Gen Z are workshy teetotallers. They’re chronically online. They care more about sustainability than any generation before them. These sweeping statements litter headlines, crop up in conversation and get trotted out on social media. They’re mostly harmless… until they enter the boardroom.
Whether your perception of Gen Z is shaped by real-world interactions or two-dimensional headlines, pigeonholing a whole generation is reductive. It’s also an increasingly unreliable way of understanding the people you want to target.
Yet, leaders are still leaning into these generalisations and letting them harden into assumptions. Such assumptions consciously and unconsciously shape decisions: who gets hired, which products get built and which campaigns get greenlit.
In hiring, age-based discrimination is causing leaders to overlook talent. Over a quarter of leaders say they wouldn’t consider hiring a recent college graduate, citing their perceived lack of soft skills. This is shortsighted, given that Gen Z will make up nearly a third of the workforce by 2030.
In marketing, the commercial risks are just as real. Dating app Bumble’s ill-judged 2024 campaign leaned into the stereotype of Zoomers as a near-celibate generation, and it went down like a lead balloon.
These missteps will persist as long as leaders use generalizations as cognitive shortcuts to understand target groups.
This isn’t a new issue. We saw it back in the 1950’s when the US Air Force was redesigning cockpits to fit the average size of their pilots. Researchers measured thousands of pilots to calculate their average size, but when they then compared this new average to individual pilots, they found that no one actually fit it. In the end, they had to build a seat that could be adjusted to fit actual people, not the average of no one.
The same problem arises with generational generalizations. Even if your concept of Gen Z is accurate for the average of Gen Z, it actually represents no one. To ignore those outside the average is to ignore who Gen Z are.
There are still things that bind Gen Z together – shared cultural reference points, economic pressures, the weight of entering an AI-disrupted jobs market. But they are not a licence to treat millions of people as a monolith. If leaders want to build stronger teams, policies, products and campaigns, they must see and target Gen Z – and every other generation – as a collection of microgroups. But how do leaders ensure this in practice?
First, change how you talk about Gen Z inside your organization. When you regularly use stereotypes in conversation, they get baked in as biases and can seep into strategy. Even when no one is consciously building a campaign or policy around a caricature, these assumptions shape thinking in ways that are hard to detect and harder to reverse. The tone leaders set in the room has downstream consequences that are rarely visible until something goes wrong.
Second, plug your knowledge gaps. Leaders can fall back on generalizations when they have to make decisions quickly with incomplete information. But in most cases, that data already exists within the organisation; it’s just sat in silos, inaccessible or overlooked when decisions get made.
Marketers, in particular, have boatloads of insight into the diverse desires and habits of target audiences. They’re masters of segmentation and deep audience intelligence, and rigorously collect data to identify and understand what relevant microsegments of Gen Z and other generations want and think.
But this layered intelligence rarely travels beyond marketing teams into boardrooms where bosses have the final say. All too often, leaders look at top-level summaries to make big calls. When decisions are made by those a few degrees removed from the data, assumptions can creep back in and influence outcomes.
To close this gap, leaders must lean on those who are deep in the data and therefore less likely to be led by assumptions. They should also ensure granular audience data is circulated across the organization, rather than keeping it siloed within the function that collected it. In doing so, businesses will fill intelligence blind spots, reduce reliance on generalizations that distort decision-making, and give teams the insights they need to build impactful solutions which truly resonate with target groups.
Finally, leaders need research tools that match the pace at which decisions are made. Even when existing intelligence is shared across teams, new knowledge gaps emerge all the time because markets are fast-moving and traditional market research methods can’t keep up. Most leaders can’t afford to wait weeks for insights that could inform their next move, and can revert to relying on generalizations to guide them as a result. But new tools are changing the game.
Synthetic audience modelling, for example, can help businesses interrogate specific microaudiences with a speed and precision that simply wasn’t possible five years ago. Leaders can stress-test assumptions in real-time and get immediate insights to power the quick, decisive decision-making required of the C-suite.
Generalizations about Gen Z – or any generation – are not a neutral shortcut for audience categorisation. They’re a source of bad decision-making in hiring, product, marketing and policy. Leaders who want to build things that actually resonate need to look beyond the caricatures and get to know the people they’re recruiting and selling to. This means shifting how you talk about Gen Z, unlocking intelligence silos, investing in research that keeps pace with culture, and surfacing these insights in the moments that matter. Only then will we be able to build great solutions, initiatives and campaigns that serve and succeed for diverse, messy, multi-dimensional people.
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