When I ask Kalani Leifer if it’s possible to generalize how Gen Z employees think and act, he makes a cautious observation.
“What I have found—and I think this resonates with our program model—is a desire to step up and take on leadership roles earlier in their career,” says the founder and CEO of COOP Careers.
Leifer—a millennial and former high-school history teacher—should know. At COOP, he and his team help first-generation college grads land their first good job. “Our tagline is ‘overcoming underemployment,’” Leifer tells me from California. “The way we do that is through peers and near-peers.”
Since launching COOP in New York in 2014, Leifer has tapped into younger generations' desire to lead. Program participants, who are the first in their families to graduate from college and/or attended on a Pell Grant, get divided into cohorts of 16. Each group is led by four near-peer “cohort captains”—young professionals in tech, media, or finance who are also COOP alumni.
“Oftentimes in their day job, they’re in quite a junior position,” Leifer says. “I think one reason so many of our alumni come back to serve as cohort captains is it gives them a chance, very, very early in their career, to step up and be a leader.”
Having run its program more than 500 times, COOP has no shortage of alumni. There are now about 7,000 in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco.
Gen Z sometimes gets stereotyped as lazy and unambitious. For Leifer, that obviously doesn’t compute. “We should stop looking for ourselves in them and start seeing them for who they are and how they show up,” he says. “There’s maybe a lower willingness to play by the rules and just wait and kind of bide their time.”
So how can employers build trust with Gen Z?
Workers from this generation are willing to pay their dues if necessary, but they expect to see some sort of career path, Leifer explains. “They know that you often have to start the journey at square one,” he says. “But they want to understand what square two, three, and four are, and how do I get there? And how are you going to support me in getting there?”
Younger folks also sometimes feel cynical about how transactional the employee-employer relationship is, Leifer says. Because Gen Z doesn’t show the same deference as older generations, companies themselves must step up, he reckons.
“It’s important as an employer to show how you are genuinely invested in people’s growth and be transparent about the forces that are at play.”
For example, that means leveling with Gen Z about why layoffs were necessary. “They want to see the math,” Leifer says.
He’s transparent with his own Gen Z employees. COOP, where two-thirds of the 80 full-time staff are alumni, helps team members understand how it makes decisions. To that end, the nonprofit uses the RAPID framework for decision-making, which includes five stakeholder roles: recommend, agree, perform, input, and decide.
“What’s been very important for me is to be able to explain [that] this input [will be] deeply considered and appreciated, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to see exactly that outcome,” Leifer says.
In a nod to the COOP model, Leifer encourages businesses to find “step-up opportunities” for Gen Z. Let’s say a company has a group of employees who started last year but there are no promotions available for them—plus a batch of new arrivals.
“How can you position the last wave as near-peer leaders for this next group?” Leifer asks. “They might not be full-on people supervisors yet, but how can you equip them to support the onboarding process? Can they be a mentor?”
Most likely, what those Gen Z employees do to step up won’t perfectly match their job description, Leifer notes. “But I think it will show them that you’re investing in them,” he says. “Giving people a chance to realize their power and influence is really important.”
Definitely a step in the right direction.
Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com
