Gen Z is opting out of management. What does that mean for your leadership pipeline?

Only 1 in 5 workers globally felt engaged at work in 2025, the lowest level since the pandemic, costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity, per Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report. At the center of that collapse is the management layer. Engagement among managers has fallen from 31% to 22% since 2022, the steepest decline of any worker category, per the same report. Gallup has consistently found that a manager is the single biggest driver of team engagement. So when managers disengage, their teams follow.

A growing number of younger workers are deliberately choosing not to pursue management, a trend called ‘conscious unbossing.’ Only 6% of Gen Z say their primary career goal is reaching a leadership position, per Deloitte's 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey. The generation now entering the workforce is watching managers burn out and check out in real time. The question for organizations is whether that is a generational attitude problem or a reflection of what the management role has actually become.

The proof-of-concept problem

71% of leaders report increased stress since stepping into their current roles, up from 63% in 2022, per DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025. Of those, 40% have considered leaving leadership roles entirely to protect their well-being. Future Forum found that middle managers reported the highest burnout rates of any job level, higher than junior employees and senior executives.

Danielle Farage watched friends and family move through the management ladder and not enjoy the climb. "It seems like work used to be a lot more rewarding," she says. "You could work your way up the ladder and really get what you deserve. I think that same thing is few and far between now."

Farage, a Gen Z marketing professional turned future-of-work speaker and consultant, started her career in startups before launching her own business in 2021. "That conventional path didn't really feel like it was worth it for me," she says. "If I was going to work that hard, I wanted to work for myself."

Managers today, Farage says, are expected to manage personalities, hit performance metrics, and absorb layers of corporate processes, all while their teams get smaller. AI was supposed to reduce the administrative load. Instead, managers are getting more work, not less. "Why would I overextend myself for an organization that could lay me off tomorrow?" The disengagement, she says, is a response to trust, burnout, and instability rather than laziness.

Natalie Morrissey, Director of Recruitment at Flex HR, says hiring teams see a vacancy, post the description, and promote the next person in line. "No one asked: What does this role actually need to do inside our system? What behaviors enable the team to flow? Where does our leadership structure currently break down?" Younger workers, she says, "saw the burnout, the lack of support, the 'figure it out' as the role formed in front of them. That's not a pipeline problem. That's a proof-of-concept problem. They have proof the role isn't worth it."

Why younger workers are being selective, not lazy

40% of people managers say their mental health declined after stepping into a managerial or leadership role, per SHRM's 2024 workplace mental health research. Leaders are stuck in the messy middle, says Laurie Maddalena, a leadership consultant and former VP of HR and Organizational Development. They face pressure from senior leadership above, carry responsibility for the team below, and are still expected to produce individual work. "It's not resistance," Maddalena says. "It's a rational response. In many organizations, the honest answer is, you wouldn't, at least not the way the role is currently designed."

That sandwiched pressure moves down to the team they manage, says Kemmbelly Dürst, a recruiter turned founder of KLYNE, a workplace emotional awareness app built from her years watching the weight managers carry. "When managers are overloaded and unsupported, that pressure moves into decisions that take too long and into trust that slowly erodes," Dürst says. Organizations measure what is visible. "Headcount, performance, turnover, engagement scores. But the emotional build-up underneath those numbers is often unmeasured. By the time it shows up as attrition or burnout, it's already been building for months."

Dürst, who is based in Switzerland, says there are high expectations around quality, responsibility, and doing things properly. “People [here] think carefully before they take on something that could affect their time, their balance, and their sense of themselves at work. That's not a lack of ambition. That's selectivity." The real question, she says, is not whether people want to grow. "The real question is what they're actually saying yes to. What does this role cost me? What does it give me? Does it fit the life I'm building? … Most organizations still don't have a good enough answer." Dürst says.

The conscious unbossing narrative has a data problem.

In April 2025, the share of managers who identify as Gen Z hit 10% for the first time, entering management at rates comparable to Millennials at the same career stage, per Glassdoor's 2025 Worklife Trends Midyear Check-In. Yet only 6% say leadership is their primary career goal. The generation that’s opting out is still showing up for a role they never wanted.

The framing of Gen Z as management-averse misses the actual tension, says Catherine Rymsha, EdD, a leadership expert and professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. "It's not like they don't want to manage and lead," Rymsha says. "But they do want to be more mindful of their time and energy." The mismatch isn't about ambition but about what management requires versus what younger workers believe leadership should look like. "That gap has started to split," Rymsha says. "This generation is not going to be kept quiet."

Nicole Griffin, a talent and HR solutions leader who has worked with Korn Ferry and Randstad Sourceright, says the pullback from management didn't show up as declined promotions inside organizations. It showed up as high performers going quiet, nobody volunteering when opportunities came up. When organizations looked at exit data, the same thing kept surfacing: managers had been handed more people and more accountability while their compensation barely moved. "They know the deal they're offering got worse," Griffin says, "and employees figured that out faster than anyone expected."

Farage, who made exactly that redirection herself, says workplaces have consistently failed to define what ambition means across generations. For Gen Z, she says, it looks like flexibility, protecting mental health, developing skills, and doing meaningful work. "We just reject the inherited definitions of success that no longer feel sustainable or attainable," she says. The target moved. The drive did not.

The cost of saying yes

Daniel Space, known professionally as DanFromHR, is an HRBP leader and consultant who has worked with companies including EA Games and Spotify. At EA, high performers were not turning down promotions. They were accepting them, stepping into management, and quickly showing the same symptoms: burnout, low engagement, and ratings that had nothing to do with their actual capability.

Some left EA entirely. Others moved back to individual contributor roles, though Space says that transition carried its own cost. "Even when employees were happier outside management, many still perceived the move as a loss of status, responsibility, or identity," he says. "It often required coaching to help them reframe the transition as a better alignment of strengths rather than a failure."

Compensation kept the cycle going. Most people, Space says, will accept a promotion they do not truly want if it comes with a significant increase in pay, equity, or visibility. The financial incentive is real enough that it masks the mismatch until the damage is already done. "Employees often need to already feel financially secure before they're comfortable declining management in favor of staying on an IC path," Space says. The pipeline problem is not that people are opting out. It’s that organizations have never built a credible alternative that competes with the pay bump.

The parity problem

77% of CHROs lack confidence in their leadership bench strength for critical roles, per DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025. At the same time, organizations are eliminating the middle manager and entry-level roles that feed the pipeline they are trying to rebuild, per Korn Ferry's HR Trends 2026.

At EA Games and later at Spotify, Space added three to four new IC levels across job families, giving high performers a path to grow in scope, influence, and compensation without stepping into people management. "Organizations that struggle the most create titles before defining what success, influence, and organizational impact actually look like at each level," Space says. "If we couldn't clearly articulate what differentiated a Lead from a Principal in measurable organizational terms, we didn't create the level."

Once informal titles get formalized, they have to be reconciled, and at EA the resistance came from leaders, not employees. Some managers had already been using elevated titles with their teams that were never officially approved. EA addressed it by spending significant time aligning leaders on the communication strategy before the rollout. "The goal was not to frame the process as a negotiation," Space says, "but as a structured organizational redesign with clearly defined leveling criteria."

Most IC track redesigns fail because organizations build the new levels without updating the pay that comes with them, Griffin says. "You can't rename a role and call it a career path. The companies making real progress are doing the market pricing work alongside the architecture change, not after." The goal is full parity: a Principal IC in the same compensation band as a comparable people manager, with the same budget authority and long-term incentive eligibility.

Where organizations have achieved that parity, senior employees are staying longer, Griffin says. The change is most visible in the four to eight-year range, historically the point where workers either moved into management or left because there was no other way to grow. "When management stops being the only route to seniority, the people who choose it actually want it." A lot of the burnout problem in middle management came from people who got pushed into it because there was no other path, she says. "IC tracks quietly solve for that too."

Building a role worth wanting

Maddalena says rebuilding the management role requires three things happening at the same time. Managers need clearly defined key result areas so they are not pulled in every direction. They need practical leadership skills before they step into the role, not after. And the role needs to be designed for sustainability so people can lead without being constantly overextended. "The concept of the working manager no longer works," Maddalena says. "Expecting someone to lead a team in a complex, fast-moving environment while also being in the trenches doing the work is not sustainable."

Morrissey says most organizations design the role after filling the seat. The work that needs to happen first is mapping what the role actually requires inside the system, co-defining leadership requirements with the people closest to the work, rather than pulling a job description from 2015. "When organizations put time and care into employees' next steps upfront," Morrissey says, "your lagging leadership pipeline transforms into an engaged employee base who wants to be a part of that."

What younger workers want, Farage says, is not abstract. Connection, clarity around their growth, and meaningful opportunities to contribute. "It's no longer that you can just hire someone entry-level and expect them to do a low-level job and be okay with it," Farage says. "If they're not learning and growing, they're gone." The organizations making progress are creating spaces where different generations learn from each other. "People are much more willing to follow leaders who make them feel understood," Farage says, "not just managed."