For the first time in modern workplace history, millennials have officially taken the helm. In mid-2025, this generation overtook Generation X to become the largest cohort of managers across the American workforce—a seismic generational shift that signals far more than a simple changing of the guard.
As millennials step into leadership roles, they’re bringing with them a fundamentally different management philosophy: one rooted in empathy, mental health awareness, and boundary-setting.
Yet beneath this progressive veneer lies a far more complicated reality—one characterised by widespread burnout, difficulty asserting authority, and the paradox of a generation that invented emotional intelligence at work whilst struggling to wield it effectively.
The data paints a striking portrait of this transition. According to Glassdoor’s semiannual Worklife Trends report, millennials crossed the threshold into managerial majority in late June 2025, displacing Gen X’s two-decade dominance.
Looking ahead, the shift will accelerate further: Generation Z is projected to command a greater share of managers than baby boomers by late 2025 or 2026, with one in ten managers already hailing from that cohort.
Daniel Zhao, Glassdoor’s lead economist, emphasises that this represents the culmination of demographic inevitability—millennials have steadily risen through the ranks since becoming the largest generation in the labour force in the mid-2010s, propelled by a combination of baby boomer retirements and markedly different attitudes towards organisational leadership.
The Burnout Crisis: When Millennials Manage the Burnout Generation
Here’s the cruel irony: millennials became synonymous with workplace burnout long before they became the majority of managers.
Anne Helen Petersen’s viral 2019 BuzzFeed article crystallised the phenomenon—later expanded into a book—arguing that millennials were uniquely born into a culture of ceaseless work, burdened from childhood with impossible expectations and mounting debt.
Fast-forward to 2025, and those same burned-out millennials are now responsible for managing teams whilst grappling with record levels of stress themselves.
The statistics are sobering. Mentions of burnout in Glassdoor reviews have spiked 73 per cent year-on-year as of May 2025, with Zhao characterising the situation as an ‘ongoing crisis’ showing ‘no signs of abating’.
Compounding matters further, the average number of direct reports per manager has nearly doubled in recent years—piling additional stress onto the very generation that popularised discussions of workplace exhaustion.
‘Reviews about burnout often refer to the cumulative effect of several years of layoffs and understaffing wearing on employees who remain,’ Zhao explains.
Many millennial managers, particularly those in their late thirties and forties, find themselves caught in what workplace experts have termed a ‘manager crash’, squeezed between competing pressures.
Zhao notes that millennials are increasingly aging into the ‘sandwich generation’, balancing demanding careers with caregiving responsibilities for ageing parents and young children.
‘Millennials right now are in a place where their career pressures might be highest, but there are also these other personal pressures that are really stressing millennials out,’ he observes. ‘In a sense, they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.’
Yet when Fortune spoke with Zhao about the broader state of the workforce, he offered a measured perspective.
Workers ‘don’t feel like they’re in a great situation’ at present, but conditions have neither improved nor deteriorated significantly since January 2025. It’s hardly cause for celebration—the workplace remains decidedly ‘mid’, to borrow Gen Z parlance—but at least the situation hasn’t worsened.
The Expectation Gap: Emotional Intelligence Meets the ‘Cool Boss’ Problem
Millennials have undoubtedly transformed workplace culture for the better in many respects. They’re widely credited with championing empathy, mental-health benefits, and remote-work flexibility as standard managerial expectations.
Glassdoor has documented a marked shift in how employees discuss management over the past five years: reviews increasingly emphasise emotional intelligence, ‘respecting boundaries’, ‘promoting employee well-being’, and ‘addressing burnout’.
‘The bar on what constitutes a good manager has been raised,’ Zhao says.
The problem is that raising expectations doesn’t automatically grant the skills to meet them. Despite their progressive values, many millennial managers have received little to no formal leadership training, often feeling unprepared for the complexities of managing multigenerational teams and navigating rapid organisational change.
More troubling still, the very generation that popularised emotional intelligence as a workplace concept—the generation that weaponised the concept against social media ‘ghosts’ and rejection—struggles with assertiveness and managing conflict head-on. This tension has spawned a peculiar modern archetype: the ‘cool boss’.
Recent viral social-media content and reporting have lampooned millennial managers who blur the boundary between authority figure and friend, adopting casual communication styles and laid-back attitudes in pursuit of workplace camaraderie.
Sketches and first-person accounts paint a stereotype of managers eager to be perceived as hip and relatable. Yet critics argue this approach masks a far more troubling dynamic.
The veneer of warmth obscures real power imbalances, whilst inconsistent or ambiguous expectations breed anxiety among staff. Worse still, when criticism becomes necessary, the cool boss dropping the mask often shocks subordinates unprepared for the shift in tone.
Many millennial managers report significant difficulties in setting clear boundaries with their teams, struggling to code-switch between friendly and authoritative modes as circumstances require. This challenge is further complicated by the preferences of younger employees themselves.
Generation Z, in particular, favours fluid hierarchies and informal boundaries—intensifying the ambiguity around roles and expectations. The result is a management style that, despite best intentions, sometimes functions as what critics have termed ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’.
Zhao emphasises, however, that emotionally intelligent management isn’t an inherent millennial gift. Rather, it’s simply an expectation that their direct reports—whether fellow millennials, Gen Z, or even older generations—now demand.
As Zhao notes, the phrase ’emotional intelligence’ only gained traction in the 21st century. How fitting, then, that the cohort which mainstreamed the concept now bears responsibility for delivering it.
The millennial management era has begun. Whether they’ll rise to meet the heightened expectations they’ve helped create remains the defining question for workplaces across the West.
dzazing. 