Is Gen Z Really Less Resilient at Work?

Senior leaders keep asking whether young employees can take the pressure. The people leaders we interviewed found that what looks like fragility is often a staffing decision taken years earlier. 

Resilience was not one of our set questions for the Future Readiness interview series. It came up anyway. Interview after interview, senior leaders raised it, and always about their youngest employees. Those leaders work in law, professional services, technology, life sciences, manufacturing, and live entertainment. This piece weighs that accusation against what the same leaders say about those same employees elsewhere. To let them speak freely, we have not named the leaders or their organisations. Their quotes have been lightly edited for clarity. 

Why Do Senior Leaders Question Gen Z’s Resilience at Work?

When senior leaders question whether young employees can cope, they tend to do it carefully and with an example to hand. A people director in live entertainment described senior managers who “get frustrated with a perceived or a real lack of resilience within the younger generations”. His industry tests that view nightly. Whatever has happened backstage, the show goes up in front of an audience that has already paid. 

“What we find is that sometimes the onstage talent doesn’t have the resilience and is saying, ‘I can’t do this, I’m not going to do this,'” he said. “And so we have show cancellations.” 

He is far from alone in that frustration. Survey research cited in a 2025 study of finance leaders found nearly three in four managers believe Gen Z is harder to work with than other generations. An HR director at a global technology business put it more narrowly. “Our younger workforce lacks some of those skills that enable them to be truly effective,” he said, meaning difficult conversations rather than stamina. 

What Else Explains What Looks Like Fragility?

The entertainment director took his own example apart before we could. Performances once absorbed a bad night because understudies stood ready, and cost pressure removed them. “Whether that is purely down to resilience, or whether that is because of the high costs of production and they don’t have the understudies that they used to have, is another aspect,” he said. “There’s a commerciality to the lack of redundancy in terms of having somebody there to step in.” A cancellation that reads as fragility can equally be read as a rota with nothing in reserve. 

A talent leader in the legal sector went through that reasoning herself. At her firm, the heaviest users of the employee assistance programme were the trainees, not the partners, and her first reaction was negative. Then she checked it. As a trustee of a charity, she put the question to its chief executive. “I’m not sure if they’re just a little bit work shy, or anything to get out of working hard,” she told him. His answer stayed with her. “You could be right,” he said. “Or is it that this generation is much more open to talking about things such as mental wellbeing, work-life balance, and other issues?” Heavy use of the programme shows who is willing to ask for help. It does not show who is struggling most. 

The two cases show different things. In one, young performers absorb a risk the organisation created when it cut the understudies. In the other, young lawyers use support their seniors would have stayed quiet about. One is a staffing decision, the other a change in behaviour, and neither necessarily proves that Gen Z is a weaker generation. 

What Does the Data Say About Young Workers and Stress?

A generation that is no weaker than its predecessors can still be under strain, however. Mental Health UK’s Burnout Report 2026 polled 4,502 UK adults. It found 39% of workers aged 18 to 24 took time off in the past year because of poor mental health caused by stress. Across all workers, one in five. The strain is real, and it is concentrated among exactly the people some senior leaders are describing as fragile. The same report found 39% of that age group would not feel comfortable raising high stress with their manager. That figure worsened by five points on the previous year. 

So young workers are not necessarily talking more than their elders did. They are talking somewhere their manager cannot hear, which is precisely what a confidential employee assistance programme exists for. 

The pressure is not confined to the young, either. HSE statistics for 2024/25 record 964,000 workers suffering stress, depression, or anxiety caused or made worse by work. The regulator names mental health conditions as the primary driver of work-related ill health across the whole workforce. 

Are Younger Employees Less Capable at Work?

The same leaders describe a capable group the moment the subject changes from resilience to adaptability. “The positive side of having that multigenerational workforce is the ability of the younger generations to adapt, and adapt really quickly,” the entertainment director said. 

The legal talent leader described juniors who lack certain skills and remain “quite shrewd operators”. They “can smell if something’s not authentic, and they don’t buy into it”. That instinct is useful in a firm, and uncomfortable, because it gets applied to the firm’s own promises first. 

The research is more equivocal than either camp allows. The finance study describes Gen Z as highly educated and technologically literate, while the managers in its focus groups reported missing practical skills in the same people. The same graduate can be quick with the technology and unpractised at handling a difficult client. 

That combination puts the weight on managers. Asked what leaders will need, a life sciences executive went straight to “the ability of the manager or the leader to build resilient teams”, in a workforce with “multiple generations inside the workforce, multiple ways with which someone is being motivated”. Resilience, on his account, is something a manager builds rather than something a recruit arrives with. 

How Can Employers Build Resilience Across Generations?

Treating resilience as something a workplace builds changes the practical question. Instead of asking whether a graduate is tough enough, an employer has to ask what its own arrangements are doing to the people it hires. Four answers came up often enough to be worth serious consideration. 

• Safeguard the youngest recruits. “School leavers are really quite vulnerable, and you need to have the appropriate safeguarding in there,” the legal talent leader said. An apprentice who joins at 18 needs a different kind of supervision from a graduate arriving at 22. 
• Build independence in stages. The entertainment organisation keeps early careers largely in-person. It then extends hybrid freedom as people are “earning, growing in confidence and trust”, treating autonomy as something built in increments rather than granted on a start date. 
• Compare the job today with the job your seniors did. Ask what has been taken out of it, whether that is the understudy who used to absorb a bad night or the margin in a rota that once allowed for one. If the role has lost its slack since the people complaining about it did the same work, the pressure sits in the job rather than in the person doing it. 
• Treat some of the changes as progress. Employers have spent years building wellbeing programmes and urging staff to speak up about mental health. The CIPD’s 2025 survey found mental health is a focus of wellbeing activity in 89% of organisations, and 74% of HR professionals and managers now say senior leaders have wellbeing on their agenda, up from 61% five years ago. A generation that talks about stress and asks for help early is doing what those programmes asked for. 

Read the rest of the series

About the Authors

Sukran Tumay is a Managing Partner at Stanton Chase London, where she specialises in the Consumer Products and Services and Life Sciences and Healthcare sectors. She has led cross-border executive search assignments across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, working with organisations from early-stage companies to global groups. She is a Co-Active Coach and an alum of the CTI Leadership Community, and she brings that coaching background to how she advises clients on leadership capability and succession. 

James Nathan is a Partner at Stanton Chase London, where he leads the Professional Services and Entertainment Sector practices. He specialises in executive search for board directors, partners, chief executives, and other senior leadership roles, with more than 25 years of experience across executive search and professional services. His clients range from specialist boutiques to private equity-backed businesses and established global firms, and his work concentrates on senior mandates where leadership capability and commercial judgement decide whether a business performs.