In an interview with Fortune, Adams described learning things from her children that gave her empathy for entry-level workers at her company, while opening her eyes to the need for additional training on how to behave at work. Feld described something similar from the opposite angle: “Their parents have been making so many decisions for them that when they arrive on college campus, they are completely unprepared to just do the simplest things for themselves.”
Adams described situations where interns and new hires struggled with seemingly simple professional decorum: missing meetings for personal commitments or failing to grasp basic calendar tools. Such experiences have pushed Cohesity to provide explicit instructions on seemingly elementary things from managing calendars to the etiquette of meetings. Adams views these interventions not as hand-holding, but as essential adaptations to a new workplace culture, where transparency, constant feedback, and a search for meaning are fundamental.
“They want to know why, how, they want constant feedback,” Adams said of her Gen Z employees. At the same time, she said, “it also is mindboggling” to see how differently young people approach work.
Adams said Cohesity has had to teach the managers how to lead this generation of workers, while also teaching some seemingly “basic things” to younger workers, like “how do I manage my calendar? You actually have to accept the meeting request. You can’t just walk out of the meeting that you’re in because you have another one while it’s still going on.”
She relayed an anecdote about a manager/intern lunch program where a senior leader treats an intern to lunch. In this instance, she said, a manager was waiting for an intern who was so successful they were due to convert to a full-time job, but this intern didn’t get the memo that a work meeting was more important than this lunch. “Sorry, I’m late, I just had to walk, I was just in a meeting,” the intern explained. When the manager offered to reschedule, the intern said they had “a lot going on” anyway, so they figured it was fine to leave the meeting early to take lunch.
Or consider Adams’ 20-year-old son and the subject of which internship he would choose to take. His attitude was something like “I really need to love the job and I need to love the company.” Adams told Fortune she was baffled by this: “What do you mean? I was a waitress for many years.”
Adams also highlighted transparency going hand in hand with what could seem to be standoffishness. “I do think some of them are picky. There was one guy, amazing, did such a great job in his internship … he went above and beyond. And when we went to offer him the job, he said, ‘You know what? I think I just want to take a year off and travel because I’m graduating.’ And I was like, whoa.” Adams said if she was that intern’s mother, she would have said “You take that job. You can travel later.” But this generation is wired differently, and both sides need some new training to work together effectively.
Feld’s program, developed through discussions with thousands of students, focuses on skills that “we all got growing up at the kitchen table”—empathy, communication, setting priorities, and basic conflict resolution. Rather than group therapy, her program is pitched as a peer-led, activity-driven “experience.” Sessions may involve role-playing, stress management, time management, even sharing playlists for emotional support. Above all, there’s fundamental guidance for communicating face-to-face, as Feld says many Gen Zers are “afraid” of making small talk. “They’re threatened by it, and they will tell us that they see a rejection in a conversation as personal failure.”
Feld said the thousands of students that she’s interacted with have problems with the simplest things. “They won’t ask someone, ‘Do you want to go to the dining hall and grab dinner, you want to go grab a beer, you want to go for a walk, you want to get a coffee?’” If someone says no, she adds, “they internalize the whole thing. The face-to-face rejection is what they’re afraid of.” She said they simply never learned how, and technology enabled them to sidestep many seemingly basic steps in their development.
Feld said sometimes she hears that parents tell their young adult children, “I’m coming with you, you can’t do this on your own, which is … why would you ever say that to a 22-year-old?” She said the pressure is immense. “These young people feel like they have to perform for their own parents all the time.”
“When I’ve been meeting with them,” Adams said, “the pressure they put on themselves scares me.” She said there’s so much thought to picking the right major, optimizing the best career, performing at the top level at every moment, it was totally different for her. “My major didn’t equate to work for me. It was something I was interested in and it was the experience of going to college” that was more important.
Feld said the most heartening thing is that these young adults “want to have in-person communication, they just don’t know how. A big eye-opener was that it’s actually a skill that they just didn’t learn, that they want to learn.”
