I sat in on a coaching session last year that made me flinch.

A well-intentioned manager was coaching a 24-year-old analyst using the exact same approach I watched him use with a 50-year-old director the week before. Same questions. Same feedback style. Same assumptions about what motivates people. He opened with “Where do you see yourself in five years?” and built toward a discussion about “paying your dues” and “earning your stripes.”

The director nodded along, engaged, asked thoughtful questions about succession planning and executive presence. The analyst? Polite but disengaged. She checked her phone twice. Gave generic answers. Within six weeks, she’d accepted an offer elsewhere.

When I debriefed with the manager afterward, he was genuinely confused. “I’m doing everything the leadership training taught me,” he said. “The same approach that’s worked for fifteen years.”

That’s exactly the problem.

The Uncomfortable Truth

The coaching methods that worked brilliantly for Boomers and even Millennials often fall flat with Gen Z. And before you roll your eyes and mutter something about “kids these days,” hear me out. It’s not because Gen Z is “too sensitive”, “too soft”, or “doesn’t want to work hard.” It’s because we’re coaching them like they’re 1995 employees in a 2025 workplace… and expecting different results.

Gen Z entered the workforce during a pandemic. They experienced remote work before they experienced office politics. They’ve watched entire industries collapse and others emerge seemingly overnight. They saw their parents’ companies disappear in 2008, their older siblings struggle with crushing student debt despite “doing everything right,” and the social contract between employer and employee shatter in real time.

This shapes everything about how they respond to coaching.

What’s Actually Different (And Why It Matters)

Traditional coaching relies heavily on delayed gratification: work hard now, put in the hours, and in 3-5 years, you’ll see the payoff. It’s a perfectly logical approach if you believe organizational stability is the norm.

Gen Z doesn’t believe that. They can’t afford to.

They heard the delayed gratification promise, then watched it evaporate for Millennials buried in student debt and gig economy instability. They need to see value and progress in weeks, not years. Not because they’re impatient, but because they’ve learned that “someday” is a terrible investment strategy.

They also process feedback fundamentally differently. The “compliment sandwich” doesn’t feel kind to them, it actually feels manipulative. They’d rather have direct, specific, real-time input that helps them improve immediately. But here’s the critical nuance that most managers miss: they want frequency over formality.

A quick Slack message saying “that analysis was solid, the way you visualized the data made it instantly clear to the client” lands better than a scheduled quarterly review where you say essentially the same thing. The informal delivery doesn’t diminish the value. In fact, it increases it because it’s immediate and specific.

What Actually Works

After working with dozens of organizations struggling with Gen Z retention, I’ve identified three shifts that consistently move the needle.

Make development visible and immediate. Instead of vague promises about “future leadership opportunities,” show them the specific skills they’re building right now and where those skills could take them, inside or, even, outside your organization. Yes, outside. Gen Z respects transparency over loyalty speeches. They know the average tenure in their role will be 2-3 years. Pretending otherwise insults their intelligence.

Try this: In your next coaching conversation, name the competency they’re developing this month. Then show them three applications: one internal advancement path, one external opportunity in your industry, and one adjacent field where that skill creates value. “You’re building stakeholder management skills right now. That prepares you for our PM track, qualifies you for client success roles in SaaS, and translates directly to nonprofit program management.”

Coach to their whole life, not just their career. When a Gen Z employee mentions burnout, they’re not being dramatic, they’re giving you critical data about system sustainability. Integration matters more to them than balance. They’ll work intensely and deliver exceptional results, but they need to understand why it matters and how it fits with their broader life goals.

I watched a brilliant manager handle this perfectly this summer. Her Gen Z team had just shipped a major feature ahead of schedule. Instead of immediately loading them with the next sprint, she said: “You’ve been running hard for eight weeks. I’m giving the team a recovery week, not because your work isn’t excellent, but because I need you sustainable for Q4 when the replatform hits.”

That team’s engagement scores went up, not down. Turnover dropped to zero.

Use their digital fluency “intelligently”. Gen Z is comfortable with async coaching via video messages, shared documents with comments, or quick voice notes. They don’t need every coaching conversation to be a formal 30-minute Zoom call with a scheduled agenda.

But here’s what this doesn’t mean: it doesn’t mean lowering standards or abandoning depth. The content stays rigorous. The container flexes to their workflow. One VP I work with records 3-minute Loom videos breaking down specific decisions her team makes, explaining her thinking in real time. Her Gen Z employees consistently rate these as more valuable than her monthly one-on-ones.

The Real Shift

The managers who succeed with Gen Z aren’t abandoning coaching principles, they’re adapting the delivery system. Same destination, different route. They still set high standards. They still hold people accountable. They still develop critical skills.

They just stopped assuming that coaching someone born in 2000 should look identical to coaching someone born in 1970.

Because it shouldn’t.