By Wyatt Heppner
Having worked with and for people significantly older than me and younger than me, I have noticed a distinct trend in millennial and Gen Z leaders: A distinct inability to delegate.
Frequently, I have found that my Gen Z coworkers and leaders tend to receive a pile of tasks that were intended to be distributed amongst a group, and simply start completing them alone. Working on a political campaign, I had a boss who struggled with their leadership position because they were piled with work, but I, their employee, was not receiving any work to do.
There is a co-worker in the military who is put into leadership roles who frequently receives a pile of tasks. It is then a battle to get her to distribute the tasks so they can be completed efficiently.
It was frustrating to watch, until I figured out two primary reasons. One of the primary reasons I found was a sense of responsibility for the task, and outcome of the task combined with “If I do it, I know it is done right,” type of thinking. That is simply the wrong way to think about it, if you are a leader at any level, you need to trust the people on your team to complete tasks. Being the most experienced person on the team you should be the one doing quality control when they have a finished or mostly finished product.
If you’re assigned to do multiple pitch letters for events through the month, assign a couple of team members to write them and then, before they get sent, read them and edit. Most importantly share the edits do not simply fix and hand it back, annotate what you edited and why. Plus, you’ll save time—and who doesn’t want to go home early?
The other reason? I found a fear of assigning too much work and coming off as “bossy”. Gen Z bosses have an anxiety of making their team hate them by passing down work that was assigned to them. A distinct feeling of “this was assigned to me, why should they be doing it?”. Not every work project is specifically for the manager to do. Often, work is passed to a manager who identifies the best people to work on the project.
These feelings honestly come from a uniquely caring place and concern for work life balance. However, in the cases I experienced, I was not getting any projects, which meant no portfolio development which meant my career was not developing. There is a balance of how much work to assign a team member, and that comes from honest communication with your team and reviewing past projects to see what worked and what did not.
Gen Z leaders have the resources to be incredible team leaders and managers, all they need is the confidence and communication skills to work with their teams. They need to be able to delegate their tasks for their teams and step back and control the quality of the whole project, not try to bear the weight entirely on their own.