Gen Y & Gen Z reshaping leadership: Adam Kingl

In a guest blog for Hanken & SSE Executive Education, future of work speaker Adam Kingl explores how Generations Y and Z are fundamentally reshaping leadership, work, and organisational culture, and sets out what business leaders must do to adapt.

Drawing on fifteen years of research with high-potential emerging leaders across 44 countries, Kingl paints a clear picture of a generational shift that goes far deeper than surface-level differences in attitude. This is a cohort defined by economic realities their predecessors never faced: no defined benefit pensions, no job for life, and the very real prospect of working into their eighties. Those conditions, Kingl argues, have produced a workforce with a fundamentally different relationship to employment, one that prioritises purpose, autonomy, culture, and work-life balance over the salaries and promotions that motivated earlier generations.

For organisations still operating on Baby Boomer assumptions, the friction is real. HR leaders describe younger workers moving on with unsettling speed, staying two to five years before seeking the next opportunity. Yet Kingl resists framing this as a problem with the generation. The issue, he argues, is a failure of organisational imagination.

His blog distils his research into six practical strategies for managers: from articulating organisational purpose and building cultures of transparency and accountability, to rethinking development as something fluid and ongoing rather than tied to tenure. He also makes a compelling case for embracing flexibility, side hustles, and even the prospect of employees leaving and returning, rather than treating loyalty as a fixed and measurable commodity.

The piece is a timely reminder that the organisations best placed to thrive are those willing to meet the next generation on their own terms.