When Veejay Madhavan recalls the team that changed how he understood leadership, his voice carries a rare mix of pride and defiance.
“They proved to be the most productive team in my company’s history,” he says. “No one has surpassed what they achieved, despite the labels we put on them.”
The team he’s referring to was a group of Gen Z interns—young, untested, and dismissed by many as inexperienced.
Today, as the founder of OulbyZ, a consulting firm that helps organizations integrate multi-generational teams and prepare for an AI-driven future, Veejay is warning companies of what’s coming. “Once the Gen Z wave starts in 2025,” he says, “many will struggle because they haven’t thought ahead. They think they can treat Gen Z like any other generation. They can’t.”
For him, the problem isn’t that Gen Z lacks resilience or commitment, as corporate leaders often claim. It’s that workplaces are built for another era—hierarchical, rigid, and performative.
“Corporate life has become very performative,” he says. “Everybody is trying to be a wannabe. But the truth is, everything we enjoy at work—titles, privileges, benefits—are just that: privileges. The only thing we’re guaranteed is what we’re paid.”
Having served as a CEO before founding OulbyZ, he’s seen the misalignment between corporate ambition and human capacity up close. And as a researcher currently pursuing a doctorate on Gen Z, AI, and leadership in the ASEAN region, he frames the issue with precision: the friction between generations is structural.
In his view, the misunderstanding of Gen Z says less about youth and more about leadership itself. “They’re not entitled,” he insists. “They’re misunderstood.”
‘The misunderstood generation’
That Gen Z workers don’t want to do the low-level jobs is a misconception, Veejay asserts. “Who says a Gen Z cannot come in at a managerial level? Which law said that?”
For Veejay, the assumption that youth equates to unreadiness is an outdated reflex, one that ignores the shifting reality of work.
“There are startup founders younger than the people interviewing them,” he says. “We’ve had people like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates—leaders who built empires before they even graduated. So why do we assume capability follows age?”
That question runs through much of his work. He argues that the problem is how organizations measure value. Tenure, he says, has long been mistaken for competence. “We have this corporate obsession with experience,” he explains. “But experience is just exposure over time. Capability is what counts now.”
He traces part of this tension to the performative culture of modern workplaces. Employees learn to display confidence rather than curiosity, and leaders mistake conformity for maturity.
In that environment, Gen Z—more direct, digital, and restless—disrupts the illusion. “They ask questions,” he says. “They want to know why things are done a certain way. That’s not an entitlement. That’s curiosity.”
In 2023, he interviewed more than two hundred Gen Z professionals across the ASEAN region as part of a research pilot. One of his findings surprised even him: many of them didn’t identify closely with Millennials, the generation that came right before them.
“They called Millennials the ‘other generation,’” he says. “They saw them as uncles and aunties. That told me something important—Gen Z doesn’t see itself as a continuation. They see themselves as distinct.”
That distinction, he explains, is born from context. Gen Z entered adulthood in a world shaped by connectivity and crisis—climate anxiety, economic volatility, political polarization, and information overload. They grew up online but are tired of the noise. They crave purpose but distrust institutions.
“They’ve had access to more information and opportunity than any generation before them,” he says. “But that also means they’ve seen failure up close: political failure, leadership failure, even moral failure. They don’t just want to work. They want to know why their work matters.”
To him, this is a kind of new literacy. “They’re built for performance,” he says, “but the systems around them aren’t built for them.”
He believes the misunderstanding of Gen Z will soon have measurable consequences. By 2025, one in four employees in the Asia-Pacific region will belong to that generation. Yet, he says, “most organizations haven’t prepared. They think culture is inherited. It isn’t. It has to be rebuilt with every generation.”
The clarity deficit in leadership
“Companies always choose the destination before knowing their origin,” he says, talking about organizational dysfunction and what he calls the clarity deficit. “It’s like booking a flight without stating where you’re departing from.”
“Everyone says, ‘We want to grow by twenty-five percent, we want to expand into new markets, we want to embrace AI.’ But no one steps back to ask, do we have the people to actually navigate this journey?”
For him, this is the foundation of sustainable leadership. Too many organizations assume that headcount follows strategy instead of shaping it. The result is predictable: plans built on ambition but executed without alignment.
“Ninety percent of HR officers will tell you they have a workforce strategy,” he says. “If that’s true, then why are they still missing their targets?”
Leaders, he says, are taught to measure success by outcomes rather than coherence. “Financial numbers take care of themselves when your processes and people are aligned. But what happens now is the reverse. We obsess over quarterly results and call that strategy. It isn’t. It’s accounting.”
The clarity deficit, as he describes it, is not only operational as it’s also cultural. Middle managers, squeezed between contradictory instructions and unrealistic goals, become translators of confusion.
“They’re told to execute strategies they don’t understand or bought into,” he says. “That’s where leadership fails, not at the top or bottom, but in the middle where communication dies.”
Veejay’s approach to solving this problem is methodical. He helps organizations create a clear-eyed audit of capability rather than position. “We need to stop confusing structure with strength,” he says. “An organization chart doesn’t show how people actually work together.”
He recalls consulting for companies that blamed turnover on Gen Z’s lack of focus. “They’d say, ‘Young people aren’t staying,’” he expresses. “But when you dig deeper, you realize they’re not leaving the job. They’re leaving confusion.”
The middle management trap
Veejay Madhavan describes middle managers as caught between ambition above and expectation below.
“They’re the ones who pay the price,” he says. “They get unclear, ambiguous instructions from the top and frustration from the bottom. They don’t know what to say, how to say it, or how to manage what isn’t clear to them in the first place.”
The problem, he expounds, is not that these managers are incapable but that they’ve been trained for the wrong realities. “We arm them with soft skills—negotiation, communication, influencing—because that sounds progressive,” he says. “But in real life, when a crisis hits, they need to act, not recite frameworks.”
“I tell my HR colleagues, don’t suffer in delulu.” The word—a Gen Z shorthand for “delusional”—is one he uses with irony. “It’s not a lack of empathy,” he says. “It’s a lack of readiness. When a ship takes on water, you don’t want your managers reaching for manuals. You want them clearing the deck.”
In Veejay’s workshops, he often illustrates how the middle layer becomes the choke point of progress. They are overburdened with meetings, constrained by bureaucracy, and rarely given permission to lead. “We think management is about telling,” he says. “It isn’t. It’s about guiding and making decisions when the playbook no longer fits.”
He recounts a time when he ran a large cross-generational team and insisted on limiting meetings to ninety minutes a month or two forty-five-minute sessions.
“That’s all you need if the team is aligned,” he explains. “The rest of the time should be used to actually work, to solve, to create.” In contrast, he describes what he now sees in most organizations: “death by meeting.” Hours of discussion mistaken for productivity, clarity replaced by consensus fatigue.
The collapse of middle management, he argues, is more than a human resources issue, it’s a strategic liability. “When the middle loses clarity, execution dies,” he says. “You can have the best technology, the best strategy, the best vision. But if your middle is confused, you’re finished.”
Veejay Madhavan sees this as a generational fault line, too. Middle managers, often Millennials or early Gen X, are expected to manage younger teams without ever having been managed that way themselves. “They were told to obey,” he says. “Now they’re expected to inspire.”
He shrugs, sympathetic. “We didn’t prepare them for that.”
The experiment that proved everyone wrong
When Veejay Madhavan tells the story of the team that made him rethink everything he knew about leadership, his tone softens from analysis to recollection. It was 2017, and he was building a new management program in Cambodia.
“I decided to hire Gen Z interns,” he says. “At the time, it was unheard of. People asked me, ‘Are you sure kids can do this?’”
He remembers the skepticism vividly. Senior leaders doubted the idea. The word intern carried a quiet dismissal; Gen Z was often shorthand for inexperience. But he pushed forward. “I told them, they’re not kids if they’ve graduated,” he says. “We all started the same way. We just forget.”
The experiment began with a challenge. He gave his new interns a deliberately vague task: find growth hacks for the company. “I didn’t define it for them,” he says. “I wanted to see how they’d approach the unknown.”
They returned days later, confused but curious. “They said, ‘We don’t know what growth hacks really mean,’” he recalls, smiling. “And I told them, good. That’s the right place to start.”
What followed was the first glimpse of their potential. The interns researched, collaborated, and eventually proposed ideas that even Veejay, an industry veteran, had never considered. “They came back with solutions that went completely against the grain,” he says. “But they worked.”
He then asked them to present their ideas directly to the leadership team. “It’s a terrifying thing for a twenty-one-year-old,” he says. “To stand before senior executives and defend your thinking.” He knew the stakes. “My job,” he says, “was to make sure they weren’t slaughtered unnecessarily.”
In that meeting, the young team faced sharp questioning. Veejay remembers stepping in only when the critique crossed into condescension. “I told the room, ‘For these kids to come up with ideas seasoned leaders couldn’t, that’s already an achievement.’”
It was a turning point not just for the interns, but for how leadership in that company viewed youth. “We recognized something,” he says. “That ideas don’t have a hierarchy. They just need space.”
Back in 2020, he began hosting what he called Sandbox Tuesdays, where employees could pitch and test ideas without fear of failure. “We treated ideas like experiments,” he says. “If they failed, we learned why. If they worked, we scaled them.”
Within a year, the results spoke for themselves. “They became the most productive team in the company’s history,” he says. “No one has surpassed what they achieved.” The experiment that began with hesitation ended with transformation. The company, once skeptical, began hiring Gen Z interns regularly.
Years later, Veejay still tracks where those former interns have gone. One became an entrepreneur. Another, a head of learning at a bank by the age of twenty-eight. “They came to me as sales interns,” he says.
“One went into tech, one into HR, one into business, one stayed in sales and is now managing distribution recruitment. They all found their path. That’s what happens when you give people clarity and space.”
Beyond his work with OulbyZ, Veejay Madhavan continues to shape the leadership conversation through research and writing. He is the author of Clarity Demands Collateral: What Are You Willing to Lose to Live in Truth?, a book that challenges leaders to confront the cost of real alignment, and a TEDx speaker whose talk on Gen Z examines how organizations can move from managing youth to empowering them.
