Gen Z Leadership Development: What the 2025 Evidence Shows
October 20, 2025 · Education · 6 min read
Gen Z professionals are not rejecting leadership. They are redefining what career growth and leadership should look like. Current global survey evidence shows strong interest in learning, mentoring and practical development, alongside much less interest in climbing a traditional management hierarchy for its own sake.
That creates an important challenge for employers: how do you build the next generation of supervisors and leaders when many talented early-career professionals want growth but do not necessarily see senior management as the only definition of success?
Gen Z wants development, but not necessarily the traditional ladder
Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey included 23,482 respondents across 44 countries. Only 6% of Gen Z respondents said reaching a senior leadership position was their primary career goal.
That does not mean they lack ambition. Learning and development ranked among the top reasons Gen Z respondents chose their current employer, alongside work-life balance and opportunities to progress.
Source: Deloitte Global 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey.
Learning is part of how Gen Z defines career growth
Deloitte reports that 70% of Gen Z respondents develop skills to advance their careers at least once a week, while 67% report building skills outside working hours.
Respondents also placed high value on mentorship and practical experience. Deloitte found that 86% of Gen Z respondents emphasised mentorship and guidance, while 88% highlighted on-the-job learning and practical experience as important for skill development.
Source: Deloitte Insights, 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey.
The manager-development gap is real
Gen Z employees expect managers to play a developmental role, but many do not experience that consistently. Deloitte found that around half of Gen Z respondents wanted managers to teach and mentor them, while only 36% said this was happening in practice.
For organisations building leadership pipelines, that gap matters. Employees do not learn leadership only from formal courses. They also learn it from the quality of supervision they experience every day.
Leadership programmes should start before promotion
One common mistake is waiting until someone becomes a supervisor before teaching them how to lead. By then, the new manager is already making decisions about delegation, feedback, conflict and workload without a framework.
A better approach is to develop high-potential employees before the role change. Useful pre-supervisory development includes:
- giving and receiving feedback;
- delegating work without micromanaging;
- handling disagreement;
- running effective one-to-one conversations;
- setting expectations;
- making decisions with incomplete information;
- understanding the transition from peer to supervisor.
Mentoring should be practical, not symbolic
Mentoring works best when it gives employees access to real judgement and experience. A useful mentor helps an emerging leader think through situations such as:
- how to handle a colleague who is not meeting expectations;
- how to disagree with a more senior person;
- how to balance team needs with business pressure;
- how to respond after making a poor decision;
- how to build credibility without pretending to know everything.
Leadership development should include meaningful work
Deloitte’s findings show that Gen Z career decisions reflect a combination of money, meaning and well-being. Leadership programmes that focus only on status, authority or promotion are therefore unlikely to resonate with everyone.
Give emerging leaders opportunities to own real work:
- lead a small project;
- facilitate a meeting;
- coach a colleague;
- present a recommendation;
- solve a cross-team problem;
- take responsibility for an improvement initiative.
Do not confuse reluctance to manage with lack of ambition
A professional may want deeper expertise, broader project responsibility or stronger influence without wanting direct reports. Organisations need career paths that recognise technical, specialist and project leadership alongside people management.
Prepare Gen Z leaders for AI-enabled work
Deloitte found that 74% of Gen Z respondents expect generative AI to affect how they work within the following year, and more than half already use it in day-to-day work to some extent.
Leadership development therefore needs to include judgement about AI-assisted work:
- when to use AI and when not to;
- how to check AI-generated output;
- how to protect confidential information;
- how to redesign work without removing accountability;
- how to help team members build new skills as tasks change.
Measure leadership readiness through behaviour
Do not judge leadership programmes only by attendance or satisfaction. Look for observable signs of readiness such as better feedback, delegation, ownership, conflict handling, communication, coaching and judgement under pressure.
A practical Gen Z leadership-development architecture
Leadership development for younger employees works best when the organisation separates three questions that are often mixed together: who has potential, who is ready for a particular responsibility now, and what experiences will help someone become ready later. A nomination to a programme should not be treated as a promise of promotion, and a promotion should not be the first time someone is asked to practise leadership.
Current behaviour
Real responsibility
Feedback and reflection
Readiness evidence
Next challenge
A useful development system can begin with small leadership responsibilities: facilitating a meeting, coordinating a short project, mentoring a new colleague, presenting a recommendation, handling a difficult stakeholder conversation or leading a retrospective. These assignments create observable evidence. Managers can then discuss what the employee did well, where judgement was weak and what type of challenge should come next.
For emerging leaders, the development mix should usually include four elements. First, structured learning provides shared concepts for delegation, feedback, decision-making and conflict. Second, stretch work tests whether those concepts can be used under real constraints. Third, coaching or mentoring helps the employee interpret what happened rather than simply accumulating experience. Fourth, manager follow-through ensures the person receives another opportunity to apply the learning.
Organisations should also avoid one-track leadership pipelines. Not every high-performing specialist wants a people-management role, and forcing talented specialists into management can weaken both technical capability and employee experience. Parallel expert and management pathways make it possible to recognise ambition without defining success only as headcount responsibility.
Readiness should be discussed in behavioural terms. Can the person make a decision with incomplete information? Can they explain a difficult message clearly? Do they seek input without avoiding accountability? Can they manage priorities across other people’s work? Can they respond to disagreement without becoming defensive? These are more useful signals than age, tenure or enthusiasm alone.
Build the pipeline around real development
The strongest Gen Z leadership strategy is not to persuade every young professional to want a management title. It is to create enough learning, mentoring and practical leadership experience that employees can grow deliberately and organisations can identify who is genuinely ready to lead.
Related MATSH guides
- Leadership Development Programs: What Works and How to Measure It
- Managing Early-Career Employees: Development, Feedback and Progression
- How to Develop Managerial Skills for New Managers
MATSH’s Supervisory Skills Development Course helps high-potential employees and new supervisors build the practical skills needed for delegation, feedback, difficult conversations and the transition into people leadership.
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