Why Your Gen Z Workers Need Tough Love
Rigor, high expectations, and an insistence on excellence remain key to good mentorship — and good leadership for your organization.
By Eboo Patel
Contributor
January 13, 2026 | Read Time: 6 minutes
This is one of two essays that argue from opposing perspectives about how to mentor and manage young workers. The second, by veteran nonprofit leader Greg Berman, promotes a model of leadership based on compassion and trust.
There is much to love about Greg Berman’s excellent new book “The Nonprofit Crisis”: Berman’s emphasis on the importance of nonprofits earning public trust, the challenges of polarization and politicization within the sector, and the imperative of civic organizations living up to their promises, among other things. But I vehemently disagree with him on one critical point: that young people coming into the work force need to be treated differently than their predecessors.
Berman writes that managing Gen Z and millennial staffers “requires understanding, compassion, and patience” due to their different “sensibilities” and “expectations.”
He contends that the “tough-love style of leadership, which expects excellence as a matter of course and scorns pats on the back, is unlikely to succeed in today’s nonprofit organizations. Young people these days have grown up in a world of instant online feedback. They are used to being able to measure their beauty or their popularity by collective likes and retweets and swipes right. Leaders have little choice but to figure out how to work with this reality.”
This is the opposite of the advice offered by management guru Jim Collins in his book “Good to Great.” His view was that finding people committed to excelling at the organization’s mission was a leader’s most important task. The mission shouldn’t accommodate itself to the people. The people should elevate themselves to the mission.
We expect this in other sectors. Imagine if airlines said that people have changed and they simply cannot demand as much of their pilots in training. Or if hospitals said that about their surgeons. Can’t happen.
Why should it be any different for hunger programs or drug rehabilitation centers?
You’re likely thinking, Well, yes, but the stakes involved in flying a plane or doing heart surgery are obvious. My answer: Consider the example of the average high school basketball team.
Full-Court Press
My son is the captain of his sophomore team. Practices start by watching a video of the mistakes the team made in the previous game. Everybody takes responsibility for what they did wrong. They talk about how they’ll do everything they can never to make those mistakes again. They run sprints as penance. They do drills designed to fix their mistakes. The coach generally does not exhibit much overt compassion or patience. Yet the only thing that’s really at stake for a high school basketball team is pride.
At a recent tournament, I noticed a coach wearing a T-shirt with the words “The Standard is the Standard” emblazoned on the front. The meaning behind those words became clear as I watched him coach his team. “You’re out of position,” he yelled at one of his players as he ran down the sideline — after scoring a basket.
The standard is the standard. If you don’t want to play to the standard, you don’t make the team. If you fail the standard when you’re on the court, you get taken out of the game. This is simply routine in high school basketball.
Why then does the nonprofit sector struggle so much with this form of leadership?
Most good youth basketball coaches know their true goal isn’t to win games but to help young people set a standard of excellence for themselves and live up to it. That’s why so many remember and appreciate the educators and coaches who were toughest on them when they were young.
If high school basketball coaches can build cultures of excellence when the stakes are simple pride rather than, say, feeding a family or helping a former addict stay sober, so can nonprofits. In fact, public trust in the civil sector would likely improve dramatically if nonprofit staff were held to the same standards as the local high school basketball team.
Insisting on Excellence
Organizations of all kinds adhere to such standards of excellence.
In the Netflix documentary The New Yorker at 100, David Remnick, the magazine’s genial editor-in-chief, clearly views his role as maintaining the publication’s high standards. There he is helping writer Ronan Farrow sharpen his angle on a story. Next, he’s flipping through 50 cartoons — whittled down from 1,500 weekly submissions — and choosing the 12 that make the cut. Finally, he’s turning the pages on the proofs for the week’s issue and giving his final approval.
Remnick describes the sacred mission of The New Yorker like this: “It’s not just … this thing that comes out once a week or every day online. … It has a soul. It has a sense of decency, and purpose and quality. … It is a cause for high things.”
A similar insistence on excellence shows up in another Netflix offering, Chef’s Table: France, featuring legendary chef Alain Passard, whose restaurant, L’Arpège, has turned preparing vegetables into an art form. Passard’s staff learns from how he selects the perfect turnip or carrot, slices it in new and creative ways, and finds the ideal flavoring or accompaniment. He has set a whole new standard in cooking, and the chefs allowed to work in his kitchen must be committed to meeting that standard.
Passard credits his first chef mentor for instilling in him a leadership approach he now uses to train others: “It was the school of rigor. Each moment was always so intense. He was demanding so much concentration. We had to memorize everything. Slicing a shallot can be done in 25 different ways. However, there is that one gesture to which we can add that elegance, that love.”
Passard was just 14 years old at the time, but his mentor demanded the same excellence from him as those more than twice his age and with vastly more experience. “It was painful for me,” Passard says, “because I felt I wouldn’t make it. … It had to be perfectly done. But I persevered. … I learned the power of the job. The magic of the job. The pain of the job.”
Words like those are too often shunned in today’s nonprofit culture. They shouldn’t be. To better serve young staff — and nonprofit missions — leaders must insist on the same high standards as chefs, magazine editors, and high school basketball coaches.
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