Desert Physicians Medical Group Health

Steven Nguyen

Intergenerational Collaboration Catalyst

Steven Nguyen is a Family Medicine Residency Core Faculty member and Assistant Clinical Professor with experience in medical education, family medicine and healthcare leadership. His expertise includes hospital medicine, outpatient primary care, curriculum development and dermatological and endoscopic procedures.

"Gen Z just doesn't want to work."

As the words left my friend's mouth, I felt a jolt of Deja vu. Less than ten years ago we had the same conversation with one word changed: "Millennials don't want to work." We were the Millennials. Now my friend manages a team, and somehow, we had both forgotten that the same complaint was aimed at us, to the point of cliché.

The script is older than any of us. The sitcoms of my childhood were full of Boomers rolling their eyes at Gen X. The labels change, but the lines don't. So what keeps this cycle running?

In my experience, nothing earned me more ire from supervisors than asking why we did something a certain way. Many defensively rationalized their way into an illogical answer, seemingly to justify testing the next generation against their own generation's suffering. But the leaders I remember most did something different. They paused long enough to reflect- "Hmm, why do we do it this way?" My question was never defiance. It was a search for meaning in the work.

I've come to believe that what leaders read as unwillingness to work is often unwillingness to work inside systems that no longer make sense. As technology improves, tolerance for inefficiency shrinks; and in healthcare, where process often lags the tools available, we feel that gap acutely. Younger clinicians tend to be the first to say it out loud. That's not a character flaw- it's a signal. Punishing the question doesn’t put out the fire, it just turns off the alarm. A leader who can hear the signal has an advantage.

So the leader's job is to translate to work into meaning, and it can be built into structure:

• Process into rationale: every standing process has a stated purpose, and anyone can ask for it

• Work into impact: people see where their effort lands

• Feedback into action: feedback is specific, tied to an observed behavior and a discussion of actionable change

• Autonomy into ownership: people decide, and carry the results

Every generation gets accused of not wanting to work. The better response is the one those few good leaders gave me is get curious.