The so-called “Gen Z stare” has attracted a lot of attention in the media recently, especially in regard to workplace situations.
The Gen Z stare is a vapid, amused, or annoyed look that young people sometimes give their elders. And in the workplace, most of the management team is going to be over forty and therefore an “elder”.
I’m not sure that there is really anything new here. Watch a teen movie from the 1980s. You will see teenagers from the Reagan era giving older adults similar looks (often accompanied by eye rolls). Keep in mind: those teenagers of the 1980s are now late middle-aged adults in their 50s and early 60s.
The point being: young people have always believed that older people are fuddy-duddies, not current, old-fashioned. If those adults would only get with it, already!
Older people have always believed that young people are too arrogant, and need to spend more time learning the way things are done, versus expressing their opinions.
Both viewpoints are right and both viewpoints are wrong. It depends on the context. The tug between tradition and change is as old as civilization itself.
But in the workplace, the situation is less ambiguous. The workplace is not going to change for the new hire right out of college. Change is going to happen in the opposite direction.
That’s why I’m not a fan of videos like the one recently published by MS NOW, entitled “Did You Just Get the Gen Z Stare at Work? This is Why.” The video asserts that today’s young adults were brought up in a “participatory” culture, and—therefore— don’t cope well with “hierarchy”.
Here’s a newsflash: you could have said more or less the same thing about young adults entering the workplace in 1990. Here’s another newsflash: those young adults of 35 years ago had to change and adapt to the workplace. Today’s young adults will have to change and adapt, too.
The workplace, whether we like it or not, is all about hierarchy. Just ask anyone who’s ever held a job for any length of time.
-ET