Leading Through Transformation: Rethinking the Role of Midlevel Leaders

As business imperatives evolve, midlevel leaders are playing an increasingly vital role in leading and executing transformation efforts.

Findings from Harvard Business Impact’s global study of more than 600 leaders highlight this shift:

• 96% of midlevel leaders say they’ve taken on increased responsibility to lead or participate in more transformation initiatives over the past year.
• 65% of midlevel leaders say they provided strategic input or supported the implementation of transformation efforts.

Explore the full infographic for additional insights.

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Under Pressure: Why Burnout Among Midlevel Leaders May Be a Strategic Risk

Many midlevel leaders are struggling with persistent burnout, limited support and recognition, and a widening gap between them and senior leadership.

When burnout and stress go unaddressed, midlevel leaders may become less engaged and less confident in their roles—undermining their ability to retain talent and drive results.

Explore the full infographic for deeper analysis and practical implications.

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Reinforcing Organizational Bridges: Four Elements That Strengthen Midlevel Leaders

Jeff Pacheco

October 1, 2025

Bridges don’t collapse overnight—they weaken in silence. Once-impassible valleys and rivers are crossed without a thought, carried by structures so reliable we forget what it took to build them. Yet, every bridge demands vision, resources, precise engineering, and ongoing maintenance. For a bridge to endure, every part must work together. If one part falters, the integrity of the whole bridge is threatened.

As we discussed in a previous perspective paper, midlevel leaders are those bridges—spanning the gap between strategy and execution, linking senior leadership’s vision to daily realities. They carry the weight of transformation, unite teams, and keep the structure intact under pressure. But like any bridge, their strength depends on deliberate construction, reinforcement, and support.

Four Elements That Support the Success of Midlevel Leaders

Midlevel leaders are operating under immense pressure. They are expected to deliver results, lead transformation, and keep teams engaged—all while navigating shifting priorities and constant change. When the structural supports they rely on are missing, that pressure strains their capacity to perform. Agility erodes, execution suffers, and burnout accelerates, putting both short-term performance and long-term transformation at risk.

Our research at Harvard Business Impact Enterprise identifies four structural elements essential to midlevel leader strength: autonomy, empowerment, psychological safety, and recognition. Each is as vital as any beam or cable in a bridge—remove one and the entire structure is at risk.

• Autonomy: Autonomy enables midlevel leaders to act decisively, adapt quickly, and drive innovation. Entrusting them with meaningful decision making strengthens the critical link between strategy and execution. In our research, midlevel leaders who reported having autonomy showed a nearly one-third increase—rising to 62%—in effectiveness at demonstrating agility and adaptability in fast-changing environments.
• Empowerment: Empowerment means giving midlevel leaders the resources, authority, and confidence to act. This requires intentional effort from senior leaders—investing in training, fostering clear communication, and including midlevel leaders in strategic decision making. The payoff is clear: Empowered midlevel leaders are stronger at supporting transformation and better equipped to influence, execute, and sustain momentum.
• Psychological safety: Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that it’s safe to take risks and express ideas without fear of negative consequences. It grows from clear, predictable, and fair expectations paired with open communication. In our research, nearly seven in 10 midlevel leaders who felt psychologically safe reported meeting goals and expectations—compared to just 43% of those who didn’t. This freedom fuels engagement, sparks experimentation, generates new ideas, and fosters a culture of curiosity and smart risk taking.
• Recognition: Recognition keeps midlevel leaders grounded in purpose and value. When their contributions are acknowledged consistently, it reinforces their commitment and resilience under pressure. Our research showed the difference is measurable—weekly burnout rates dropped from 80% to 66% when midlevel leaders felt recognized by senior leadership. Recognition isn’t a courtesy; it’s a stabilizing force that sustains engagement, strengthens commitment, and helps leaders perform at their best even in challenging conditions.

Like engineering a bridge, each structural element has its own value and measurable impact. But true strength comes when every part works in unison. For midlevel leaders, it’s the combination of these supports that enables them to perform at their best, sustain momentum, and lead the organization forward under any conditions.

Inspecting the Bridge: Stress Testing Your Midlevel Leadership

Even the most impressive bridge must prove its strength before being opened for use. Engineers test every joint, cable, and beam to confirm they meet standards, can bear the bridge’s load, and will endure. Organizations must do the same with their midlevel leadership.

An initial “inspection” means systematically evaluating their performance against the four structural elements and, just as critically, assessing how well the organization supports them. Measurement reveals strengths, exposes stress points, and directs resources where they have the most impact.

But inspections aren’t a one-and-done exercise and often surface evolving needs. In our study, nearly 60% of midlevel leaders pointed to three areas they needed more support in for their success: greater decision-making authority, stronger work-life balance, and more efficient technologies. Addressing these requires more than periodic check-ins; it also calls for continuous feedback loops. Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis call this making feedback a team habit by embedding smart intentional questions into meetings to solicit a steady stream of insights from midlevel leaders.

Build the Bridges That Carry Your Business Forward

A bridge is only as strong as the investment in its design, construction, and upkeep. The same is true for midlevel leaders. Strengthening their autonomy, empowerment, psychological safety, and recognition produces higher engagement, lower burnout, and greater innovation. These leaders become catalysts—driving transformation, connecting strategy to execution, and sustaining momentum through change.

Neglect midlevel leaders and cracks will appear under pressure. With consistent investment, midlevel leaders become the reliable, resilient structures that carry an organization from where it is today to where it must go tomorrow. The future of your organization depends on the bridges you build now.

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Midlevel Leaders: The Bridge to Your Organization’s Future

In Harvard Business Impact’s recent survey of 600 midlevel and senior leaders across industries and global regions, both groups agreed that expectations of midlevel leaders continue to rise.

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Scale Innovation with Speed: The ABCs of Leading Innovation

Shruti Patel

August 21, 2025

In an era of constant disruption and complexity, innovation isn’t just a competitive edge, it’s a leadership imperative. That was the core message from Linda A. Hill, Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, during her powerful keynote at the Harvard Business Impact’s 2025 Partners’ Meeting.

Drawing from her upcoming book Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation, Professor Hill challenged traditional notions of innovation as the responsibility of Research and Development (R&D) or a handful of creative thinkers. Instead, she framed innovation as a collective, organization-wide capability. One that can only thrive when leaders are equipped to foster collaboration, experimentation, and bold execution at scale.

Why Innovation Fails to Scale

Many organizations generate great ideas but struggle to implement them broadly. Professor Hill identified a critical gap: the ability to scale innovation with speed.

Whether it’s digital transformation or operational reinvention, scaling requires more than strategy, it demands leadership behaviors that mobilize cross-functional momentum.

The ABCs of Leading Innovation

Professor Hill introduced a powerful framework from her research: the three leadership roles required to innovate at scale.¹

1. Architects – Design the conditions, systems, and values that enable innovation across the enterprise.
2. Bridgers – Connect silos, build internal and external partnerships, and foster diverse perspectives.
3. Catalysts – Mobilize people to act on bold ideas and co-create solutions at speed.

Organizations that succeed in embedding innovation, Professor Hill explained, are those that develop leaders who can move fluidly across these roles, not just at the top, but at every level of the organization.

From Collective Genius to Genius at Scale

Professor Hill’s earlier book, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation explored how great leaders cultivate environments where innovation thrives. And Genius at Scale builds on that foundation, focusing on how to operationalize and embed innovation across large, complex organizations navigating transformation.

Her call to action: stop treating innovation as episodic. Instead, make it a continuous, scalable capability, supported by leaders who know how to design culture, connect systems, and ignite progress.

Final Reflection: Are You Building Bridgers?

Professor Hill shared a candid insight from a recent executive conversation: “We don’t have enough leaders who can bridge.” The immediate reaction? Replace them. Her response? “Not so fast.” If we aren’t rewarding collaboration, partnership, and ecosystem thinking, we’re not enabling leaders to bridge, we’re discouraging it.

Instead of replacing talent, we should be developing leaders with the mindsets and behaviors needed to lead across functions, markets, and sectors. Because in today’s environment, real transformation doesn’t just require innovation, it requires integration.

1. Hill, L.A., Tedards, E., Wild, J. and Weber, K., 2022. What makes a great leader? Mastering the ABCs of innovation at scale. Harvard Business Review, 19 September. Available at: https://hbr.org/2022/09/what-makes-a-great-leader ︎

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Breaking Through: People-Centered Transformation Powered by Learning

Patrick Voorhies, Ed.D.

August 13, 2025

This post is co-authored by Patrick Voorhies, Ed.D., Manager, Talent & Development, Motiva Enterprises, and Susan Douglas, Ph.D., Professor of Practice at Vanderbilt University and an executive and team coach.

Achieving higher-level results from learning and leadership development remains elusive for many organizations. As we discussed in our recent post, “Beyond the Survey: Design Learning Data for Real-Time Impact,” there are many complexities and challenges slowing progress.

For organizations working to drive real change and transformation, old models for learning measurement are too slow and ineffective. It takes systems, discipline, and transparency to achieve real results. We recommend a more adaptive and holistic approach where you consider each program’s unique goals and outcomes within the larger context of business objectives.

Here we share three examples of practical shifts organizations made to move toward human-centered inquiry, recognizing the power of learning analytics and metrics to fuel action and change behaviors aligned with the business.

Example 1 – Starting small and simple to show insights

We recently worked with a large multinational energy company where the approach to evaluating leadership development programs, especially those for frontline supervisors, was rooted in participant satisfaction, facilitator effectiveness, and Net Promoter Score (NPS). Following the global enterprise deployment of a new supervisor development program to several hundred frontline leaders worldwide, executive sponsors tasked program leaders to report on the success of the offering.

Previously, program managers and stakeholders had become conditioned to answer questions from executives about the effectiveness of learning programs to say that they had a nearly perfect NPS and received glowing e-mails from previous program participants. However, in the backdrop of a more competitive landscape, executive sponsors wanted more robust evidence of success: was there any chance that participants intended to change their behavior after participating in the program? Were they going to use the new skills they learned?

In our work with this organization, we collaborated with stakeholders to implement a streamlined evaluation form that was only 7 Likert scale post-learning questions that focused on self-perceptions of learning transfer: usefulness of content, applicability to their job, support on the job from their manager and colleagues, and opportunity to apply their newly acquired skills. The higher response rate for this more straightforward form from otherwise busy frontline leaders formalized feedback mechanisms and directly tied the feedback obtained from participants to the outcomes that executives cared about: learning and leader effectiveness tied to organizational outcomes.

“Start where you are.” By continuously guiding highly skeptical stakeholders to embrace an adaptive mindset, we began to shift their focus away from limitations around reporting and data and more toward the possibilities – even within imperfect systems.

There was value in fewer questions that were targeted and research-backed, beyond standard satisfaction, NPS, or facilitator ratings. Gaining buy-in required trust and a willingness to experiment. Skepticism only disappeared when this new approach delivered more actionable insights for stakeholders and executives. Most participants found they could apply the content on the job, use what they learned, and felt supported by their leaders. These insights helped us refine the program and strengthened executive confidence in our impact.

Example 2 – Embedding learning practices into existing operations and routines

While not a company we have directly worked with, we have both admired the way that Amazon utilizes data to inform practice, and how they could use this information to continuously improve business operations or safety training programs. From reviewing Amazon’s safety practices, they monitor real-time factors using data such as work-hour patterns to understand fatigue risks during peak shifts, and incident hotspots such as repetitive motion injuries in specific roles.

In our experience, we’ve observed that these kinds of practices could alert managers to take real-time actions if employees exceed exposure times or if certain patterns are likely to happen. Safety training programs for both managers and employees can help account for behaviors to address issues related to a safety stand down or the focus of the next safety briefing. This can rely on data already tracked as part of business operations, such as driving, equipment use, or order fulfillment.

Amazon’s practices are an excellent example of the kind of participatory feedback loops we are recommending. They do not feel like ‘extra’ work for employees and partners. Organizations can measure the frequency of leadership check-ins, quality of post-incident briefs, and perceptions of leadership commitment to safety through iterative data collection. These practices can be embedded in the evaluative mindsets of the team through continuous challenging of assumptions, feedback to those who can act in near-real time, and iterative improvement.

Data-driven adaptations and leadership engagement are hallmarks of the types of embedded evaluation approaches we advocate for within systems, learning programs, and organizations. We’ve observed that practices like these have yielded a reduction in recordable injury rates and lost time incidents.

Example 3 – Humanizing data at the point of care

Have you ever answered questions about how you’ve been sleeping or feeling in the waiting room of your doctor’s office? That is measurement-based care, grounded in measures completed by patients. Unlike measuring blood pressure with a cuff or doing a blood test to assess A1C levels, in mental health care, we don’t have many tools that can give us access to meaningful metrics. When patients complete brief measures on their problems and concerns, and their providers review and talk about the results in that visit, the research shows that care is more effective and efficient. When the questions spark curiosity and the answers are used to guide collaboration, people’s symptoms improve faster.

We can apply lessons from this to learning and development. By collecting data throughout an intervention, learners encounter smaller bite-sized sets of questions that are less burdensome. Questions that are directly relevant to the experience at hand provide a valuable moment for reflection-in-action, a core component of learning that influences behavior. When the data becomes part of the dialogue in the moment, you’ve transformed a learning experience into a multi-modal strategy of engaging with learners. This both increases learning transfer and can reinforce the connection to larger goals. And, when you use readily accessible technology to capture and display data, you gain the advantage of real-time data for immediate use and aggregation for long-term organizational learning.

So, how do you embed measurement within people’s daily jobs?

Three Practical Steps to Shake Up Your Organization’s Approach to Learning Measurement

1. Start where you are
   No system or tool is perfect and most organizational data is messy. Don’t let this reality block progress toward program improvement. If you already collect “happy sheets” or other forms of participation data, it’s easy to switch out questions in existing tools and forms to more evidence-based questions such as those that assess learning transfer. Sharing findings and recommendations from the data you collect is what will drive the desire for learning and improvement by bringing voices of stakeholders from the frontline to the C-suite. We think that this cadence of sharing the perspectives of the organization with decision makers creates the desire for more program improvement supported from the top down.

2. Go to where the data is
   Embed in existing programs, systems, and tools. Most interventions are plagued with low response rates for the surveys and instruments that they deploy. This makes sense when you consider the constant state of overwhelm most knowledge workers find themselves in, not to mention deskless workers, such as those in remote or field operations. Formative check-ins on critical levels of change such as motivation, intent to apply, or cognitive load during the progress of a program can open up opportunities to course-correct even as the program is delivered.

3. Embrace measuring outcomes over activities
   Participation and reaction data is the easiest data to collect, but it is also the least helpful in evaluating program outcomes. Discovering participants do, or do not, attend your program or if they like it has no bearing on how that training may improve organizational effectiveness or performance. In times of economic uncertainty, some learning experiences may appear to be a luxury, such as expensive leadership development programs. Your C-suite may feel that you are the events planning team rather than understanding your strategic role in driving the performance of the organization. To change this perception, you must present data that demonstrates how this kind of development is a critical lever to performance. If you can’t make that case, desired culture change will remain elusive.

Learning evaluation and measurement for leadership development programs can feel like a monumental, impossible task where data is elusive and participants are unwilling captives to your ploys to collect data. By starting small and taking an iterative mindset to evolve over time, and in a way that is already part of the operational rhythm of your program or business, you can build the momentum and credibility needed to embed evaluation in a way that establishes actionable insights and builds an organization of data-informed decisions.

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Beyond the Survey: Design Learning Data for Real-Time Impact

Susan Douglas, Ph.D.

August 5, 2025

This post is co-authored by Susan Douglas, Ph.D., Professor of Practice at Vanderbilt University and an executive and team coach, and Patrick Voorhies, Ed.D., Manager, Talent & Development, Motiva Enterprises.

What if your learning data didn’t just prove that people liked your programs, but actively fueled curiosity, conversation, and change – while learning was happening?

In a highly competitive and volatile global market, organizations have become increasingly attuned to the need for evidence-based or data-informed decision making. Organizations analyze and report on a host of measures, delivering data to senior executives to guide their decisions. Advancements in technology, such as generative AI, are making data capture and use increasingly accessible to better build the evidence base.

While it is widely recognized that leaders must demonstrate how their investments drive organizational objectives, the challenge lies in consistently meeting this expectation. Talent development leaders already understand how important it is to:

• Articulate the story of how learning and development programs contribute directly to business outcomes.
• Establish clear learning and development metrics, targets, or benchmarks to use to assess the value of learning to the organization.
• Efficiently deliver learning and talent analysis and insights aligned with organizational goals and objectives.
• Leverage data to evaluate workforce skills, competencies, and capabilities in relation to business needs.

The struggle comes when organizations try to show the close connection between learning interventions and business objectives. In our examination of how organizations measure learning and leadership development, we frequently encounter three myths that drastically disconnect learning metrics from organizational learning.

Myth #1

Measuring satisfaction with a learning program tells us something important.

Measures related to how much learners enjoyed an experience don’t usually connect to the real impact on the business unless they are wildly dissatisfied. In fact, research on learning suggests that challenging experiences that lead to growth often don’t earn the most positive ratings from participants. We have too often seen measurement focus on what can be measured rather than what is meaningful to measure.

Attendance and net promoter scores have their rightful place in a comprehensive learning evaluation system. They help you understand the whole picture of what is going on with a program and provide useful insights for quality control and benchmarking. But they are not the best way to answer stakeholders’ and executives’ concerns around a program’s ability to influence business outcomes. They are only the first step in what we call a “chain of outcomes” that integrates a series of measures of how a program was experienced. This approach applies theory-based measures of short- and long-term changes in knowledge, skill, and behavior that predict real business impact.

Myth #2

Connecting learning experiences to behavior change is too difficult.

We acknowledge that survey fatigue is real and that attempts to collect data in the weeks and months after a learning program are minimally useful. Self-reporting provides only a limited slice of a leader’s behavior. Research methods that control for all the reasons why people change that have nothing to do with training are costly and lack fit with the dynamic business context.

Instead, imagine what data might result if you drop the surveys altogether (most of them anyway) and instead embed micro-data collection points throughout a learning experience. This creates opportunities for feedback loops that can be part of the learning experience itself. This is a better fit for how adults learn and even better, it transforms the why behind data collection.

Our research on measurement-based health care shows that people are much more willing to answer questions that directly impact their experience, which ultimately contributes to more and higher quality data that can then be aggregated to benefit organizational learning.

Myth #3

We evaluate to know what something is worth.

Okay, we recognize this is a controversial thing to say when we are talking about evaluation. Now that we’ve got your attention, here’s what we mean. Collecting data to evaluate the merit or worth of something is always a political activity. Emerging leaders want the program to continue because it will enhance their chances of promotion. Senior leaders believe in the program because it enhances the company’s reputation as a place that develops leaders. And yes, talent development leaders want to prove that their programs matter and enhance the business. When these things are true (and even when they are not?), organizations tend to hold learning data too close.

While talent development leaders may share metrics with HR or management, they often don’t put the data in the hands of those who can make the biggest difference with it. It’s not enough to generate data dashboards and produce reports. What’s needed is to integrate real-time relevant data into a dialogue about what we can do more of, do less of, or do differently to increase impact.

It’s time to move beyond using data only to prove something. The real power of data comes when organizations use it as a catalyst to spark curiosity, fuel shared learning, and inspire collective action—an essential shift too many still overlook.

From Transaction to Transformation: Embedding Micro-Data for Real-Time Learning

Too often, learning data collection is treated as a post-training transaction — a quick survey asking participants to rate their experience after the fact. The result? Feedback becomes an afterthought, disconnected from the actual learning. And learning and development (L&D) teams are left relying on goodwill for insights that may never arrive.

We propose a shift: from evaluation as an endpoint to evaluation as a learning strategy. When you embed data collection directly into the learning experience, you turn insight into action — in the moment.

This approach puts learning data closest to where decisions are being made. Here’s how to start:

1. Ask Questions that Shift the Learner

Design questions that do more than gather opinions – ask ones that evoke insight, awareness, or behavior change. These questions should feel like part of the learning itself, not a separate task. When data collection deepens the learner’s engagement, you get useful data for evaluation and training impact.

2. Share Results in Real Time

As data is collected, make results visible immediately within the learning experience. Show participants how their responses are shaping the journey. This not only builds trust but creates opportunities for real-time customization – even in asynchronous settings.

3. Build a Feedback loop that Powers Learning

When questions are well-designed and responses are used immediately, you unlock a powerful feedback loop. Data isn’t just captured – it is applied. Even self-reported outcomes, gathered throughout the experience, can be woven into a story of change that speaks to both learner and organizational impact.

This model requires more intention from L&D teams but delivers far greater value to learners and to the organization. Measurement of leadership development that is embedded in the “Why?” – what we call the theory of change – creates a pathway that shows impact across individual leaders, teams, and the organization. Visualizing the path, as shown below, helps create the connections forward when planning leadership programs and backward when measuring crucial outcomes.

Pathway to Embedding Leadership Development Outcomes

The key question isn’t “Can we do this?” but “How might we?”

The real magic happens when we use data as a starting point to explore, engage, and evolve together. Ultimately this is about strengthening a culture that values execution, which is about getting it right, and learning, which is about getting it better. Creating data transparency and pushing information access to the people who can drive the change requires shifts in candor, as it changes how we lead, listen, and design programs.

Our model is more than a method – it’s a mindset. If you’re ready to move beyond proving value to creating it in real time, we invite you to experiment, reflect, and learn with us. In our next post, we will showcase organizations that are taking a human-centered systems thinking approach with learning measurement.

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Leadership Fitness Behavioral Assessment

In our study, “Leadership Fitness: Developing the Capacity to See and Lead Differently Amid Complexity,” we identified four dimensions of leadership fitness that reframe how leaders see their environment as well as how they can lead differently through it.

To help you evaluate your organization’s leadership maturity, we’ve created a tool to measure your leaders’ leadership fitness.

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The Purpose Factor: Why Your Talent Strategy Depends on It

A global survey revealed that 52% of jobseekers would not accept a job offer if they did not know or agree with a company’s values or purpose, and 90% of respondents from another poll said that work should bring a sense of meaning to their life.

Explore the infographic to uncover more insights.

View the infographic

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How to Help Gen Z Early-Career Professionals Navigate Their Careers

John Hall

May 8, 2025

Who Are the Early-Career Professionals?

Early career typically refers to the initial stage of a person’s professional journey after completing their education or training. It is this phase when individuals are in the early stages of building their work experience and establishing themselves in their chosen fields. While there is not a universally defined time frame, early career generally encompasses the first few years of professional work.

Understanding Generation Z Is A Leadership Imperative

Born between 1997 and 2012, the generational cohort with the highest percentage of early-career professionals is Generation Z. According to public relations and communications firm Burson Cohn & Wolfe, Generation Z is the largest generation in the world, and by 2025, they will make up 27% of the global workforce.

Leaders cannot afford to be reactive; rather, they must take a proactive approach to attract and retain talent coming from this generational cohort. Nowadays, it will take more than a competitive compensation package to retain Gen Z workers; this cohort is also looking for an emotional paycheck. In the article “WTF is an emotional paycheck?” author Hailey Mensik states, “Traditional salary packages are no longer enough to retain talented professionals today. Instead, there’s a growing insistence on emotional fulfillment—a currency long overlooked in the employer-employee exchange.”¹

Simply put, the global workforce is changing, and so are the expectations of early-career professionals. Leaders will need a new set of skills to effectively influence and impact this up-and-coming cohort. To begin to understand Generation Z, it is important to first understand some of the challenges that they have faced.

Challenges Faced by Generation Z

Many Gen Z workers started their careers during the tumultuous times of the Covid-19 pandemic. While previous generational cohorts had the benefit of beginning their careers with in-person support, collaboration among team members, and overall consistent onboarding processes, the Gen Z worker onboarding experience was starkly different.

As new entrants in the workforce, Generation Z workers were forced to work remotely, and they experienced pandemic-induced roadblocks to collaboration and new onboarding processes that were being created on the fly. To make matters worse, many of these workers experienced being furloughed or fired before they could establish themselves during the infancy of their careers. As a result, Gen Z workers formed a distrust of the establishment and had legitimate concerns about job security and career advancement.

What Practical Steps Can Leaders Take to Support Early-Career Professionals?

1. Prioritize helping Gen Z workers succeed and find fulfilment at work

As mentioned previously, compensation alone is not enough to attract or retain talent. Today’s leaders must be cognizant that company culture will either make or break the relationship between their organization and its Gen Z talent. Leaders can start by demonstrating an authentic desire to help Gen Z early-career professionals flourish and find a sense of satisfaction and happiness while at work. This requires taking a human-centered approach.

2. Proactively ask Early-Career Professionals how to best support them

Leaders would benefit by taking a proactive approach to asking how to best support Gen Z early-career professionals. Gen Z is very pragmatic and will seek concrete examples, directions, and advice to help them navigate their career journey. Unfortunately, sage advice is not always readily available. Given the manner in which these early-career professionals were onboarded during the pandemic, it has been difficult to build developmental networks.

As Harvard Professor Linda Hill stated in her seminal article “The Three Networks You Need,” “Your developmental network is the collection of individuals whom you trust and to whom you can turn for a sympathetic ear, advice (depending on their experience), and a place to discuss and explore professional options.”² Assuming that these types of networks would form organically would be a mistake. Leaders can help connect Gen Z workers to more-experienced colleagues who can help provide guidance in addition to the support the leaders provide themselves.

Take the guesswork out of how to support Gen Z workers by simply asking them how to best support them as their leader.

3. Ask them “What does success look like?”

Successful projects are predicated on taking time out to define what success looks like and identifying the indicators of that success; planning a career is no different. Ask Gen Z early-career professionals to describe their ideal state as it relates to the first years of their career. This thought-provoking question can act as a catalyst for a deep conversation about their aspirations, thoughts, and ideas as they relate to their career. The benefit of describing an ideal state is that leaders can help early-career professionals begin identifying the gaps between the current state and the desired state and help them map out the required steps to get there.

Having a conversation about a Gen Z early-career professional’s definition of success will help leaders provide perspective that will help those professionals correct course if their current path is not aligned with their desired future state. Without taking these steps, success will feel nebulous and measuring progress will be difficult.

4. Help Gen Z Professionals take responsibility for their personal and professional growth

While leaders can encourage, build accountability, and monitor progress, it is the Gen Z early-career professional’s job to own their experience which is all about taking responsibility for their personal and professional growth and development. Gen Z workers must be able to see that they are firmly in the driver’s seat when it comes to managing their career. It implies taking responsibility for their actions, decisions, and outcomes. Real career growth happens when Gen Z early-career professionals can learn from their experiences, whether positive or negative, and recognize and take ownership of mistakes.

Leaders who will be successful in helping Gen Z early-career professionals navigate their careers will make a meaningful and positive impact. Helping Gen Z early career professionals pays dividends to the employee and the organization alike. There is a growing need for organizations to take a human-centered approach.

Helping each employee succeed and find fulfillment at work does not happen by chance; it takes intentionality.

Learn More

To learn how to develop human-centered leaders who drive employee fulfillment, download our report “Fulfillment at Work Requires Real Human-Centered Leadership.”

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Fulfillment at Work Requires Real Human-Centered Leadership

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1. Hailey Mensik, “WTF is an emotional paycheck?” worklife.news, April 2024.
   ︎
2. https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-three-networks-you-need”>Linda Hill and Kent Lineback, “The Three Networks You Need,” HBR.org, March 2011. ︎

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