Gen Z and the Future of Leadership: Built for Speed but Unprepared for Complexity?

On the surface, coming of age in such conditions of flux may appear advantageous - particularly in a world where 70% of business leaders say their primary competitive strategy is to be fast and nimble.

However, as disruption continues to accelerate and leadership becomes less about applying established answers and more about interpreting incomplete signals, weighing trade-offs and integrating competing perspectives, organizations should be questioning: are the systems shaping younger talent pipelines hindering the development of the very capabilities needed to lead through future complexities?

For Odgers, the question is not whether one generation is more or less prepared. It is about understanding where the leadership gap may emerge, what this means for future pipelines, and identifying whether current approaches to assessment, succession and development are still fit for purpose.

Key takeaways: 

• Gen Z’s digital upbringing brings fragmented trust. 
• AI is reshaping early career development. 
• Leadership development must become more intentional. 

The role of the information environment 

The first pressure sits in a dramatically changed information environment. Rapid migration of social, cultural and informational life online means ‘screen time’, is increasing across all age groups, particularly among younger generations, with 25% of Gen Z spending over five hours per day on their phones alone. Thus, the digital realm has become as important as offline reality in shaping how information is disseminated and worldviews are formed.  

Information is not actively sought but passively and continuously received, shaped by feeds designed to maximize relevance, salience and engagement within a highly competitive attention economy. It is therefore unsurprising that 44% of 18–24-year-olds say social media is their main source of news.

Further compounding this is a shifting hierarchy of trust. Confronted with a highly fragmented information ecosystem where fears around misinformation abound, Gen Z are increasingly placing greater weight on peer opinions than on traditional authority figures, experts or institutions.

Taken together, these factors mean selective exposure becomes easier, nuance competes at a disadvantage, feedback loops close, and in-group signaling generates more social capital than out-group perspective-taking.

Over time, these conditions shape not only what people consume, but the habits they form to process disagreement, ambiguity and contradiction. For leadership pipelines, the risk is not that Gen Z consumes information differently, but that the surrounding systems are less likely to build the integrative habits complexity leadership requires.

AI trade-offs

A similar pattern is emerging with the widespread proliferation of AI. Whilst fears of widespread job replacement by AI may be overstated, evidence suggests those most affected are junior workers - with the World Economic Forum reporting a 29% fall in entry-level job postings worldwide since January 2024.

The strategic question for organizations is what disappears with those roles? Junior work is where people build context, pattern recognition and practical judgment.

AI is also becoming part of everyday cognition, with Gen Z in particular experimenting with it as a sounding board across myriad of personal and professional challenges. This means thinking rarely happens alone: early ideas are tested, shaped and validated in dialog with tools designed to respond quickly and affirmatively. Indeed, Deloitte’s 2026 Human Capital Trends notes that as AI moves into everyday decisions, value comes not from the technology alone but how humans and machines work together.

With this comes a seeming paradox: despite heavy usage, Gen Z is the generation most mistrustful of AI-generated content, with 72% holding negative or cautious views towards it. Taken together, the risk then becomes one of selective interrogation, whereby validating chatbot responses are accepted uncritically, whilst externally found evidence is viewed sceptically as potentially AI-generated misinformation.

Used correctly, AI can widen access to knowledge, accelerate learning and improve decision support. However, if thinking is routinely outsourced, and inconsistent AI skepticism reinforces rather than reduces preconceived ideas, what might be the implications for building the critical reasoning and judgment needed for complexity leadership?

How organizations and leaders need to evolve 

These issues are not unique to Gen Z. However, as they make up an increasing share of the future leadership pipeline, and the gap between the future capabilities they require, and the extent to which they can be cultivated widens, they may become the generation in which these tensions become hardest to ignore. 

The answer is for leadership development to become more deliberate, explicit and intentional; looking carefully at where judgment is built, whether early-career pathways provide enough exposure to ambiguity and trade-offs, and preventing AI adoption from removing parts of the apprenticeship layer without replacing their developmental value.

For today’s leaders, the shift also requires making the judgment process visible: role-modeling how to weigh competing considerations, handle uncertainty and interrogate difficult issues without collapsing them into easy answers too early. For emerging talent, stretch assignments, better coaching, and explicit conversations about how difficult calls are made does more for development than another layer of process.

As leadership advisors, Odgers’ helps your organization shape these pathways more deliberately to build the leadership capabilities their future context will require. 

Explore our Leading Through Uncertainty collection here.   

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