Nicholas Mukhtar has watched the same scene repeat itself across engineering firms, wealth management practices and healthcare offices: a CEO still at their desk at 6 or 7 p.m., while employees in their early twenties left closer to 4:30. He treats that gap as a symptom of something more specific than burnout.
In his consulting work, the businesses struggling most with generational friction are the same ones running out of time to hand off leadership at all.. “I’m seeing it as a twofold thing,” Nicholas Mukhtar said. “There’s a generation of leaders getting very burnt out, and a generation of new employees who are, and I say this carefully, contributing to that burnout.”.
A split, not a single crisis. Nicholas Mukhtar describes the current moment as two groups operating on incompatible assumptions rather than one shared complaint. Older executives built their careers on a model where showing up first and leaving last was the baseline expectation.
“You have a generation that was first in the office and last to leave,” Mukhtar said. “That’s how I came up: you work, and you keep working. And then you have a generation that doesn’t see it that way.”.
Survey data on how burnout now breaks down by age lines up with what he describes. Millennial and Gen Z workers report burnout at rates of 74% and 71%, compared with 59% among Gen X and 48% among Baby Boomers. Poor communication and collaboration tied to generational friction is linked to six times higher odds of burnout among employees generally, according to O.C.
Tanner Institute research surveying more than 5,700 workers across 17 countries.. The Ferrari problem. Mukhtar points to a mismatch in expectations rather than a shortage of ambition among younger workers as the real driver, not a simple workload argument..
“These younger employees want to be the CEO and earn the CEO money,” Mukhtar said, “but they don’t fully understand what it took that CEO to get there. It’s not all Ferraris and nice cars. In many cases it was six days a week of grinding for years.”.
He’s careful about how he describes that gap. “It’s not that there’s no willingness to work, it’s that they want to work differently,” Mukhtar said. A 22-year-old angling to run a company one day and a 55-year-old already running one share the same eventual goal but hold different assumptions about what the years between those two points are supposed to look like.
Mid-level managers, caught operating between both groups, report the highest burnout of any role level in the workforce, ahead of executives and individual contributors alike, according to the same research cited above.. Why this is a handoff problem. Mukhtar’s clients describe loyalty and tenure differently than they used to, and he hears the complaint consistently regardless of industry.
“The constant complaint is that loyalty is harder to find than it used to be,” he said. “Work ethic and longevity look different now.” An engineering firm, a wealth management practice and a medical group can each describe the exact same frustration to him in a single week, which is part of why he doesn’t treat it as an industry-specific issue..
That consistency is what separates his diagnosis from a standard burnout story. Business owners in his client base are simultaneously running day-to-day operations and trying to prepare the next layer of leadership to eventually take over, and the same generational mismatch driving burnout complaints is the mismatch slowing down that handoff.
A leader already stretched thin has less capacity left to bridge a gap in expectations with staff who define a sustainable pace on different terms than the leader did at the same age.. Mukhtar traces his own approach to this back to sports, having grown up around coaching and team dynamics through his father, a longtime high school soccer coach in Michigan.
Communication closes most gaps between people who read the same situation differently, he said, and he applies that instinct directly to how he advises clients working through a leadership transition. “Whether that’s right or wrong, I genuinely don’t know,” Mukhtar said of the generational divide itself.
“But the divide is real, and it’s burning out the generation trying to hand things off.”. That reading puts the weight on the transition rather than on either generation individually. For business owners working through their own succession timelines, the burnout numbers work as an early signal that the handoff itself is already strained, well before anyone involved would call it a succession problem out loud, rather than a side issue to be managed with a wellness stipend..
What business owners tend to miss. Nicholas Mukhtar’s clients rarely walk in describing succession as the issue on the table. Most come to him with a narrower complaint: a key employee threatening to leave, a manager who seems checked out, a younger hire who won’t put in the hours a role used to require.
He treats those as downstream symptoms of the same generational mismatch rather than separate problems requiring separate fixes. A business owner who addresses the surface complaint, in his experience, without addressing the underlying assumption gap between generations tends to see the same complaint resurface with a different employee within a year..
Nicholas Mukhtar’s advice to business owners in that position starts with the same tool he applies everywhere else in his consulting practice: a direct conversation, held early, about what each side actually expects from the other. He’ll ask an owner whether an employee threatening to leave was ever asked directly what they wanted.
“Did you, as the employee, sit down with the business owner and explain what you actually want, and give them the opportunity to meet you there?” Mukhtar said. “Most of the time the answer is no.” The pattern he sees is an assumption of rejection substituting for an actual conversation, on both sides of the age divide, which turns a solvable expectations mismatch into a resignation neither side saw coming..
Featured image credit. Tags: trends
