I recently reopened my 2019 book, The Chameleon Leader: Connecting with Millennials, for the first time in years. Some of it held up. Other parts made me wince.
Back then, I encouraged managers to embrace the employee who answers emails at midnight. I called the traditional 9-to-5 working day “a crazy concept” and quoted a 25-year-old who loved having work and life flow into each other. I saw it as the future.
Then, on page 114, I found this line I’d almost forgotten writing: “This isn’t a book about Gen Z, so I won’t go on about leadership styles with them.”
Well, perhaps I should have.
Seven years later, Gen Z has made me reconsider some of that advice. Over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with young professionals and their managers about work, ambition, feedback and learning. A few things surprised me.
Logging off is not a lack of commitment
In 2019, millennials were challenging the conventional working day. Working whenever and wherever you wanted seemed like progress. What I underestimated was how easily that freedom could become an expectation to be constantly available.
The Gen Z professionals I spoke to aren’t opposed to working outside traditional hours. A 2025 SurveyMonkey study of U.S. workers even found Gen Z more comfortable than Gen X with after-hours messages, while two-thirds believed career success required sacrificing personal time.
But being willing to work late occasionally is different from feeling obliged to respond at all hours. One interviewee told me: “I’m not less committed. I just don’t think a reply at 10 p.m. proves anything.”
Deloitte’s 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, covering more than 22,000 people across 44 countries, also found that more than half experienced digital fatigue from constant notifications and switching between tools.
Managers need to be clearer about what genuinely requires attention outside working hours, what can wait, and why a delayed response shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of ambition or commitment.
Feedback is a conversation, not a verdict
When I researched millennials, feedback came up constantly. They wanted more of it, and they wanted it sooner.
That hasn’t changed. But in my recent conversations, Gen Z professionals repeatedly raised the importance of understanding why decisions were made.
Whether it involved feedback, career opportunities or changes affecting their work, they wanted context. I can see why this might frustrate managers accustomed to environments where decisions were rarely questioned. Yet wanting an explanation isn’t necessarily a challenge to authority.
When giving feedback, explaining your reasoning and inviting someone to share their perspective can be far more useful than simply telling them what needs improvement.
Loyalty to skills, not to a ladder
I devoted an entire chapter of my book to defending millennial job-hopping. I stand by that argument. What I didn’t anticipate was how much the traditional career ladder itself would be questioned.
In Deloitte’s 2026 survey, just 6% of Gen Z respondents identified reaching a leadership position as their primary career goal.
It’s worth considering what younger employees see when they look at their managers. Increasing workloads, constant change, endless meetings and responsibility for delivering results while supporting everyone else. Why would they automatically aspire to that?
Many still want to progress, but the people I spoke to placed considerable emphasis on learning, developing skills and working with managers who invested in them.
Organizations should pay attention to this. A promotion may still be attractive, but it’s no longer safe to assume that everyone measures success by how quickly they climb the hierarchy.
Learning needs people, not just tools
This is probably the part of my 2019 book I would rewrite most extensively.
I argued that because young people could learn almost anything through Google or YouTube, traditional training was becoming less relevant. Today, they can ask AI almost anything and receive an answer in seconds.
But I’ve become increasingly concerned about the learning that takes place through everyday work. Most of us developed our judgment by observing colleagues, working through problems, making mistakes and watching experienced people navigate difficult situations.
Some of those opportunities are disappearing as AI takes over routine tasks. In Deloitte’s survey, one in five Gen Z respondents reported that their organizations were reducing entry-level positions.
One young professional told me: “My manager told me to just ask ChatGPT. I didn’t need an answer. I needed to see how he thinks.”
As organizations redesign jobs around AI, they need to consider how younger employees will gain the experience that previously came from doing the work itself.
What still holds
Not everything has dated. The crisis of unmet expectations at the heart of my book hasn’t gone away. Young people still say the leader matters more than the job. And in 2019, millennials surprised me by preferring face-to-face conversations with their boss over email or video. Gen Z, the most digital generation yet, is saying the same thing.
A word to my younger self
If I wrote a second edition of The Chameleon Leader, I would change quite a few things. But I’d keep the central idea: good leadership requires adapting to the people in front of you rather than relying on assumptions about what they need.
I spent years trying to understand millennials. Now I’m learning from the generation that followed them. And by the time we think we’ve figured out Gen Z, the next generation will probably be challenging some of our conclusions.
Perhaps that’s the lesson I’d pass on to managers today: never assume you’ve figured people out. Keep asking what they need, and keep listening.
