What Leaders/Managers Can Learn from iGen
A manager welcomes a new hire straight out of college who has never had an unsupervised job before this one. The hire asks to move a one-on-one because a family video call ran long, texts a question at 9 p.m. instead of waiting until morning, and looks visibly relieved when told mistakes during onboarding are expected. The manager, who spent her own early twenties working two jobs and living alone, isn't sure if this is a quirk or something bigger. She notices half her new hires this year fit a similar pattern, and wonders what changed between her first job and theirs.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
0 of 5 selected
The core lessons, applied to you
Your newest hires reached adulthood on a different schedule than you did
Twenge's research shows this generation reaching driving, dating, and working later than previous ones, with more adolescent time spent at home and alone with a phone rather than gaining independent experience. A manager may find a 23-year-old has genuinely less unsupervised decision-making practice than a 23-year-old a decade ago, not less capability. Expecting the same instant confidence you had at that age, built on different formative experiences, can set you both up for a frustrating mismatch that has little to do with effort or talent.
Mistaking less practice with independence for a personality flaw or lack of drive.
Give new hires explicit, low-stakes opportunities to make small decisions early, rather than assuming they'll volunteer for ambiguity right away.
The generation you're managing is more risk-averse and more anxious at the same time
Twenge documents more reported loneliness and anxiety in this generation, alongside genuine positives like more caution around risky behavior. That combination can look like an employee who is meticulous and safety-conscious but visibly stressed about ambiguous feedback. Treating the caution as weakness, or the anxiety as an excuse, both miss what's happening: a generation raised with more structure and more awareness of downside risk, doing their best inside a workplace framework built around a different generation's habits.
Interpreting careful, risk-aware behavior as a lack of confidence rather than a genuine strength to build on.
Replace vague feedback like "just use your judgment" with a specific, concrete example of what good looks like.
School, family, and friendship habits followed them straight into your workplace
Twenge's four contexts, school, family, work, and friendship, don't stay separate for this generation the way they may have for you; phone-based habits from adolescence carry straight into work life. That shows up as employees checking family messages throughout the day, expecting workplace chat to feel casual, or finding the office unusually quiet compared to constant social contact at school. This isn't a discipline problem; it's a continuity of habit, and treating it that way changes how you set norms.
Treating phone-checking habits carried from adolescence as intentional disrespect rather than an ingrained pattern worth naming directly.
State your team's specific communication norms explicitly in writing rather than assuming new hires will infer them.
Managing well means adapting expectations, not grading this generation against your own
Twenge's core recommendation for adults supporting this generation is to understand the shift rather than judge it, adjusting expectations instead of demanding an earlier era's independence and confidence. This means building onboarding, feedback, and communication norms around how your team works today, not how you remember working, while recognizing plenty of individuals won't match the average pattern at all. Managers who adapt tend to retain talent that managers stuck comparing generations lose.
Sometimes structure that helps with anxiety cuts against building independence. Very explicit instructions reduce stress but can slow the growth of confident, unsupervised decision-making the role eventually requires. Because Twenge's generational pattern is a broad generalization, not a fixed trait of every employee, some hires need far less scaffolding than others; the skill is reading the individual in front of you rather than applying one generational template to the whole team.
Name one thing, honestly
- Where are you assuming a level of independence your newest hires haven't had the chance to build yet? - Is a hire's caution actually a strength you could be leveraging instead of correcting? - Have you stated your team's communication norms out loud, or just assumed they're obvious?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
0 of 3 selected
Run this for seven days
State your team's specific communication norms explicitly in writing rather than assuming new hires will infer them.