The NextGen Hub / Vol. 01 / The Loyalty Contract
Driver 01 of 03
The Manager Effect
Stay because of.
Leave because of.
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Driver 01 of 03
The Manager Effect
Stay because of.
Leave because of.
Most would rather stay than leave. But default loyalty is gone. What's left is conditional, and the conditions run both ways.
Few things test that contract earlier, or more often, than the relationship with your direct manager. A good one can be the reason you stay through a hard year. An absent one can be the reason you quietly start looking.
And like any relationship, both sides have a role to play. This isn't only a NextGen wish list, and it isn't only the organisation's job to fix. It comes down to what each side is willing to bring, to honour the contract you both signed on day one.
The stakes
Sometimes the manager is the only thing keeping you there. Sometimes they're the reason you go.
One finding from the qualitative research kept surfacing: the quality of the relationship with a direct manager shapes whether someone stays or leaves. Even when they're unhappy about salary or career prospects, a good manager is a buffer against exit. An absent one, on the contrary, is an accelerator.
Who pays the price? Both parties.
When a young talent leaves early, the bill arrives at the organisation in the form of recruitment cost, lost institutional knowledge, and the months it takes to bring a replacement up to speed, not to mention the extra pressure it puts on the other team members. But the biggest hidden cost in an organisation is the loss of talent. It is not written in your EBITDA, but it is there: wasted onboarding efforts, loss of engagement, loss of fresh perspective.
The young professional pays too, just later and quieter. Six to twelve months of starting over somewhere else, plus the gap between where they are and where they could have been if someone had been pointing them forward. Add an uncertain job market, and the scenario stops looking appealing to anyone.
Same exit. Two invoices.
The central tension
They describe the same problem from opposite sides, and the conversation that could resolve it is often the one that never gets scheduled.
NextGen talent arrives expecting a manager who coaches, gives feedback, and actively contributes to their growth. Most managers want to be exactly that kind of leader. Many would also benefit from that same support themselves. But reality gets in the way. Ask yourself: when was the last time a manager received meaningful feedback from their own manager?
This mismatch is not a motivation problem. It's a capacity problem. It's what both sides have (or haven't) been equipped with: time, tools, and training. Add a structural perception gap; leadership often rates the talent situation more positively than the people closest to the floor, and the tension takes centre stage.
So what's the move?
What Gen Z actually asks for
Ask Gen Z what they want from a manager and you don't get a wishlist. You get the profile of a coach. When asked what they value most in a manager, the respondents listed their top manager characteristics:
Not a pie. We asked Gen Z which qualities matter most in a manager and had them pick a top five from a longer list. Each number is how many put that quality in their five. The bigger the number, the more it was chosen.
The top-down half
In case the request feels naive, it's actually a direct response to what Gen Z is living:
25%
say their manager gives too little feedback, this number jumps to 29% amongst higher educated professionals.
21%
specifically miss positive feedback
1 in 5
feel their manager doesn't meaningfully contribute to their growth
We asked Gen Z whether their manager currently does each of these too much, too little, or just enough. Each number is the share who said "too little", out of everyone, including those with no opinion.
The conversation Gen Z is looking for isn't automatically on the calendar, and they've started keeping count.
"I find I don't have, say, quarterly one-to-ones with my manager. It's kind of just as and when, which surprised me a little, because I thought it would be more structured.
— Young professional, mid-twenties from Qualitative research among Gen Z professionals, 2026
Listen to the tone. There's no complaint in it. Just surprise that a serious job didn't come with the conversation they assumed it would. Instead finding the opposite.
Though it would be a mistake to read this as a Gen Z thing alone. The wish to be seen and guided runs across every generation and every layer of an organisation. What's changed is mostly the volume: where older colleagues often learned to expect less, the NextGen tends to say it out loud and treat it as normal.
And if you follow that thread upward, it gets interesting. Most managers were never really taught how to give feedback to a 24-year-old whose expectations look quite different from their own at that age. Many are also working with about as little feedback as the people they lead. So it's worth asking: when did they last hear from their own manager? How are they meant to know whether they're doing well?
During a workshop with a client, one of the managers noticed he hadn't had proper feedback in quite a while, and decided, then and there, to put it on the agenda with his own manager the next day who was in the room too.
What stayed with me was something simpler: there were three generations in that room, and they all wanted much the same thing from a good manager, and stayed with an organisation for much the same reasons. A sense of belonging, someone who sees them, a healthy culture, and room to keep growing.
So the need to be coached isn't really new, and it isn't unique to one generation. If anything, it's the times we're in that have made an old expectation easier to name out loud. And this generation just happens to name it first.
The bottom-up half
Feedback and voice aren't symmetrical. Feedback can land one-way and still be useful: you learn where you stand. Being heard is the other half: whether what you bring back changes anything. Together, they make a coaching relationship reciprocal. One without the other makes it a monologue.
That's the real read on those 35% asking to be heard and those 38% asking to be treated as equals. Not a demand to be agreed with. A test of whether this is an environment where your judgement can develop and eventually be trusted.
Two ways the test gets failed. Gen Z owns half of them.
The organisation's half.
An idea raised in a 1:1 lands nowhere. A suggestion gets a polite nod, then gets absorbed into nothing. The room runs on the manager's reflexes; the talent learns to keep their head down. Speaking up costs energy and returns nothing. People stop spending the energy.
Gen Z's half.
Making the ask once and concluding it was rejected. Reading silence as a verdict. Skipping the second attempt because the first didn't land cleanly. Earning a seat where your judgement counts isn't a single conversation. It takes more effort: it's making the case more than once, in better terms, with the patience of someone who knows good ideas don't always travel on the first try.
So being heard isn't a passive entitlement, and it isn't an exit clause. It's the slow business of building a reciprocal relationship, with both sides actively showing up for it.
Which sets up the next quiet trap: even when a manager does hear you, even when they value you so much they can't afford to let you grow out of the role. Which is the opposite of being developed.
What looks like a retention problem is often a capacity problem. Managers don't block growth because they don't believe in it. They block it because losing a top performer creates a gap they can't afford.
So don’t design around the gap. Have the conversation. And it doesn't have to be about a promotion. Growth can happen inside the role too: which skills to sharpen, which challenges to take on next.
See also: Driver 02 · Where Are We G(r)owing →
Skip that conversation and block the internal move, and the growth will happen anyway, only at another company. The internal mobility you didn't allow becomes external mobility you didn't see coming.
That's why judging retention at team level is short-sighted. At company level, a manager who develops someone until they outgrow the role isn't losing talent, they're moving it forward. That should be rewarded, not penalised.
But this only works when coaching counts as a real part of the manager's job. Too often, it still doesn't.
And the manager can't keep up
The most common complaints organisations make about young professionals: they need intensive guidance; they require time investment; they take longer to ramp up. These all describe a job that has a name: coaching. And in most organisations, coaching is what managers are expected to do on top of their actual role, not as part of it.
Picture a manager stretched in every direction: accountable for results, navigating a calendar packed with meetings, and carrying the team’s emotional load. Coaching quietly slips into the “if I have time” category. And we all know what happens then: it doesn’t happen.
That isn’t because managers don’t care. They do. But when delivery and output take priority, it can feel difficult to ask for the time needed to onboard new colleagues properly and then coach them consistently. So here’s the uncomfortable question: was coaching ever part of the job description they received?
The result? The young talent puts extra load on the manager's plate.
"Vergen soms meer aandacht dan beschikbaar is."
They sometimes demand more attention than is available.
More attention than is available. Whose availability? The manager's. And whose decision is it whether the time exists in the first place? Not the manager's.
The sentence sounds like a complaint about Gen Z. But perhaps what is happening is that they are exposing a deeper issue: organisations, and thus managers, do not see coaching as an essential part of their job, a description of an organisational design choice, made to seem inevitable.
The employer side: 30% name time investment as a challenge. The Gen Z side: they get it. They’re asking for structure, not limitless attention: fixed moments, clear expectations, a signal that it matters.
The manager is not the problem. The manager is the solution that isn't being equipped. Not investing time in your young talent is the most expensive form of saving time there is.
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