Simon Sinek: Are GEN Z The Weakest Generation?

there's no way some of these younger gen zed people could weather such a storm without quitting the definition of what full-time employment is is up for is up for debate that this young generation seems less capable to deal with stress than previous generations that is true and so they're really good at presenting a confidence that they don't have they sound they sound like they have all the answers when they don't it raises the question is that bad the grass is always greener you have people who are going from relationship to relationship to relationship worse from

job to job to job to job and when i was younger you know if you didn't like your job or if you didn't like your boss the bad news was you had to stay there for a year because if you left in anything less than a year you would hurt your cv they would be like why did you leave in under a year you know and now young again particularly young people there's no um there's no stigma to quitting um and it happens sometimes too quickly like if you're confrontation avoidant and i've seen it happen

confrontation avoidant i'm too afraid to ask my boss for a raise so i just quit i've seen it happen right or um i've been here for four months i don't like the culture i quit right or i got in trouble at work i hate my boss i quit like and so people are quitting so much my fear my fear like i don't mind if something's super toxic get the heck out of there most places are not super toxic imperfect yes but toxicity is like a like there's a standard you know and it's a high bar

and um uh or this doesn't fit my values or this disagree with my politics i quit my fear is that if you go if we flash forward five years there's going to be a disproportionately high number of people who have eight jobs in five years and what's going to happen is an employer is going to look at them be like i can't take the risk that you're going to stick around i'm not hiring you you're you sound like an amazing candidate but you're too high risk for me or or and because you've had so many

jobs over such a short period of time you actually haven't stuck around long enough to build up a skill set or know what it's like to manage a storm because you've stuck around in the good times and bailed on the bad times and so you have now been in the workforce for five years but you don't have five years of work experience you have four months of work experience and so i don't want you either because you don't you've never been through a battle you know and i and i and i see it happening um

a young person who's been at a company for eight months uh goes to their boss and says i want to raise i want a significant raise because i'm doing the same job as those people um those people have been in the workforce for 10 years i know but i'm doing the same work as them and i'm doing good work that's true you are doing the same work as them and you are doing good work the difference is i'm not paying them just because they've obliquely been in the the workforce for 10 years i'm paying them

because you know how to hoist a mainsail in calm waters and you can hoist a mainsail in calm waters as well as they can hoist a mainsail and calm orders the difference is they also not always to mainsail in a storm i don't know if you can always domain sail in a storm i pay them more because i know that if if we run into hard times i know that they know what to do and i can trust that we can navigate and i also know that they will teach you how to hoist a mainsail

in a storm it's like the same reason i buy insurance i don't expect my house to burn down but i pay just in case i'm paying them more for a skill set that i hope they never have to use that's why they get more you know one of my fears at the moment which is perfectly linked what you're saying is i have a fear and i've never expressed this openly so this is the first time so don't all come for me at once i have a fear that gen z are the least resilient generation um

that i've ever seen and a lot of it and this sounds so stupid and not evidence-based but if you look at what tick-tock is telling this generation work is and there was a video that went viral on twitter the other day out in silicon valley where it shows like a facebook employer one of the big tech companies she arrives at work in the morning she takes a latte all this free muffins she goes everyone has the free muffin it shows her in a tick tock literally doing like 30 seconds of work then she's out doing

some like pottery making class that work i've put on she comes back to the desk doesn't have 30 seconds of work then she's off to a work social and i i reflect on the storms that my father went through at work and i i just know so deeply inside of me that there's no way some of these younger gen zed people could weather such a storm without quitting um reporting doing a long linkedin post to criticize their employee then quitting employer then quitting and i just i just fear that gen z when when i'm hiring

people that are in that generation i almost need to to go to an extra length just to check that they can cope with a high-intensity culture where demands might come on a saturday because the world doesn't stop on saturdays and sundays uh so i wanted to get your take on that um so let's examine both sides right let's again let's let's think of it what's the balance and what are the costs right um it is a generation that already was starting to ask these questions but covet forced the rest of us ask these questions too

which is what is the definition of work right like what does a full-time job mean and these these are unanswered questions so i don't have an answer as to what the future of work is because it's right now everything's in flux and we don't things are have not landed yet right so what is the definition of a full-time job if i don't come to work the definition used to be i come in at eight or nine and i leave at five or six that was the full-time job now how much work i did between those

hours you know it was it was face time and we know that because we've all had jobs where we stuck around until seven so we got face times our bus liked us right we've all done it right but facetime is not a thing anymore and so i have a full-time job and i'm offered another full-time job and i took it and we've seen we see this like employees who like have productivity issues and then they say that they're burnt out and like i know how much work you have you shouldn't be burnt out how do

they have a second job and why shouldn't they have a second job well we pay them benefits so what like as long as they're getting their work done do we care when people all have side hustles even people who've got full time come to work everybody's got some sort of little side hustle so the definition of what full-time employment is is up for is up for debate and i think young people feel in particular that why shouldn't i it's my time i can do what i want with it or i only work 40 hours because

those are my those are my limits respect my boundaries right um and uh the problem is is i think all of it is so literal which is yes boundaries are important but the edges of the boundaries are fuzzy right and it's not like i don't work on saturdays well i i agree with you i don't want you working on weekends this one weekend i really need your help to finish this project so we can get it out the door or you know you just i'm i i don't take meetings after five o'clock i agree with

you i think we should have that life balance but today i just need you to work till six to get this one project done to recognize that you know so one of the things they're getting right is that we're married to work and we take our phones on holiday you know we take our computers on holiday with us and that work has ultimate say on our time i agree that should be we should that should go the way of the dodo but the extreme is not to put these hard lines everywhere and say i don't

do this as an aside the irony is you know they demand that we respect their boundaries and yet they seem to step on every other boundary about bringing you know emotional professionalism at work and dumping all of my problems onto my colleagues which is emotionally unprofessional it's like that's a boundary you can't cross um uh but there is good evidence to your assertion that this young generation seems less capable to deal with stress than previous generations that is true um they are good at curating you know they've grown up in an instagram facebook you know

tiktok world where i'm really good at showing you the life i want you to think that i lead and so they're really good at presenting a confidence that they don't have they they sound they sound like they have all the answers when they don't but then i see you presenting that live to me if you're a fellow gen z yeah and i go what are my my life's stressful and difficult and my i had to work really late and you're having a frappucci lotto latte whatever yeah at 3am doing pottery lessons i need to quit

yeah it raises the question what do you want from your life and what do you want from your work like why do you have this job you know um if it's just to pay the bills i mean i i hope i know that is the case for a lot of people that i have to have a job to pay the bills and i hope that employers are good enough that even survival jobs are a nice place to work you know uh trader joe's great company where people who have survival jobs is still a nice place

to work you know but i think the question is what is the life that you're trying to build and if you want a job simply to pay your bills and you know there's this concept of quiet quitting have you heard this one quiet quitting i've heard this term but i've maybe i heard you talk about it well i i i mean it's been written about right um it's not my concept um but quiet quitting is this thing where i don't quit the job but i basically will dial back my effort and give you the minimum

so you pay me to do this job and i will do the basic minimum amount to do the job where you can't really fire me because i'm not really doing anything badly or wrong but i'm also not going above and beyond at all right so there's this concept of quiet quitting where people are coming to work and they're just doing the minimum doing their hours doing their job not volunteering or raising their hands or going and that's it and and it raises the question is that bad [Music]