Anxious Generation – Challenges of Future Leaders
How to Manage Gen-Z and Everyone Else
I’m a parent of a few-year-old daughter. It makes me constantly think about how we should raise her to prepare for adulthood. With that in mind, I recently read The Anxious Generation by Jon Haidt from
.A “must-read for all parents,” the book shows how the shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based one significantly alters how children develop social skills and cope with challenges.
While I was aware that my daughter’s childhood would be very different from mine 20–30 years ago, I hadn’t fully reflected on how many threats might exist—especially regarding her mental health and development.
Why am I sharing this here?
Because over recent years, I’ve realized many similarities between parenting and leadership roles. Empower rather than enforce, give context and explanations instead of orders, and let people fail in a controlled environment so they can thrive in real challenges—these are effective approaches to both managing your teams and raising your kids.
With that in mind, I invite you to explore the possible lessons and takeaways from Anxious Generation that we can apply to our roles as engineering leaders.
Here, you can find a PDF cheat sheet summarizing this article.
Gen-Z
A few months ago, I wrote an article about how to Manage Gen Z, a new demographic cohort that will soon become a significant group of employees and who are stereotypically perceived as disloyal, lazy, entitled, and overly sensitive.
From an employer’s perspective, the main differences between Gen-Z and older generations like Millennials (including me) are:
Lower loyalty to employers—staying no longer than two years within a single company
Growth and training—desired, but within working hours and fully covered by the company
Promotions—new responsibilities should bring adequate compensation
Work from the office—good for catch-ups, brainstorming, or refreshing social circles, but for day-to-day work, it is noisy, distracting, and bad for deep focus
Work engagement—if you want missionaries—people who deeply care about the company’s success—bring transparency first
Salaries—focus on transparency and equality
Work-life balance—when people are sick, they are off. When they clock out, they are off. During weekends, they are off.
While some of these traits are seen as annoying by older-generation leaders and employers, they also influence the work culture for all of us—Gen Z, Millennials, and Boomers. I also benefited from this shift. While I consider myself a missionary who is focused on the organization’s success, I also enjoy better work-life balance and increased market transparency, which helps me navigate salary-related conversations. Plus, I no longer feel bad about learning new skills at work instead of doing it late at night.
In his book, Jonathan Haidt defines Generation Z as those born after 1995, with pervasive access to smartphones, social media, and the internet. This early exposure has had significant implications for their mental health, contributing to increased levels of anxiety and depression.
Beyond that, overprotective parenting trends have limited Gen Z's opportunities for risk-taking and personal growth, which are essential for developing resilience. Haidt highlights that despite being more digitally connected than ever, Gen Z often experiences shallow connections.
Key Themes from The Anxious Generation for Leaders
Okay, so what do all those findings and data tell us as tech industry managers, directors, and leaders?
1) Risk-Taking Aversion
The book highlights two modes of people's behavior:
Defend Mode is tunnel-visioned, focused on survival and defending against threats. Individuals in this mode often fixate on avoiding mistakes, seeking safety, and minimizing uncertainty.
Discovery Mode, by contrast, is all about exploration and learning through trial and error. In this mode, we embrace uncertainty as an opportunity to innovate, take risks, and remain open to new ideas.
According to The Anxious Generation, highly protective parenting and the deprivation of challenging but safe experiences—such as playground conflicts or mild physical risks—lead to lower resilience. In the workplace, this can manifest as hesitance to make decisions for fear of making mistakes or a reluctance to engage in open-ended problem-solving.
At the same time, risk-taking is critical to the success of product organizations. The DevOps culture clearly states that experimentation and constant learning are our desired ways of working. We also know that only 10–30% of features pushed by companies bring positive results (more here), meaning that acting as a mere “feature factory” that blindly executes orders is the least effective approach.
So what can we do? As leaders, it’s valuable to design tasks and processes that encourage small, iterative risks so people become accustomed to learning by doing. This can be achieved through fast and stable delivery processes (e.g., Continuous Deployment) and Center-out Leadership, where much of the context is shared with your teammates. Hence, they feel encouraged to make independent decisions.
2) Increased Anxiety and Depression
Haidt’s book, as well as great publications on Generation Tech by
, highlight the rise in reports of anxiety and depression among Gen-Z. Smartphones and social media have created environments that foster chronic fear, particularly through social comparison and perfectionism. Online personas are often maxed out, leading to feelings of inadequacy among teenagers.In the professional environment, this can lead to withdrawing opinions and ideas at best or FOMO-related stress, burnout, and mental health issues at worst.
According to DORA research, employee well-being is a strong predictor of organizational performance. When people feel supported, they are not only more productive but also exhibit lower turnover rates and better collaboration.
With rising levels of anxiety and potential risk aversion among younger cohorts, creating an environment of psychological safety becomes even more urgent. If team members feel safe to fail and learn, they’ll bring out their best creativity and collaboration. If they’re in Defend Mode, they’ll likely do the minimum required, avoid tough conversations, and pass on real opportunities to innovate.
If you want to build such a safe environment, you can take inspiration from Polyvagal Theory (PVT), developed by American psychologist and neuroscientist Stephen Porges. Two elements are crucial to creating proper neuroception:
Removing threats and their indicators in both physical and emotional realms
Introducing signals of safety
For practical tips on how to implement this, check out: Safety Leadership and Neuroception
3) Shallow Social Skills and Team Work
Gen Z’s “digital nativity” often means they’re great at quick, online communications, but they may find traditional face-to-face interactions, public speaking, or ad-hoc brainstorming more stressful.
In a professional environment, teamwork is essential. Collaboration is often the only way to accomplish highly complex tasks. To foster that, leaders must build a setting of high trust, psychological safety, and collaborative problem-solving.
Because of the shift toward online interactions, Gen Z often has less practice with face-to-face communication, conflict resolution, and reading nonverbal cues than older generations. This can lead to misunderstandings in workplace interactions, especially in hybrid or in-person environments. Leaders may need to explicitly teach or model effective communication skills.
Gen-Z’s strong emphasis on individuality and self-expression is reflected in their preference for flexible work arrangements, personalized career paths, and the freedom to express their identity at work. Respecting that is important, but it must also be balanced with team cohesion. For inspiration to find the sweet spot between being a leader and a manager, see How to Take Care of Your People as an Engineering Leader.
4) Harder to Be Creative and Deeply Focused
The constant flow of information has shortened attention spans for many in Gen Z—and, frankly, for everyone who is online 24/7. The current generation has also developed a heightened sensitivity to threats, which can stifle creativity and exploration (defaulting to Defend Mode).
This shift in our minds’ “busyness” correlates nicely with the rise of Developer Experience, a practice of measuring and improving engineers’ productivity. Several times, I’ve mentioned the three dimensions of developer experience, highlighted in DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity:
Flow State – a mental state in which people are fully immersed in their work or activity, with high productivity, joy, and internal energy
Feedback Loops – how quickly people get the information they need to continue or improve their work
Cognitive Load – the amount of mental processing required to do one’s job or perform an activity
So, what can we do as leaders here?
First, protect blocks of “maker time” to reduce the cognitive load of constant interruptions, allowing engineers to work deeply without frequent context switching. Second, focus on psychological safety: openly discuss learning experiences, run safe-to-fail pilots, and celebrate small “failed experiments” as pathways to bigger achievements.
Next, employ metrics with care—use them to spark conversations, not as performance checks, so developers feel empowered to propose bold solutions rather than gaming numbers. Encourage collaboration through pair programming or regular knowledge-sharing sessions; a culture where peers openly exchange insights reduces fear of mistakes and fosters creativity.
Finally, balance autonomy and support: Give experienced engineers room to explore and innovate while offering structured guidance to those who need it (already mentioned Center-out Leadership). These shifts collectively lower the threat level and invite more experimentation, laying the groundwork for higher-impact engineering.
By making risk-taking normal and safe, leaders create an environment where teams can comfortably shift from defending the status quo to discovering new ideas and driving sustained innovation.
It’s Not Just About Gen-Z
Even though The Anxious Generation focuses primarily on Gen-Z, as leaders, we should apply its lessons to all our teams. Stress management, reducing cognitive load, and building psychological safety benefit all generations in a workplace. Research findings—from sources like DORA or studies on Developer Experience—reinforce that supporting well-being and resilience increases performance, collaboration, and overall job satisfaction. Ensuring a healthy environment across the board helps everyone thrive, not just Gen-Z.
Moreover, when we incorporate practices like continuous feedback, mindful context-sharing, and clear communication for one demographic group, the culture shifts for everyone’s betterment. The result is a team that is more cohesive, adaptive, and ready to tackle challenges—regardless of when each member was born.
End Words
Mental health, psychological safety, and developing robust human relationships are increasingly important factors in today’s tech industry. Yet it’s also vital to keep perspective:
Balance caution with optimism - Gen Z employees bring fresh energy and adaptability. While they arrive with unique stressors, they can thrive in environments that are psychologically safe, inclusive, and supportive.
Focus on what you can control – You cannot change the entire digital environment or how people were raised. Still, you can shape your team’s culture, set realistic expectations, and offer proactive well-being resources.
Embrace the upsides – The same generation that’s more anxious can also be more empathetic and open. Gen Z is often unafraid to talk about mental health, connect with communities worldwide, and rapidly adapt to new technologies.
Supporting the Gen-Z workforce, building psychological safety, and creating an environment that is friendly to focus, creative, and deep work are some of the key challenges of 2025.
But there are others on the horizon—like remote-native environments and transitioning from mere software engineering to full product engineering. For more on those topics, check out one of my recent articles: The Engineering Leader of 2025 and Beyond – How to Prepare for Tomorrow as an Engineering Leader.
By staying mindful of our teams’ evolving needs and making intentional cultural shifts, we can empower every cohort—from Gen-Z to Boomers—to do their best work and grow together in a rapidly changing tech landscape.