The snowflake myth: Why businesses struggle with Gen Z talent

Based in London, Gen Z specialist Alex Atherton spent 25 years in education, including more than a decade leading large inner-London secondary schools. He explains why employers misread younger workers and how generational stereotypes damage recruitment and retention.

Gen Z is often described as entitled, impatient and unwilling to work. Atherton argues that these labels ignore the generation’s academic achievement, ambition and the financial barriers younger professionals face when trying to build independent lives.

Alex Atherton is an award-winning keynote speaker, leadership coach and author of The Snowflake Myth: Explaining Gen Z in the Workplace and Beyond. He led two large comprehensive schools as a headteacher and later served as Education Advisor to the UK Parliament’s Youth Violence Commission.

In this exclusive interview with the Inspirational Leadership Speakers Agency, Atherton explains why business leaders overlook Gen Z’s work ethic, how generational amnesia fuels workplace tension and why dismissing younger employees as “snowflakes” can cost organisations talented recruits.

Q: Why do business leaders underestimate Gen Z’s work ethic and academic achievement?

Alex Atherton: “They miss how hard they work. I remember there was a particular year when I was running secondary school where there suddenly wasn't a group of young teenage girls whose sole aim in life was to smuggle a packet of cigarettes in and pass them around.

“Those same kids were saying to us, “Will there be a teacher here at 5:00 because I need to go through this? I'd like to come in at half term and do that.”

“The academic achievements of Gen Z are off the scale compared to what came before. There's lots of murmuring with my peers about, “Oh, it's all easier in GCSEs, and they hand out first-class degrees for free,” and all the rest of it. I find it really quite demeaning.

“Often after a talk, someone comes up to me and says, “Well, it's all very well you saying that, but I employed a young professional and they were like this,” and so on. It always comes down to the same thing: I think they've appointed the wrong people.

“The right people saw their advert, didn't think much of it and scrolled past.”

Q: How does generational amnesia shape tension between established leaders and younger professionals?

Alex Atherton: “I used to say that the biggest problem in education is that adults forget their own childhoods.

“Part of that childhood was remembering how you were described as a young person coming out into the world of work. I think my peers can forget that similar things were said about us: that we were too impatient for promotion, we hadn't paid our dues and we didn't have realistic expectations.

“There's a lot of generational amnesia here. They get dismissed because they don't suit someone's narrative.

“Older generations often think, “You've got to get in the real world.” The real world for them is the world that they live in, the world that they got to know and how they were treated as a young professional. Because we went through it, they've got to go through it too.

“That's not going to work.

“There's a lot of generational tension from the younger generation to the older ones: work, pay, cost of living, cost of buying property, cost of having kids, apparently they're expensive, cost of bills, everything.

“They are so far behind what I was able to do as a young professional. I could work, I could save towards the deposit. Needed some discipline to do it.

“We used to call rent dead money because why aren't you saving towards paying off a mortgage?

“I find it very hard to hear my peers talk about Gen Z as entitled when I look at what my generation had available to us that the younger ones do not.”

Q: How does the “snowflake” stereotype affect an organisation’s ability to recruit and retain talented young professionals?

Alex Atherton: “It certainly blinds leaders to signals about whether their best young professionals are going to stay with them or not. It's derogatory and not helpful. Word spreads. I think my peers totally underestimate the way in which that might happen.

“Recently, there's been someone present at an event where I've been speaking, and you go on the website and they've got a link to their Glassdoor reviews.

“I think, “Right, that's good.” None more transparent. On your website, you're directing future applicants to comments that you cannot control. That generates a lot of trust.

“Someone said to me recently, “At the moment we're not recruiting, but if I am recruiting, I'm not going to bother with Gen Z. I'm going to wait for them to have grown up. I'll just stick to older folks for now.”

“It's the kind of thing young professionals might be interested in hearing, that those attitudes are out there. It's wasting the most talented generation we've ever had, in my view.

“If you want to use it casually, don't then complain when the calibre you want to apply to you or stay with you doesn't do it.”

Q: What practical change do you want leaders and Gen Z professionals to take away from your speeches?

Alex Atherton: “For those who are my peers age-wise, or a bit younger or a bit older, I want them to take away that change starts with us by trying to see the world through the perspective of a younger generation, not just going back to what we think we remember about what it was like to be 20, 22 or 25.

“For those who are of Gen Z age in the audience, which is always interesting, I've had them come up to me afterwards and say, “Thank you for saying it. I've tried to say it. Nobody listened. But you saying it made me feel heard and it made me feel seen.”

“That's really good when that happens. They think, “All I have to do now is repeat what you said because it's being said, and some of my colleagues were in the room when it was said.”

“There's an empowerment element to it.”

This exclusive interview with Alex Atherton was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.