By Max Adams | Wall Street Mastermind

It was a Sunday at 5pm. A client sent an urgent message something squarely in the domain of one of my Gen Z employees. Something she’d normally handle easily. Instead of replying, though, she sent me a message asking if I could respond to the client because “Sunday was her day off."

I’ll be honest, I had a moment. A full-on boomer moment. I very nearly caught myself thinking kids these days, which is ironic, because I’m on the cusp of Gen Z myself. I rushed through college, worked my way up through investment banking and private equity to the mid-levels, and spent years managing people older than me. So I get to talk about Gen Z both as an insider and as a Gen Z manager.

That Sunday message felt like a generational indictment. But it wasn’t. It was a management signal I almost missed, but which has become increasingly clear as I’ve worked with hundreds of analysts and associates every year through Wall Street Mastermind, the premier finance recruiting bootcamp: Gen Z isn’t a downgrade from previous generations. They’re just running a different operating system. 

And the leaders who learn to work with that system, not against it, are going to dramatically outperform the ones still managing like it’s Wall Street in 2007. 

When I joined investment banking, I was once asked to build an AVP. I had never heard the term “analysis at various prices” in my life. I sat there staring at a blank Excel sheet like it was written in hieroglyphics. My MD’s trade-off was simple: spend five minutes giving me a framework, or let me burn three hours figuring it out on my own. He chose the latter. That was considered character-building. It was actually just inefficient.

I’m not saying the learning you get from asking around, piecing things together, and struggling through ambiguity isn’t valuable–it is. But there’s a Pareto Principle at work here. If a manager can invest 20% of the effort to save an analyst 80% of the wasted time, you don’t lose the learning–you redirect it to future projects. Instead of burning hours deciphering what the task even is, your analyst spends that time learning how to actually do higher-level work across more projects.

And here’s what’s changed: the cost of delivering a good framework has collapsed. Writing a thoughtful Claude prompt that lays out the task, the context, the expected output format, and a few examples takes a senior banker five minutes. That prompt becomes an intermediary layer. It translates your expertise into a format your analyst can immediately act on. 

The managers who still treat ambiguous instructions as a rite of passage aren’t being tough; they’re being inefficient.

Remember the Gen Z employee who wouldn’t email the client on a Sunday? Here’s what actually happened.

She wasn’t avoiding work. She was grinding that same weekend on a different project. She didn’t have a clear framework for when client-facing communication was expected outside of business hours versus when it could wait. So she made a judgment call–the wrong one, from my perspective, but a reasonable one given the information she had.

Once I clarified communication standards–specifically, that client-facing responsiveness on urgent matters doesn’t follow a Monday-to-Friday schedule–she adjusted immediately. Not begrudgingly. Enthusiastically. She produced incredible results for the team from that point forward. The issue was never effort or willingness. It was clarity on expectations.

And when she stepped up, I told her so. This is where a lot of senior bankers leave value on the table. With Gen Z, positive reinforcement is a necessary motivator. If someone adjusts their behavior, delivers results, and raises their game after a single conversation, why wouldn’t you acknowledge it? It costs you nothing and it compounds. Recognition doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It means making your standards feel achievable, which in turn makes people run harder toward them.

The senior bankers who think praise is beneath them are solving for ego, not performance.

Gen Z is often characterized as idealistic–and the data backs it up. Deloitte’s 2024 Global Survey found that 86% of Gen Zs say a sense of purpose is key to their workplace satisfaction, and half have rejected assignments or employers based on personal values alone.,

You can read that as entitlement. Or you can read it as a leadership opportunity.

“Build this model” is an instruction. “Build this model because the client is presenting to their board on Thursday and your analysis is the centerpiece of the recommendation” is a mission. Same task. Completely different level of output.

When Gen Z understands how their work connects to the outcome, discretionary effort goes up dramatically. The 30 seconds it takes you to explain why a task matters buys you hours of higher-quality execution. This is the generation that grew up with radical transparency–from social media to school to the workplace, they expect context. Not because they’re questioning your authority, but because context is how they calibrate effort.

The senior bankers who provide context give analysts skin in the game and get better results in return.

A lot of people hear “frameworks,” “positive reinforcement,” and “explain the why” and conclude that finance standards are slipping. We’re coddling a generation that needs to toughen up. This isn’t how it was done, and therefore expectations are lowering.

They’re wrong. The bar doesn’t drop. The expectations of leadership must rise.

Several years ago, I was working with a Gen Z intern- I’ll call him Abdul. He was one of the best interns I’d ever worked with, sharp, hungry, and reliable. When I had to travel unexpectedly for a funeral, Abdul built nine accretion-dilution models nearly from scratch, managing a critical client process entirely on his own while I was gone. This was far and above anything I’d ever accomplished as an intern at his stage.

Nobody lowered the bar for Abdul. The work was complex, the timeline was brutal, and he delivered at a level that would impress any MD on the Street. Gen Z can absolutely meet the highest standards in banking. But they do their best work under leaders who match those standards with clarity, speed of feedback, and genuine recognition.

The leaders who win the talent war won’t be the ones who lower the bar. They’ll be the ones who raise it and raise their praise, their clarity of instructions, their speed of feedback, and their communication skills right alongside it. That’s not going soft. That’s upgrading your leadership for a generation that will outperform under the right conditions.