At least inside the workplace most of us inherited.
They care – a lot – about money. They protect their personal lives with a ferocity previous generations sometimes interpret as a lack of commitment. Many seem reluctant to pursue the executive roles we assumed ambitious people would eventually want. And when they're disengaged, they can look downright unmotivated: transactional, self-focused, and unimpressed by titles, tenure, and all the incentives that worked beautifully on the generations before them.
It makes them easy to complain about.
It also makes them easy to misunderstand.
What if the behaviors frustrating us aren't evidence of a defective generation? What if they're evidence of a generation that was paying attention?
Recently, I was talking with a Millennial member of the San Francisco Sheriff's Office about what shaped his view of work. He described watching his parents give their careers to companies that eventually treated them like numbers. He watched them lose money and clout. He watched the security they believed they had earned become considerably less secure.
And after giving all those years? "They got a crappy watch."
Not every Millennial watched precisely that story unfold, but millions came of age during the Great Recession, watching parents and other adults follow the prescribed formula – work hard, remain loyal, buy the house, build the retirement account – only to discover how quickly security could disappear.
So, yes, Millennials care about compensation. But perhaps the question underneath it is more revealing:
If I give this organization a significant portion of my life, what exactly am I getting in return?
Qualtrics has been documenting that renegotiation between employee and employer for years. Its Employee Experience Trends research has repeatedly pointed to burnout, compensation concerns, work-life boundaries, career growth, trust, organizational values, voice, and belief in the future as major factors shaping employee engagement.
Money establishes whether the relationship feels fair. It gives people security and communicates value. But once fairness is established, money alone doesn't create passion.
Qualtrics' 2025 Americas research found that pride in an organization's external impact and being encouraged to develop better ways of serving customers were the top two drivers of engagement across the Americas.
Impact. Service. Contribution.
Those are very different motivations from simply earning another dollar. Give someone a paycheck but disconnect him from the mission, and eventually his attention turns inward: my schedule, my compensation, my needs, my future.
Then we decide he doesn't care about the organization.
Maybe he doesn't.
Or maybe we've given him very little inside the organization worth caring deeply about.
Millennials also came of age watching confidence in institutions erode. Public figures, corporations, and respected institutions repeatedly demonstrated that occupying an important office did not necessarily mean behaving with the integrity historically associated with it.
Titles lost some of their magic.
Qualtrics' 2024 findings exposed just how differently employees and executives can experience the same workplace. Only 48% of individual contributors believed their organization responded to employee feedback, while 86% of senior leaders believed the organization did.
The following year, only 56% of employees believed senior leaders would prioritize employee well-being over short-term gains.
Authority may give an executive positional power over a Millennial. It does not automatically give him influence with one. Credibility has to be visible.
Then there's “balance.”
Many Millennials grew up watching adults prove commitment through absence. Dad couldn't make the game. Mom had to work late. The phone rang during dinner. Vacation wasn't really vacation. Something important happened at work, and everybody at home was expected to understand. Their children watched the cost.
Now those children have children, and many have decided not to make the same trade.
Deloitte's 2026 research found only 6% of Millennials and Gen Z respondents identified reaching a leadership position as their primary career goal, yet 67% of Millennials remained interested in senior leadership eventually. Stress, excessive responsibility, and the effect on work-life balance were all cited as barriers.
They aren't necessarily rejecting leadership. They're rejecting what leadership appears to require.
We've designed executive roles people don't want to buy.
So if you have Millennials who seem apathetic, stop beginning with the question, How do I motivate them? Figure out where the fire went out.
Give them something consequential to own. Connect the assignment to the human being on the other end of it. Make growth bigger than promotion. Build financial, professional, relationship, and political capital long before handing them the chair. Pay fairly, then stop pretending money is the fire. Protect what matters outside the building. Earn influence instead of demanding deference.
The oldest Millennials are now in their mid-40s. They're supervisors, managers, directors, command staff, and executives. This is our succession pool.
Some executives will spend the next decade wishing Millennials were more like the generations before them. Others are already figuring out how to use exactly what makes them different. Because the Millennial irritating you by asking why today may be precisely the executive you need asking why not? tomorrow.
His parents got a watch. We can give him something better.
A reason to believe that giving his best years to this work will actually build something worth inheriting.
— Dr. Renee Thornton
Architecture Files: Investigating our Inherited Culture
Each week through October, we’ll open a new case, examine the evidence, challenge the obvious explanation, and look beneath the surface at the architecture producing the outcome.
September 28, 2026 at 1:00 PM Eastern
