Early in my career, the rules of leadership felt relatively straightforward. You earned respect through tenure, you communicated through the right channels, and you gave feedback in the right setting. The relationship between manager and team member was largely defined before anyone walked into the room.
That is not the world most leaders are navigating now. The arrival of Gen Z in pharmaceutical, life sciences and IT teams has prompted a genuine rethink of some leadership assumptions that many managers had never thought to question. Not because Gen Z is difficult, but because they are different in ways that matter, and the leaders who are thriving are the ones who got curious rather than frustrated.
Leading Gen Z in the workplace is less about learning a new set of rules and more about understanding what this generation actually needs from the people above them and being honest about whether current leadership habits are delivering it.
What Gen Z Actually Wants From a Leader
The most common complaint about Gen Z in technical teams is that they need too much. Too much feedback. Too much reassurance. Too much explanation of why, not just what.
Spend some time with that complaint and it starts to look different. A team member who wants to understand the purpose behind a task is not being demanding. A colleague who asks for regular feedback is not being needy. These are signs of someone who is engaged and wants to do the work well.
What Gen Z typically wants from a leader is straightforward: clarity, consistency, and genuine interest in their development. Research from the CIPD on developing young people in the workplace confirms that the most effective approach combines clear expectations with real investment in building capability, not just task management.1
In pharma and life sciences teams, where junior colleagues are often working alongside highly experienced professionals on high-stakes projects, that investment pays dividends quickly. A Gen Z data analyst who understands the bigger picture of a clinical programme will contribute differently from one who has only ever been told what to do.
The Coaching Shift
One of the most consistent patterns in teams that lead Gen Z well is a move away from directive management towards a coaching approach. This does not mean abandoning standards or removing accountability. It means changing the default question from “here is what you need to do” to “how would you approach this?”
That shift can feel counterintuitive in technical environments where precision matters and there is often limited time for exploration. But the investment is worth making. Gen Z colleagues who are given space to think, rather than just execute, develop faster, contribute more, and stay longer.
The practical shift is smaller than it sounds. It might mean starting a project briefing with a question rather than a directive. It might mean asking a junior colleague to come to a meeting with their own analysis before the senior team shares theirs. It might mean replacing an annual review conversation with shorter, more frequent check-ins that feel less like an assessment and more like a conversation.
Understanding individual communication preferences is part of making that coaching shift work. The way a team member prefers to receive feedback, process new information, or signal that they are struggling is shaped by personality as much as generation. The Insights Discovery colours guide is a practical starting point for understanding those differences in technical teams.
Feedback That Actually Works
Feedback is the area where generational expectations diverge most sharply in technical teams. Many experienced leaders were shaped by environments where feedback was formal, infrequent, and tied to performance cycles. For Gen Z colleagues, that approach can feel like silence, and silence tends to read as a negative signal.
This does not mean leaders need to provide a running commentary on everything their Gen Z colleagues do. It means building feedback into the rhythm of work in a way that feels natural rather than performative. A brief comment after a presentation. A quick message acknowledging a well-handled client query. A honest conversation when something did not land as expected.
The quality of the feedback matters as much as the frequency. Gen Z colleagues respond well to feedback that is specific, honest, and two-way. Feedback that is vague, overly positive, or delivered as a monologue tends to land badly regardless of how well-intentioned it is.
Values, Purpose and Why It Matters in Technical Teams
Gen Z are the first generation to have grown up with the full weight of information about global challenges, from climate change to social inequality, available at their fingertips. That shapes how they think about work. They want to understand the purpose behind what they are doing, and they want to work for organisations whose values they recognise and respect.
In pharmaceutical and life sciences settings, this is actually a significant advantage. The purpose of the work, improving patient outcomes, advancing scientific understanding, making treatments accessible, is genuinely meaningful. Leaders who make that connection explicit, who help Gen Z colleagues see the direct line between their day-to-day work and the broader mission, create a very different kind of engagement.
The challenge is that many technical leaders underestimate how much this matters. Purpose conversations can feel soft in environments that prize data and rigour. But as the CMI’s research on multigenerational workplaces makes clear, understanding what motivates individuals rather than assuming uniform motivation is one of the most practical things a leader can do.2
Leading the Individual, Not the Generation
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about leading Gen Z in the workplace is that the generational label is a starting point, not a destination. Gen Z, like every other generation, contains enormous variety. A Gen Z colleague who thrived during university, built strong in-person networks and joined a team straight from a structured graduate programme will need something very different from a colleague who spent formative years navigating remote learning and entered the workforce with almost no experience of professional in-person dynamics.
The leaders who do this well are the ones who treat every new team member as an individual first. They ask questions rather than make assumptions. They adapt their approach based on what they observe rather than what they expect. For a closer look at how generational dynamics specifically play out across science and technology teams, this post on generational communication in tech teams goes further.
And they are honest with themselves about whether their current leadership habits are serving the people in front of them, or simply reflecting how they themselves prefer to be led. Much of what looks like a generational gap is actually a communication styles gap.
Frequently Asked Questions About Leading Gen Z
Growing Leaders Who Grow With You
Leading Gen Z in the workplace is not a problem to be solved. It is an opportunity to become a more effective leader across the board, because the habits that work well with Gen Z, clarity, coaching, genuine feedback, purposeful work, tend to work well with everyone.
The leaders who will build the strongest technical teams over the next decade are not the ones who figure out how to manage Gen Z. They are the ones who build environments where every team member, regardless of generation, can do their best work.