As I've gotten older and had the pleasure of working alongside younger generations, one thing has become obvious. As the kids say, they're built different.
I mean that with affection. I genuinely enjoy working with them. But it raises a real question, one I hear older managers ask with a sigh all the time: why don't they respond to authority the way previous generations did? What changed?
The easy answer is the one you've heard a hundred times. They're entitled. They don't respect authority. They want everything handed to them. I want to suggest that the easy answer is not just unkind. It's wrong, and it causes managers to misread the single most useful signal they're being given.
Because the younger workers aren't the problem. They're the signal.
Here's what I mean. For most of modern history, authority lived inside buildings.
If you wanted a degree, you went to a campus. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you needed an institution's stamp. The building decided who was credible and who got to speak. Authority had an address, and you borrowed it by standing inside.
The internet dissolved that, and not in the way people usually say. It isn't only that information got cheaper, though it did. The deeper change is where credibility comes from. It used to be conferred. You were credible because the university, or the licensing board, or the org chart said so. Now, increasingly, you are credible because of what people can actually see you do.
Younger workers are the first generation to grow up entirely inside that new world. They watched real expertise online their whole lives. They learned to tell, quickly, the difference between someone who actually knows a thing and someone who merely holds a position. They can see their own market value, their own options, their own worth, in a way no previous generation could.
So when they don't automatically defer to a title, it isn't disrespect. It's that they can see straight past it. They grew up after authority left the building, and they never learned to be impressed by the building.
And here's the part almost no one connects.
What's collapsing isn't really institutions. It's positional authority itself. The idea that you should be followed because of where you sit. Education was just the first place it left. The workplace is the next.
For a century, management borrowed its authority exactly the way the university did. You did what the manager said because of the box they occupied on the org chart, not because of anything they'd earned from you. The title did the work that character was supposed to do.
That's ending, for the same reason it ended for the institution. The people being managed can now see the whole landscape. They know what good leadership looks like, because they've watched it elsewhere. And so the manager who expects deference for the title alone is losing their grip, not because workers got entitled, but because the basis of authority moved, and the title got left behind in the building.
This is the real reason top-down management is failing, and it's deeper than the usual one. It's not only that command-and-control is unkind, though it is. It's that command-and-control runs on borrowed authority, and the loan is being called in. A leader can no longer rely on position to be obeyed. They have to earn it, in full view, through what they actually do and how they actually treat the people around them.
So the next time a younger employee doesn't just fall in line because you're the boss, try resisting the urge to call it disrespect. Get curious instead. They're not failing to recognize your authority. They're showing you where authority actually comes from now.
The internet didn't just reshape education. It reshaped where we believe authority comes from. And the last place still pretending otherwise is the one with a manager standing at the front of the room, waiting to be believed because of the box they stand in.
Until next time,
Avi