After I clicked “publish” this morning, I had actually thought about our “Gen Z exchanges.” My inspiration for this short story was an experience I had with a colleague (about your age) last week.

At my work, we were hosting a small event, and he was in charge of pulling it together. He was walking me through his planning process — including details like how he was going to fold napkins — and I stopped him to say, “Brian, nobody cares. You’re giving 90% of your energy to the small stuff, and for this group, nobody will notice or appreciate these considerations.”

The ultimate issue was that nobody in the organization had spoken with him about expectations, so the parameters were super wide and ambiguous. In those situations, you’re right, it does create a double standard. And that’s a massive, systemic issue within many industries.

The answer, though, isn’t honing in on small details — it’s zooming out and figuring out where rubber meets the road in a meaningful way.

Companies that think in this way have superior performance appraisals that fix what you’ve experienced in your evaluations. But ask me how many of them actually do this… in ~20 years working I can count them on just a couple of fingers!