Gen Z Leadership: Growing Up Faster Than Ready
GenZ is stepping into leadership roles earlier than any generation before it. But it comes with a price they pay: the rise is fast, the learning is backwards, and the cost is quietly emotional.
There is a moment in every career when you realise that you are no longer being watched. You are being trusted. You are no longer the one taking notes; you are the one being questioned. You are no longer the learner in the room; you are the one expected to have answers. For many young professionals today, that moment arrives far earlier than they ever anticipated. One day they are part of a team. The next, they are leading one.
Gen Z is entering positions of responsibility at an unprecedented pace. Digital skills give them leverage. Youth gives them speed. Opportunity clears a path. But something crucial has not moved just as quickly. Guidance. The old rhythm — learning slowly, observing quietly, failing safely — has been replaced by promotion without preparation. Leadership often arrives before readiness.
Being young in charge is not glamorous. It is uncomfortable. You carry authority before you carry confidence. You manage people before you fully know yourself. You are expected to lead while still privately learning how to stand. Outwardly, you appear capable. Inwardly, you worry whether you are keeping up. It is confidence in public and confusion in private.
One of the hardest parts of early leadership is not work. It is people. Especially people older than you. You inherit teams with more experience. You supervise colleagues who have been in the organisation longer than you have been in the workforce. Respect has to be earned, not assumed. And no training manual tells you how to correct someone older without sounding insecure, or how to assert authority without appearing arrogant.
Leadership does not come with instructions. It never has. It was always something learned through proximity — watching how tough decisions were made, observing how conflict was handled, listening to small stories that never made it into corporate handbooks. Apprenticeship was not formal, but organic. It is precisely this process that has quietly disappeared.
Today, Gen Z is learning leadership not through mentors but through content. Podcasts. Online creators. Career influencers. Social media gurus. Five-minute videos promising 10 life lessons. Leadership, for many, has become something to consume rather than something to practise.
Previous generations learnt leadership by watching managers fail and recover. Today's generation watches curated success stories. They see clarity without struggle, confidence without visible doubt, and decisions without consequence. What is missing is the messy middle — the uncertainty, the learning, the awkward silences, the emotional burden of responsibility. Leadership ends up looking simpler than it is. Until you have to practise it.
Leadership is not learned in theory, but in tension. In conflict. In difficult conversations. In the space between options when none of them feel safe. An online video cannot teach you how to sit with a team member who feels let down. A quote cannot prepare you for the loneliness of a hard call. Wisdom is not downloadable.
The workplace has also changed. For Gen Z, mistakes feel more visible than ever. Feedback trails live forever in chat histories. Decisions are flattened into threads. Errors do not quietly disappear. They linger digitally. There is little room now to fail anonymously. Every misstep feels amplified. No wonder confidence develops more slowly when scrutiny arrives early.
What often gets mistaken for fragility is in fact awareness. This generation understands reputation instinctively. They grasp visibility as a currency and risk as a constant companion.
Many young leaders I meet are not afraid of responsibility. They are afraid of failing without a safety net. They want feedback, not flattery. Context, not control. They are not asking for protection. They are asking for permission to learn.
Organisations, however, have become better at promoting than preparing. Capability is rewarded faster than character is built. Results are tracked more carefully than judgement is grown. And so we end up with high-potential professionals carrying leadership weight with very little structural support.
At the same time, senior leaders are stretched thin. They are under pressure to deliver, grow, adapt, digitise and defend against disruption. Mentorship becomes optional. Presence becomes fragmented. Leadership, ironically, becomes transactional at precisely the moment when younger leaders need human guidance the most.
This is how the apprenticeship model collapsed quietly — not by intention, but by neglect.
The cost of this neglect is invisible at first. It shows up later as brittle confidence, shallow decision making, overreliance on validation and underdeveloped judgement. Leaders who were accelerated but not anchored. Promoted but not prepared.
Gen Z does not lack ambition. And they know it.
They consume leadership content not because they are lazy, but because they are hungry. They listen to strangers because they have no familiar voices. They scroll through wisdom because they cannot find mentorship. And while digital learning can educate, it cannot accompany.
Leadership is not about information. It is about initiation.
It requires someone to say, "This part is hard. Everyone struggles here."
It requires someone to say, "Do not outsource your judgement."
It requires someone to say, "Being liked will never be the same as being trusted."
No algorithm can replace that.
Being young in charge was never meant to be easy. But it was never meant to be lonely either. If corporate India wants leaders who endure rather than burn out, it must rebuild apprenticeship as a norm and not treat mentorship as a luxury.
Srinath Sridharan is a corporate adviser & independent director on Corporate Boards. Author of Family and Dhanda. X: @ssmumbai. Instagram: @AuthorSrinath
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