Coddled, or Just Unwilling to Perform Silence?

I've managed Gen Z for long enough now to know that branding doesn't survive contact with the actual data, or the actual people. Some of them are genuinely difficult; every generation has some of those. But most of what gets filed under "can't take feedback" is something else entirely: a generation that has simply never learned to perform the silence we spent our own careers perfecting.

I was at a team lunch and one of the new joiners, in the midst of the discussion, on the peculiar clients that we get to manage, asks me; “Himanshu, but don’t you think our system is tough to understand, I have spent 2 months now, spending all my time on it and I still get stuck navigating it.” Most of the people on the table instantly were uncomfortable. The first thought that came to me was “Maybe its your incompetence, rather than the system being tough”. That’s the thought process, I had been brought up with, if there is a problem, the problem is within. We should not question outside. But this was a fresh perspective, when I thought of our customers, our customers will also be going through the same experience and we need to improve it. This is what we need to change.

Think about what a Millennial career in India actually looked like, especially the first decade of it. We didn't question any established process out loud, the appraisal rating, the onboarding, the training, the enablement. We didn't ask our manager "why" when a decision didn't make sense, we executed it, either because of self-doubt or asking "why" read as insubordination, and insubordination had a cost your family couldn't afford you to pay. Job security wasn't a nice-to-have; for a huge number of us, entering the Indian workforce in the 2000s, it was the entire point of the job. Predictability, hierarchy, deference to the person above, these weren't only cultural quirks. They were the operating system, and we didn't get to opt out of it and still keep our seat at the table.

Now that same generation is managing a cohort that never internalised that operating system the same way, and the reflex is to call the new system broken, rather than ask whether the old one was ever actually healthy to begin with.

I remember my conversation with my Manager in EY, when in 2012, I thought my rating was not appropriate. The blue eyed HR consultant in me, dared to propose a change in the system, because I thought it was not genuinely measuring performance. My ideas were laughed at, and another senior leader in a closed room, called me a rebel and a ‘union leader’. My colleagues, advised me against and I also realised, its absolutely unnecessary creating so much chaos, when you can’t change. As a Manager now, when I am asked similar questions, it makes me uncomfortable and the instinctive reaction is obvious, but with time I have learnt to pay more attention to the real questions.

What the data actually says

It's worth being precise here, because the popular narrative and the research diverge sharply. A 2026 workplace study found 97% of Gen Z employees are open to receiving feedback on an ongoing basis, and 63% specifically prefer regular, timely feedback over the isolated, once-a-year version most Millennial managers grew up delivering. Another set of 2025 studies found Gen Z responds well to direct, specific critique, the thing they reject isn't honesty, it's vague praise and criticism that arrives too late to act on. The common complaint, I hear is that Gen Z "needs constant feedback" is, read differently, a workforce explicitly asking for more directness, more often the opposite of coddling.

What the same research shows about Millennials is less flattering than the narrative Millennials tend to tell about themselves. In earlier studies comparing what each generation wants from a manager, Millennials ranked "open communication and feedback" as their top want from a boss — meaning the generation now accused of dishing out too much hard truth to a fragile younger cohort was, itself, hungry for exactly that kind of directness from its own managers, and by most accounts didn't get nearly enough of it. We wanted the same thing we're now being asked to give. We're just less practised at giving it than we are at wanting it.

This gets sharper, not softer, in the Indian context. On Hofstede's power distance index, a measure of how much a society accepts unequal distribution of authority, India scores 77 against 40 for the United States, one of the widest gaps in any commonly cited workplace comparison. Feedback in Indian organisations has historically flowed down easily and almost never up. I remember, when my Manager from EY asked me feedback, I was taken aback, and was left thinking, because I was really unsure on what to say.

Turn that story over and look at who's actually being coddled in it. It isn't the boy. It's Yama, offering wealth and comfort precisely to avoid the harder conversation. Maybe that's closer to what's happening in a lot of our own one-on-ones than we'd like to admit; a younger employee asking the plain, hard question, and a manager, uncomfortable with it, offering reassurance, a title, a project, anything, rather than the honest answer the question actually deserved.

Turn that story over and look at who's actually being coddled in it.

So when a Gen Z employee treats a manager's decision as something to be questioned rather than simply executed, it isn't landing on neutral ground. It's landing on a generation that spent fifteen years earning the right to give orders without being questioned, and is now being asked to justify them on the spot. It might not be disrespect. It might just be the first real test, in an Indian workplace, of an assumption we never had the standing to test ourselves.