Gen Z won’t follow you unless you walk beside them

New Delhi: There was a time when, in marketing teams, the proverbial corner office came with invisible perks—authority and respect. The invisible power to get people to stay back late just by walking past their desk. Times have changed, and how. The new intern isn’t looking at your LinkedIn followers in awe. They look through your LinkedIn drivel and see through who you are IRL. They’re wondering why you wrote “digital-first” in your headline in 2025. The rules of engagement have shifted, and not in the incremental, evolutionary, over-time way. Especially if you’re a millennial (or Gen X) leading a team filled with Gen Z talent.

You can’t manage Gen Z the way you were managed. You can’t even mentor them the way you were mentored. They’re not waiting for an annual appraisal to tell them if they’re doing well. They’ve already posted their latest design project on Behance, gotten feedback from strangers across three time zones, and moved on. You’re still formatting a PPT without the help of AI.

Gen Z isn’t the problem. The leadership operating system is.

The myth of the reluctant learner

Let’s begin by killing the biggest myth: that Gen Z is "entitled," "unwilling to learn," or "fragile."

What they are is discerning. They’ve grown up with access to the world’s best creators, coders, thinkers, and storytellers—on demand. So when they join your team, they don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to be real. Every day, performative leadership—where your calendar looks inspirational but your one-on-ones don’t—is the quickest way to lose them.

They will not blindly follow authority. They’ll fiercely align with authenticity. That’s a great thing, if you know how to show up.

From captain to collaborator

Remember the brand manager who once ruled with Gantt charts and glares? That archetype is extinct—or should be. Today’s marketing teams are less “command-and-control” and more “jam session.” Think of leading them like directing a modern creative agency: you’ve got strategists who moonlight as meme-makers, planners who host podcasts, and designers who run side hustles. They don’t want to be told what to do; they want to be co-conspirators in building something that matters. They see whether you are a thinker and creator in real life.

One needs a fundamental rewiring: the idea that your job as a senior marketer isn’t to ‘approve’ the idea, it’s to make the team feel safe and sharp enough to push the idea further than you imagined.

Culture is open and inclusive. We are like a family. Or are we?

If I had a rupee for every time a leader told me “our team culture is open and inclusive,” I’d have enough to buy a share in a D2C brand. Culture is not what you declare in a values slide. It’s how you behave when a 23-year-old in your team says, “Hey, I think that brand insight doesn’t work anymore.” It’s in whether you pause and ask, “Tell me more,” or pull rank and defend the brief you built in 2018.

Some of our last few campaigns on social media at Unstop have been driven almost end-to-end by an extremely talented intern from LSR. The way she came in and shared ideas with us, we realised the best thing we could do was to let her be. To stay away from her executional playbook. And the engagements on those posts—higher than our average levels of engagement—proved that this is the way to work in future.

Can you enable a culture where major mistakes are allowed, irrespective of your operating environment? And still back your team members up?

Are we ready to let go of control as marketing leaders?

One of the biggest shifts for senior marketers today is accepting that ‘not knowing’ is not a weakness; it’s perhaps an asset. If your team’s average age is 25 and you’re still dictating Instagram or social strategy without having used the app intensively yourself, you’re not leading. You’re just louder.

A CMO of a leading fashion e-commerce platform told me, “When I stopped trying to sound relevant and started being curious, I found the team opened up more. They don’t expect us to have all the answers. But they do expect us to stop pretending we do.” That’s the thing. Sometimes leadership is about knowing when to stop talking and start listening.

The big shift: from ego to ecosystem

What we’re seeing is not a rebellion; it’s a recalibration. Gen Z isn’t rejecting structure; they’re rejecting structures that don’t serve creativity, clarity, or conscience. The best leaders today aren’t building teams around themselves. They’re building ecosystems where everyone grows. Focused on learning by themselves and with each other.

That means creating room for feedback to flow both ways. It means sharing not just vision decks, but vulnerabilities. It means asking questions like: What do you want to learn this quarter? Where do you think the brand should be headed? It means having the humility to hear things that might bruise the ego, but strengthen the culture.

Because the truth is this: Gen Z will absolutely follow you if you show them you’re willing to walk beside them first. They’re not scared of the hustle. They just want to know the hustle isn’t hollow. And maybe, just maybe, that’s exactly what marketing leadership needed all along.

In a world where everyone’s trying to go viral and resort to virtue-signalling on LinkedIn, perhaps the real flex is being the kind of leader people want to grow with, even when no one’s watching.