Good Morning Reader it's Maria,

She held my hand for 30 minutes and never once looked me in the eyes.

Not when she sat down. Not while she worked. Not until I said thank you at the end, and even then it was a half-second glance before she got up and walked away.

This experience with that young woman at my nail salon has been bugging me ever since. I don't believe that she was being rude. I first thought she was shy, but I think it was something else…it felt like she just didn't know how to interact with me... and I couldn't stop asking myself: whose fault is that, really?

Is this what happens when a generation grows up getting most of its answers from a screen instead of a person? And what’s going to happen to them in a world where they don't need to talk to people because AI has all the answers?

She's entering a world where AI will handle more and more of the technical side of any job, faster and more accurately than any of us could. And nobody, it seems, is teaching her the part that can't come from a screen.

But sitting across from someone, reading their face, knowing when to make small talk and when to let silence sit, handling an awkward client, recovering from a mistake in front of someone watching you make it... none of that comes from a screen. It comes from being crap at it a few times in front of real people and feeling the discomfort of it.
​
That discomfort is the whole point. It's where you build your judgment and experience; it's where careers actually start.

If podcasts are more your speed, I've got you covered; there's a discussion about this topic available now here.

THE BIG IDEA

The environment we built over the last decade is fundamentally altering how people develop professional judgement.

Deloitte's 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, which surveyed 22,500 people across 44 countries, found that only 6% of Gen Zs and millennials say achieving a leadership position is their primary career goal.

The main reasons:

1. stress and burnout
2. excessive responsibility
3. concerns about work/life balance.

Most people of my generation, when they read this, think "What a bunch of lazy and entitled kids. They just don't want to work hard" .

But they're wrong.

76% of them do want to lead at some point in their careers. They don't lack ambition; they're just refusing a version of leadership that has been consistently linked to working yourself into the ground. They've seen what it did to their parents and they're saying "no thanks" to that.

Frankly, I admire them for having the courage to do what we didn't.

And there's also the financial reality they re living in that's diferent to ours.

More than half of Gen Zs and millennials have delayed major life decisions, including marriage, starting a family or business, or furthering their education, because of their financial situation. Almost 50% are living paycheck to paycheck.

These are not people choosing comfort over effort. These are people navigating a world that is significantly harder to navigate than the one most of us started out in, while being told they're not trying hard enough.

I spent 22 years at Sotheby's. I managed teams, taught people to handle demanding clients in high-pressure rooms, and not one of my skills came from a manual. They came from being thrown into the deep end, getting it wrong, watching someone senior handle it better, and trying again. That's how it worked, and that's how I built the relationships that shaped my entire career.

But in those days you assumed a certain stability. You joined a company, you stayed for years and built a career. Now the world keeps shifting under their feet and Gen Zs and millennials know it.

So they're doing something about it. They're investing in skills, learning constantly, picking up new tools, figuring out AI before their organisations even have a policy on it. They're not waiting for someone to hand them a path, they're building one as they go, in real time, with no guarantee of what's at the end of it.

The part that worries me is whether we're giving them what they need to build judgment, connection, and the kind of relationships that carry a career. AI will teach the technical side brilliantly. Faster than any of us could. But sitting across from a client, reading a room, having those difficult conversations, comes from real experiences with real people.

And right now, a lot of organisations are pulling back on exactly that.

• Fewer entry-level hires.
• Less face time.
• More tools, more platforms, more digital noise.

Gen Zs and millennials report experiencing digital fatigue, feeling overwhelmed by constant alerts and the need to navigate multiple tools and platforms.

We built this world. It's on us to help them navigate it.

Not by telling them it was harder in our day and that they should toughen up that's not fair.

They are already tougher than we give them credit for, they're just doing it differently, with less of the safety net we had, and far more awareness of what they're walking into.

The question isn't whether they're ready for the world we've built.

It's whether we're ready to actually show up for them in it.

Don't know where to start?

​Book a free consultation and let's chat!

THE ACTION STEP

So what can we do? How can we help?

Have one real conversation with a young person in your world this week. A team member, an intern, a junior colleague. Ask them what they're finding hard, what they wish someone had told them.

Then listen without fixing, without comparing it to your own experience, and without telling them it'll all work out (it's harder to do then it sounds).

That's it, one conversation and you might be surprised what you hear, I know I was.

Have you just signed up? See all previous newsletters here.​

AI MADE SIMPLE

Use AI to audit how human your mentoring actually is.

A lot of organisations have mentoring programmes that look great on paper and do very little in practice. Here's a prompt to help you figure out where yours actually stands.

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT:

"I want to audit how well my organisation supports junior employees in building human skills: things like communication, client relationships, judgment, and resilience. Here's a brief description of our current onboarding and mentoring approach: [paste your description]. Based on this, identify where we might be over-relying on tools or processes instead of human experience. Suggest three practical changes we could make in the next 90 days to strengthen the human side of development without overhauling everything."

You'll get a starting point in minutes. Treat it as a thinking prompt, not a final answer. Take what's useful, discard what isn't, and bring your own judgment to it.

PS: I get the irony of advising you to to use AI, the exact technology driving digital isolation to audit and diagnose how we can be more human

⚠️ A note before you use this: please don't paste any sensitive company information, employee names, or personal data into AI tools.

That's all for today Reader

Have a great weekend!👋🏼

Take Care

Maria

PS: If you want to explore what working together looks like, book a free call

PPS: If you enjoy these emails and want to do something nice, you can buy me a coffee 😉

​​​