The Next Generation Isn't Waiting for the Ceiling You Hit

I was a natural leader. People gravitated toward me. I read a room well, I was confident, I got things done. For a long time, that felt like enough.

Here is what I have learned since. Even natural leaders have blind spots. We all do. And without actively working on our own development, natural talent does not protect you from going stagnant. It just delays when you notice.

That is the shift that changed everything for me, and it is the reason Catalyst exists at all. Being good at leading people is not the finish line. It is the starting point for the real work.

I bring this up because this week on Real Talk, we talked with Briana Lorenzo, Director of Food Safety and Quality at Harris Teeter, about what the next generation of food safety leaders actually sees when they look at this industry. And one thing Briana said stuck with me the same way that lesson did. She is not waiting around to go stagnant before someone helps her keep growing. She wants that investment now, while she still has decades of leadership ahead of her, not after years of coasting on instinct alone.

What the research says next-gen leaders actually want

This is not just a Briana story. It shows up in the data, consistently, across the industry.

Learning and development ranks among the top three reasons Gen Z professionals choose an employer in the first place, and 86 percent say mentorship and guidance genuinely help them, according to Deloitte's most recent workforce survey. But the same research found that most Gen Z employees feel their managers are focused on overseeing day-to-day tasks rather than developing them. That gap between what they want and what they are getting shows up in the numbers that matter most to retention: nearly one in three Gen Z employees plan to switch employers within the next two years, roughly double the rate for millennials. Source: Deloitte, 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, 2025.

Why the gap exists, even with good managers

Here is the part that should reframe how we talk about this. It is not that managers do not care about developing their people. It is that they structurally cannot.

Deloitte's Global Human Capital Trends research found that managers spend nearly 40 percent of their time on immediate problems and administrative tasks, and only 13 percent of their time actually developing the people who work for them. Source: Deloitte, cited in Deloitte's 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, 2025. 

Thirteen percent. That is the sliver of time left over for the exact thing next-gen leaders say matters most to them.

And the stakes of that gap are not small. Gallup's research shows that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units, meaning the quality of a person's manager is, more than almost anything else, the difference between someone who stays engaged and someone who quietly starts looking elsewhere. Source: Gallup, State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders, 2015.

That number is a decade old, but the problem has not improved. Gallup's most recent global data shows manager engagement itself fell from 27 percent to 22 percent in a single year, the largest year-over-year drop the organization has recorded. Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026, 2026. 

Put those together and the picture is clear. The people most responsible for keeping the next generation engaged are themselves under-resourced, under-trained, and running out of time to do the one thing that would actually move the needle.

This is not a talent problem. It is an infrastructure problem.

Last week, Sharron Northern told us something similar from a different angle. Programs do not usually fail because organizations stop caring. They fail because they were never built to reach everyone who needed them, and they quietly flatline while the people carrying them run out of capacity.

Briana's story and the data point to the same conclusion. The industry does not have a shortage of talented next-gen leaders. It has a shortage of managers with the time, training, and support to actually develop them. And every year that gap stays open, the best of them are making a quiet calculation about whether staying is worth it.

I learned that lesson myself, long before I let stagnation set in. The difference for me was choosing to stay intentional instead of coasting on what came naturally. That is the investment this generation is asking for. The only question is whether the industry is willing to build the infrastructure to actually give it to them.

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