The numbers come first: the oldest members of Gen Z are now approaching 30, while the youngest are in college and high school. That cohort is moving deeper into the workforce just as managers, remote work, and artificial intelligence are changing how employees are expected to communicate.
In Fortune, Jeff LeBlanc argues the real problem is not that Gen Z cannot communicate. It is that companies often fail to explain what their rules actually are. One example centers on a Gen Z employee at a small café and restaurant who texted her boss that she would be late. She thought texting was considerate because she did not want to take up too much time. Her Gen X boss was frustrated because he saw lateness as serious enough to require a phone call.
Both sides believed they were being respectful. They simply assigned different meanings to the same act. LeBlanc’s point is straightforward: if a manager wants a phone call for lateness, the manager should say so. A two-minute conversation about expectations can prevent a clash over etiquette that is really a clash over policy.
The same pattern shows up in another case involving a young worker at a large New England company in a blue-collar industry. He told his baby boomer manager that he was dealing with severe anxiety. The manager said he was sympathetic, but also uncomfortable and unsure how much he needed to know. That reaction was not a dismissal of anxiety. It was a boundary issue.
LeBlanc argues that many older workers were taught professionalism as a strict line between personal and professional life, while Gen Z came of age in an era when mental health and personal well-being are discussed far more openly. What feels like honesty to one person can feel like oversharing to another. Again, the problem is not necessarily the employee. It is a workplace that never defined where the line sits.
That matters because much of office communication is never spoken outright. People learn by reading a room, watching tone, and picking up unwritten signals. But many young workers lost part of that apprenticeship during the COVID-19 era, when classes moved online and internships became remote. When they returned in person, masks and video calls made those signals harder to read.
For free enterprise, the lesson is bigger than one generation. Capital rewards clear rules, not vague expectations buried in a manager’s head. If a company wants punctuality, disclosure limits, or deadline discipline, it should state them plainly. Bureaucratic confusion wastes time, creates resentment, and turns ordinary misunderstandings into false judgments about competence.
The market has already voted on this kind of management failure. Teams run better when standards are explicit and responsibility is clear. That is not a Gen Z problem. It is a leadership problem.
