professionals, having entered the workforce in a largely remote or hybrid capacity ... are less inclined towards complete company loyalty.”
It’s not just the pandemic that has transformed the workplace into a new, uncertain arena. The rise of AI technology in many industries has redefined what it means to have any kind of pride in your own ability, and the post-COVID economy has been shaky, leading to the constant threat of downsizing and redundancies. If your job isn’t given to ChatGPT, it might be outsourced to a cheaper albeit less effective subcontractor.
It’s becoming clearer and clearer to all working-age generations that the future of their careers is dependent on ruthless market forces rather than their own ability or dedication ... and once you know that, it’s much harder to motivate yourself to come in every day and truly believe that a good performance in your morning Zoom meetings (for some reason conducted mostly in-office) will make any difference to your longevity within a particular company or brand.
But still, perhaps I am being too easy on the Zoomers, and too harsh on the capitalist means of production (I doubt this). Surely there are causes for concern in the growing popularity of conscious unbossing. If there aren’t any middle managers, who do we go to to complain when AI technology fails us and directors mislead us?
And if not middle managers, then what is the aspiration? Perhaps predictably, Robert Walters found that for Gen Z, a more appealing area to concentrate on was “brand and approach”, with 72 per cent of those surveyed saying they’d rather be individual contributors than middle managers. This, too, feels very ‘on brand’ for a generation criticised for their individualistic messianic tendencies, and their belief that everyone can be the ‘main character’ of their own lives.
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Although it at first seems somehow subversive to buck the trend of middle management, viewed through the ‘main-character’ lens of a generation basically raised by TikTok, conscious unbossing is just individualism repackaged.
On the surface, it might seem like leaving your office (or logging off Microsoft Teams) at 5pm on the dot reveals a positive attitude to work-life balance, but realistically many Zoomers are simply using those evenings to work on their side-hustles, or the side-hustles to their side-hustles. Individualism and technology has morphed and warped the idea of working into something that’s bled out from office hours and company loyalty. Instead it’s become something more amorphous and sinister. If we can work from home and for ourselves then we can work all the time, forever. If we work for ourselves rather than for a boss we hate, then we can blame ourselves rather than the boss if we’re skint or stuck or bored. And hate ourselves for it too.
Conscious unbossing is positive in that it reveals a fact we already all know to be true, even if we’re not quite ready to address it yet: the traditional way we think about ‘work’ is outdated and not fit for purpose. Work is changing, we need to change with it. But because there is no alternative – certainly no healthier alternative – to the existing system, a sudden dearth of boring, grey, middle managers could have miserable consequences further down the line for us all.
We stare down the barrel at a corporate future where we’ll be stuck conversing with chatbots saying “sorry, I don’t quite understand what you mean” in perpetuity. And the sad reality is, someone will have to step in to save us from that.
At the risk of sounding like the cringe millennial I must accept myself to be, I come with a warning: if none of us are middle managers, then sadly, we’re all middle managers.