A 23-year-old on your team is turning in work that's adequate. Nothing wrong with it. It's also everything they will ever give you unless something changes, and you can feel that.
Nothing here is fireable. That's exactly the problem. People in this spot tend to sit there for two or three years until they leave on their own, having learned very little, and the organization writes it off as a bad fit.
There are plenty of reasons a young employee ends up here, but I keep coming back to three that seem to account for a lot of it.
The first is disconnection. They can't see what their work turns into, so they've stopped investing in it.
The second is depletion. They're working a second job to cover debt they took on because no one ever explained how to stay out of debt, and they are not sleeping enough. What reads as indifference is someone running on empty.
The third is the one everybody knows and nobody tells them directly. Sometimes a 23-year-old is just 23. They haven't learned yet that showing up prepared is something you do whether or not you feel like it, because no one has required it of them in a setting that mattered.
Most managers can tell these apart. The harder part is what comes next, because each one calls for a different conversation, and the conversations are not equally easy to have.
Every generation had to grow up at work. This one has less help.
Becoming a competent adult at work is not a Gen Z problem. It's a being-young problem, and it always has been. Boomers learned it from managers who told them exactly where they stood. Gen X learned it from being handed responsibility early and left to figure it out. Millennials learned it, somewhat painfully, in a recession that didn't care about their credentials.
What's different now is that the structures doing the teaching have thinned out. There are fewer first jobs with a demanding supervisor who corrected you in real time and not as many adults outside your family telling you plainly that your work wasn't good enough yet. Then several formative years happened through a screen, which cost them the in-person practice that teaches a young person how to carry themselves around people who aren't their friends.
That's not a character verdict. It's a gap, and gaps make people want to assign responsibility for closing them. Unfortunately, this gap doesn't close neatly. No amount of initiative produces an entry-level job in a market that isn't hiring, and telling a 24-year-old to try harder at that is useless. They know it, which is part of why advice from older people lands badly so often.
Learning to be dependable is a different kind of gap, and this one has an obvious owner. It gets taught on the job, by people already doing it well. A hard market raises the stakes rather than lowering them. When openings are scarce, the young person who shows up prepared, takes feedback, and can be counted on is the one who gets hired and kept.
Before you read all that as a story about young people who can't handle themselves
Think about what the 23-year-olds you know build when nobody asks them to.
Somebody's kid runs a resale business out of a bedroom with better margins than they'd admit to their parents. Somebody taught themselves color grading off YouTube and now gets paid for it on weekends. Somebody moderates a Discord with four hundred members and handles disputes in it with more procedural fairness than a lot of HR departments manage. No supervisor, no deadline anyone imposed, no script. They decided the thing should exist and then made it exist.
That's this generation. Dr. Corey Seemiller, my guest on the most recent GenShift® episode, has studied them for more than a decade. She names the stereotype about Gen Z that's mostly true, and it isn't the one people expect. They're entrepreneurial and resourceful. The one that's flat wrong is the one about being lazy and quitting when things get hard, and she's blunt about it: a lot of them work tirelessly on things they care deeply about.
Notice the condition here: they do it for the thing they chose. That tells you something useful about the flat effort on your team. The capacity is there, you've just watched it show up somewhere else, pointed at something they picked themselves. The question isn't whether they can work hard. It's what connects this work to anything they'd choose.
We learned this from somebody. They haven't.
Plenty of leaders have already written this generation off, and the reasons are usually real. Someone turned up in clothing that read as sleepwear. Someone took a personal call mid-meeting, kept their camera off for a month, cried in a one-on-one over feedback that wasn’t even harsh. None of that is fine. The verdict gets reached fast, though, and it tends to be about character, when the likelier explanation is simply ignorance or inattentiveness.
None of us were born knowing this. We learned it from somebody, directly or indirectly, and often we remember exactly who. The woman two cubicles over who informed you, unprompted, that your shirt needed ironing and that she could see it from there. The manager who pulled you aside after a meeting and said that whatever you were doing with your face while the client talked, stop doing it. Nobody enjoyed those moments. They also worked, permanently, which is more than some professional development can claim.
A lot of these young people never had that, because the places that used to deliver that kind of correction were harder to come by for them. That leaves a decision. You can treat the behavior as evidence of who someone is, or you can tell them the expectation and find out whether they’ll meet it. The first option is easier and it costs you nothing today. It also teaches them nothing, and the behavior follows them to the next job.
Compassion and accountability are the same conversation
I was intrigued that when I asked Corey what one thing leaders should take from our conversation, she landed on compassion, something I talk about frequently in the Three C's. She's clear that it was never meant to mean lowering the bar. Understanding why someone behaves as they do doesn't make unacceptable behavior acceptable or mean nobody gets held accountable. It means finding out what's actually going on before deciding what it means.
What you do with the answer depends on which of the three you're looking at:
When someone can't see the point of the work. Sometimes you can draw a real line from their task to a person it helps. Often you can't, because a lot of entry-level work is genuinely boring, and there's a good reason nobody enjoys it. Manufacturing meaning that isn't there costs you credibility with people who hold a high value for authenticity. What works better is shifting the question to what they're building. Five-year plans aren't really possible to make anymore, but skills are still concrete. What do they want to be good at, and what would make them a stronger candidate for the job after this one? Most young employees have never been asked that by anyone at work. Once you know the answer, you can usually point to the part of the current job that develops it. A dull task you can name a reason for has a different long term impact than a dull task you can't.
When someone is depleted. You are not their financial advisor or their doctor. You can notice, though, and you can guide them. Most organizations already have more than managers realize, from an unused EAP to financial wellness sessions nobody promotes. Make these resources known, by name, rather than gesturing at a benefits portal. Then protect the time for it, because a session people have to skip to stay on top of their workload isn't a benefit, it's a message.
When someone isn’t doing what the job requires. Say so. Plainly, without apology, in words that leave no room for interpretation about the standard. Managers skip this conversation most, and skipping it isn't kindness. It leaves someone to work out at 30 what they could have learned at 23.
They are waiting for you to start
Here's what makes this more workable than it sounds. This generation is unusually open to being taught. Corey described something I've seen over and over: Gen Z actually likes talking to their friends' parents. They'll stand in a kitchen and talk to an adult they barely know for an hour, which would have mortified most of us at that age. They're curious about how people older than them figured things out, and they want the mistakes, not just the highlight reel.
What they usually won't do is initiate it with you. A 23-year-old is not going to walk into your office and ask about your career. They're waiting for you to go first.
So go first. Tell them what you believed about work at their age that turned out to be wrong. This costs you nothing and does two jobs at once. It hands over knowledge they have no other way to get, and it builds enough trust that when you do have to say the work isn't good enough yet, they can hear it as investment instead of attack.
One thing worth remembering
Across every study Dr. Corey Seemiller and Dr. Meghan Grace have run, the strongest motivator that keeps surfacing is making a difference for others. Their global study across 81 countries (Emerald, 2024) found it holds regardless of country or culture.
That's the fuel. A lot of them are still working out where to point it, and aim is teachable. It just has to be taught by someone willing to be warm and demanding in the same conversation, and to believe the person in front of them is going to get there.
Go listen
My conversation with Dr. Corey Seemiller is live now on the GenShift podcast. She’s spent more than a decade studying this generation and she’s one of the most cited researchers working on them, which means she has data where most people have opinions. We get into what she expected to find in her global study and didn't, what she thinks leaders should stop assuming immediately, and why she wishes she'd behaved a little more like Gen Z when she was younger.