Gen Z Isn't Bad At Communication. They're New At It

The skills gap is real. The generational blame may not be.

Only a few years into their careers and Generation Z already has a reputation for poor communication. Indeed found that 47% of employers said Gen Z lack satisfactory communication skills (compared to 11% of Gen X). In another poll, 70% of business leaders say that Gen Z workers can’t communicate well at work.

While the pandemic certainly played its role in this gap, is it really so bad as all that?

“The claim that Gen Z can’t communicate comes not from robust research but from surveys of managers,” says JP Pawliw, President of IHHP. “These surveys don’t really measure how well young people communicate. They show how older people feel about them.”

Pawliw believes that there’s always friction when a new generational cohort enters the workforce, because each generation is shaped by different societal forces and technologies. “We said the same thing about Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers when they were new to the workforce,” he says.

“If every generation gets the same complaint, the issue isn’t the generation.”

Pawliw and I aren’t arguing that Gen Z has perfect communication skills. If a majority of business leaders and managers report challenges in communicating with their youngest workers, there’s a problem somewhere. It simply may not be solely the fault of Gen Z.

Generational research’s blind spot

What about all the studies that seem to indicate that Gen Z is as incompetent as the stereotypes? Pawliw argues that generational research comes with a blind spot because it conflates three different factors: cohort, age and period.

“The cohort effect refers to people born in a certain era,” he says. “The age effect is what’s true for anyone early in their career. And the period effect, which is about what’s happening in the world right now.

“The best studies show that most so-called generational differences disappear once you separate these factors.”

When there is a real difference, he says, it usually comes down to a few things:

• Career stage. “Workplace communication is mostly unwritten knowledge, like how to push back on a senior colleague, which channel to use, or how to read the room. New employees haven’t learned these things yet. Every generation goes through this, but we have short memories and forget it.”
• The pandemic. “Gen Z did spend important years working remotely, so they built fewer in-person relationships where these skills are usually learned. This is a matter of circumstance, not a character flaw, and it will fade as things return to normal, because it is a completely learnable skill.”
• A real shift. “Gen Z is comfortable with texting and asynchronous communication, but they have less experience with live, high-pressure situations. However, they are often better at digital collaboration. It’s a different skill set, not a weakness.”
• Misunderstanding that turns into bias. “Wanting more feedback, questioning authority, and preferring directness over corporate-speak are things older managers read as poor communication. It isn't. It's just a difference of preference.”

Generalizing generations

The real problem, says Pawliw, is that generalizations based on generation or cohort are too broad to be useful. “When leaders believe these myths, like ‘there is a problem with this new generation!,’ it creates real consequences: leaders start to lower their expectations, judge people too quickly, and stop coaching the actual person in front of them.”

This, of course, only exacerbates the problem because that younger worker is left to figure things out for themselves.

“The problem isn’t that Gen Z can’t communicate; it's that we’ve convinced ourselves they can’t, and we lead them based on that belief,” asserts Pawliw.

Outdated metrics

Many older-gen managers may also be doing Gen Z a disservice by judging them by the metrics that mattered when they first entered the workforce, not realizing that some communication methods and styles are morphing with technology.

Despite having what I thought was a decent theoretical knowledge of workplace communication, it took years of observing other professionals and actively refining my own skills for me to become a truly strong communicator. Even now, I’m always learning because the ways we communicate are always changing.

Email, for example, is considered an outdated channel for many younger workers. If I judged a younger coworker by their email skills but overlooked how well they communicate on Slack and other chat platforms, I've used an outdated metric—and missed the full picture.

Communication skills can make or break professional growth

Pawliw believes Gen Z’s communication challenges aren’t just about different styles or channels. Their lack of ease with in-person conversations is real, and it can hurt their professional growth. “An example would be not challenging an older, respected colleague on something that you know is right,” he says “Or not submitting a new idea, a creative thought, or doing something different from the status quo.”

Gen Z is young and perhaps even more prone than the rest of us to what Pawliw calls our deepest wiring: the need to belong. “The second something threatens that need, we retreat,” he says. “Especially someone new to an environment—say, a younger generation still trying to decode what it actually takes to belong in a culture. They don't push. They don't risk it. They avoid.”

This hurts their professional trajectory, says Pawliw, because growth and high performance require risk and courage. “If you do not do anything different than anyone else, you will be, by definition, average. Which means you will not have a higher probability of getting that promotion or new opportunity.”

Along with communication, what else does Gen Z need?

When we talk about professional skills, communication is usually at the top of the list. However, Pawliw argues that the foundational skill underneath it is emotional self-regulation, which he defines as the ability to manage your own physiology under pressure so you can stay effective when the stakes are high.

“Everything else depends on self-regulation,” he says. “You can't communicate well, lead well, or make good decisions if your threat system has hijacked you. In a slower world, you could get away with poor regulation because there was time to cool off between pressures. In a fast-paced, always-on, constantly-changing one, the pressure is continuous, so the people who can self-regulate—who don't get flooded by every setback, deadline, or hard email—have an enormous and growing advantage.”

The good news, he adds, is that this isn't a personality trait you either have or don't. “It's trainable, and it's becoming the core professional skill of the era.”

Gen Z also needs to hone their ability to make hard decisions, “the ones you put off for many of the same reasons you procrastinate on the difficult conversations,” says Pawliw. “Being able to be decisive with less available information and the need to make decisions faster is a critical skill today. It ties into the importance of judgment—discernment about what matters, what's true, and what to do when there's no clear answer.”

Pawliw sees AI as responsible for the increasing importance of judgment as a professional skill. “As AI gets better at producing competent-looking output on demand, the scarce thing stops being the ability to generate work and becomes the ability to judge it: to ask the right question, to know when the confident answer is wrong, and to decide what's worth saying or doing at all, even when it might upset people.”

Professional courtesy to our youngest coworkers

While I’m a huge fan of today’s young people and believe they are capable of amazing things, I’m not turning a blind eye to their need to grow up at work. Gen Z has an etiquette gap and often lacks some of the soft skills necessary to thrive in the workplace. What I question is whether they’re really so uniquely behind on all this, or if they’re simply at a stage in their journey that all generations had to experience.

It’s easy for those of us in older generations to look back on our formative career years through rose-tinted glasses. We weren’t that bad. We at least knew how to do X, Y or Z [fill in the blank with your preferred pet peeve]. But were we really so great right off the bat, or did the generation before us give us the example, training and mentorship we needed to grow into our professional potential?

I’m inclined to think the latter. And it’s all the more reason we should extend the same professional courtesy to our youngest coworkers. Someday, they’ll be in a position to do the same.