Last week I was at All Flows, a brilliant creative conference held in Milton Keynes, and was enjoying a fascinating talk by Nada Hesham, founder and chief creative officer of 40MUSTAQEL, an independent graphic design studio based in Cairo.
She was busily talking through the work of her practice, which expertly navigates the complex cultural demands of clients in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. And then said something that made the entire room laugh, nod and visibly squirm in recognition.
Nada described a younger colleague like this: "Tasnim is the unbothered, cool Gen Z that every millennial in the studio secretly, and not so secretly, aspires to kind of gain her validation." It was a throwaway line, but the chuckles that followed weren't polite laughter. They were the kind of laugh that happens when someone says something you've silently thought, but never actually articulated.
I caught up Nada afterwards and told her as much. Together we reflected that it is genuinely strange: when we were younger, we craved the approval of people older and more experienced than us. Now, somehow, it's the other way around.
As a few follow-up conversations with other attendees confirmed, it's not just us, either. Plenty of senior creatives, art directors, studio founders – people who've spent decades building careers – are secretly obsessing over what their younger Gen Z colleagues think of us.
So why is that exactly?
The BS detector generation
From my personal viewpoint (other perspectives may differ), what happened was something like this. Gen Z – the people who were born between 1997 and 2012 – entered the workforce and, with remarkable collective nerve, decided to reject some of the attitudes to work that previous generations felt were untouchable.
So while Millennials hustled, worked late into the night, and bought into the idea that career = personality, Gen Z drew a line in the sand and – perhaps egged on by lockdown and remote working – opted to pursue work-life balance instead.
Though acts like quiet quitting, "act your wage", and rejecting the notion that work defines you, this new generation ended up articulating what many of us older creatives felt, but never felt we could realistically act on.
In contrast, many creative directors and studio founders in their 30s and 40s were shaped by genuinely toxic workplaces: the demanding, dismissive, boundary-free cultures of the 90s and early 2000s. Having got to positions of leadership, they are determined not to replicate that cycle.
What it's really about
In that light, Gen Z, with their instinct for calling out what isn't working and their refusal to perform gratitude for bad conditions, have become the measure of modern managerial success. A signal that you, as an studio founder or creative director, are respected and heard. Or, in more basic psychological terms, you're one of the good ones.
In other words, Gen X and millennial creatives don't just want Gen Z to like them because they want to be liked (a perfectly normal human instinct). They don't even want Gen Z to like them to make them feel young, cool and connected (again, a perfectly normal instinct for anyone reaching middle age). It's more than, as managers and employers, they want Gen Z to confirm that the freedom and authenticity they seems to hold so naturally – the things we spent decades wishing we'd had, but never actually got – were actually worth waiting for. That we got there in the end.
For more, here are the challenges facing designers designing for Gen Z.
