Meet Rebecca Adams, the Chief People Officer at Cohesity, a data protection startup with $1.5 billion-plus in revenue and, she notes, close to 6,000 employees. The key to driving further growth, she’s decided, is training her managers in how to work with—even talk to—Gen Z. Speaking of her own and her managers’ interactions with younger colleagues, and even some of her conversations with her children, ages 18 and 20, “it gives me some empathy,” she says. “It also is mindboggling” to see how differently young people approach work.
This new generation of workers is different in that they don’t accept a manager’s directions at face value, she says. “They want to know why, how, they want constant feedback.” Adams said Cohesity has had to teach the managers how to lead this generation of workers, while also teaching some seemingly “basic things” to younger workers, like “how do I manage my calendar? You actually have to accept the meeting request. You can’t just walk out of the meeting that you’re in because you have another one while it’s still going on.”
Boundaries and oversharing
Adams related an anecdote of a lunch program where a senior leader takes an intern out, and an instance where a manager was kept waiting by a successful intern who had just signed on to convert to full-time. The intern explained, “Sorry, I’m late, I just had to walk, I was just in a meeting.” The manager was horrified to learn that their lunch date had interrupted a business meeting, but the intern said they had “a lot going on” so it was fine for them to leave the meeting early for lunch.
