Gen Z will make up 10% of managers in 2025

Gen Z employees aren’t the new kids on the block anymore. They’re all grown up and taking on leadership roles.

Next year, over 10% of managers will identify as Gen Z, according to a recent Glassdoor report. The eldest members of the generation will be 27, following a pattern set by previous generations: 13% of millennial, 14% of Gen X, and 12% of Baby Boomer workers were also managers at 27 years old. They’ll also be redefining what it means to be a manager.

“There will be some differences with how Gen Z approaches management, because things that we look for in good leaders and good managers now is different,” Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor, told HR Brew.

Gen Z leaders aren’t completely different from previous generations, Zhao said, but they are entering management at a time when the workforce has different expectations of leaders.

Between 2019 and 2024, Glassdoor reviews about leadership and management increasingly mentioned new terms, like “well-being” (up 222%), “burnout” (up 126%), “boundaries (99%), and “empathy” and “inclusion” (both up 79%), according to the report.

“In my mind, I think the theme for a lot of these terms that are becoming more common is emotional intelligence,” Zhao said. “We see that employees really value emotional intelligence in their leaders and managers in a way that was not really true 10, 20, [or] 30 years ago.”

Each generation has “raised the bar” on what makes a good leader, Zhao said, so it will be a good challenge for Gen Z managers to not only meet but raise expectations. As for HR leaders, he said, they’ll be tasked with developing and training these new leaders.

“In order to get the best leaders tomorrow, we need to train up the leaders that are entering today,” he said. “The way that we need to think about training is different, not necessarily just because it’s a new generation, but just because there’s constantly this raising of the bar of what constitutes good leadership.”