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fromForbes
18 hours agoThe Gen-Z Retention Problem Is Really A Leadership Design Problem
Gen-Z turnover is driven by cultural mismatches, not generational flaws, highlighting the need for organizations to adapt their environments.
Companies in most industries are investing heavily in artificial intelligence: 88% of companies reporting regular AI use. Yet many leaders report familiar frustrations. AI adoption stalls. Performance gains plateau. Employees experiment with new tools but don't integrate them deeply into how work actually gets done, leaving executives increasingly concerned about ROI. Erin Eatough is a co-founder and chief science officer at Fractional Insights and professor of organizational psychology at Michigan State University.
Rebecca Hinds has studied office meetings and collaboration efforts for more than 15 years and most recently she's seen how AI can make corporate get-togethers better - or worsen existing problems. In a study commissioned by Read.AI, Hinds found that AI, when correctly implemented, can encourage more participation by women and lower-level employees. At the same time, it can actually hurt hybrid meetings, with in-room participants speaking up much more than remote attendees. AI could make meetings much worse.
Personality assessments have become woven into the fabric of modern organizational life to the point that there's no avoiding them. DiSC, Belbin, Myers-Briggs, and their cousins are often among the first tools we encounter as we enter the corporate world. They show up in onboarding sessions, leadership programs, recruitment processes, and executive classrooms, and that familiarity breeds acceptance just like their repeated use breeds expectation, to the point where not administering an assessment can feel like a missing ingredient.
In my new research on Intuitions-at-Work Theory (IWT), I propose the problem is not that all diversity strategies are doomed to fail, but rather that business decisions involving diversity are strongly driven by intuition, and that managers have flawed intuitions about diversity -especially regarding which diversity strategies will fail and which diversity strategies will succeed. IWT, which integrates and synthesizes prior empirical findings
"That cartoon is a great example of someone else defining what became the cultural narrative more so than reality," Nadella told Stripe cofounder John Collison.
Have you noticed how even well-planned organizational changes can leave teams feeling scattered, resistant, or quietly overwhelmed? Our research with more than 1,000 workplaces has found that 'poor change management' is consistently the most frequent cause of burnout in workplaces right now. The problem isn't a lack of project plans. Organizations have those in abundance. The gap is neurological. Too much focus on timelines and deliverables while overlooking what uncertainty does to people's brains.
Everywhere I turn - podcasts, research calls, dinner conversations - people are talking about "toxic workplaces." The phrase has become ubiquitous; almost unavoidable. So I did what most researchers do when they're curious (or procrastinating): I Googled it. That led me to a chart showing the term's meteoric rise beginning in the early 2010s. The curve shoots upward like a fever.
Building great teams is not about hiring stars. Many leaders believe that building a high-performing team requires hiring star employees. However, intelligence, abilities, and personalities are poor predictors of how people behave in teams and what they can contribute to a team's success.