Asger Risom
Corporate America expects young workers to psychically absorb decades of unwritten etiquette. The problem isn’t that Gen Z is unprofessional—it’s that modern management is entirely incapable of explicitly stating its own rules.
For decades, corporate America has operated on a foundation of unwritten rules—a ghostly etiquette of implied deadlines, mandatory phone calls, and silent boundary-setting. When young employees fail to psychically absorb these invisible norms, management immediately brands them as “unprofessional.”
But as highlighted in Fortune’s recent teardown of multigenerational office dynamics, the problem isn’t that Gen Z is bad at workplace communication. The problem is that modern management is entirely incapable of explicitly explaining its own rules.
The mind-reading requirement
The modern workplace is riddled with traps disguised as basic instructions. A manager tells an employee they need a deliverable “by Friday.” The employee submits the polished work at 4:30 p.m. on Friday. The manager is furious because they actually needed it by 9:00 a.m. to review it before a weekend handoff.
The employee met the exact criteria of the assignment, yet they are penalized because they failed to read the manager’s mind.
The same friction applies to basic logistics. An older manager expects a phone call when an employee is running late, viewing it as a necessary display of contrition.
A younger worker sends a text specifically to avoid wasting their boss’s time with a disruptive call during a busy shift. Both believe they are being perfectly respectful. But because the manager never explicitly established the protocol, the worker is written off as lazy.
Management has repeatedly mistaken their own personal preferences—norms forged in a radically different era of office culture—for universal common sense.
The transparency penalty
Corporate America spent the last five years aggressively promoting “bring your whole self to work” initiatives and internal mental health awareness campaigns. Yet, when Gen Z workers actually take this corporate messaging at face value and disclose an anxiety struggle or burnout, older management often recoils, framing the honesty as “oversharing.”
You cannot actively encourage vulnerability in your HR seminars and then penalize it in the breakroom. Older generations were conditioned to build an impenetrable firewall between their personal and professional lives, viewing silence as the ultimate form of professionalism.
Gen Z entered a workforce traumatized by a pandemic, operating almost entirely through digital channels where the traditional “room” to read didn’t even exist. They aren’t oversharing; they are operating in the exact environment corporate culture built for them.
Write it down or let it go
If a specific behavior is genuinely critical to the operation of a business, it needs to be explicitly stated. If a deadline actually means “Friday at 10:00 a.m. because I need three hours to review it,” the manager has to say exactly that.
Providing clear structural expectations isn’t “hand-holding”—it is the literal definition of leadership.
The era of expecting entry-level workers to navigate a labyrinth of unwritten social cues based on 1990s office culture is over. Expecting employees to blindly guess what success looks like is just a setup for failure.
