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Most leadership books treat Gen Z and Millennials like nuisances to manage around, focusing on how leaders from older generations can fit young people into their existing corporate cultures.
As a millennial, a founder and executive, (and a mom of two who’s trying desperately to have a life outside of work), I never saw myself reflected in those books. The CEOs of the past never had to think about things like how to show up in the office when the office was simply Slack, or how to post on Instagram when their employees follow them there.
So I wrote the book I couldn’t find anywhere else: When We’re In Charge is a no-bullshit guide for the next generation of leaders on how to show up differently, break the cycle of bad boomer leadership, and navigate the changing demands of those in power and the evolving expectations people have of their workplace.
Informed by conversations with more than 100 Gen Z and Millennial leaders across politics, business, media, tech, education, and more, along with my experience running a company and helping thousands of Gen Z and Millennials run for office across the country, the book is a guide on how to be an effective leader without being an asshole.
In this excerpt from chapter five, I make the case that in order to work better, you have to rest better — and that it’s incumbent on leaders to both set guardrails for their teams to make that possible, and for us to model it ourselves (something I’m admittedly very bad at!).
It is possible to work hard and get stuff done without being miserable or burning out — do not accept that as the default.
Raise your hand or roll your eyes if you’ve heard some variation of this before: “Kids these days just don’t want to work anymore.”
It feels like every few weeks, some article, video, or viral social media post comes out ranting about how millennials and Gen Zers are lazy, good-for-nothing brats. They’re always trying to log off right when the clock hits 5:00 p.m. (even though they’re not paid for work after 5:00 p.m.), they’re serious about not answering emails over vacation (even though paid vacation days are part of the benefits package provided by the company), and they don’t dare to work through the flu (even though rest is necessary for healing). Those piece-of-shit next-gen team members want to work for the hours they’re paid for and then leave to go pick up their kids, fit in a workout, or lounge around in pajamas scrolling the internet for three hours before bed. Monsters, the ranters say, absolute monsters!!
Obviously I think those rants are ridiculous. Too many of us got our starts in workplaces where the idea of living a full life outside of work was frowned upon for junior members of the team and was often poorly modeled by leadership. Millennial and Gen Z workers are rejecting that work has to be that way—as next-gen leaders, we can take the next steps to turn that sentiment into structural support for rest.
Let’s break that cycle. We have a responsibility to be intentional about what many people call work-life balance but I prefer to think of it as work-rest integration. After all, we work what feels like (or is!) a vast majority of our waking hours—what is work if not a major part of life?
We need to be thinking about creating space for work and rest, about giving people not just permission to unplug but active guardrails to guide them on how to do it.
Liz Zaretsky, a millennial running the online fundraising efforts at the New York Public Library, summed this up well, describing her leadership style as one that revolved around the idea that “the life of everyone I manage should not be miserable. First, work is great, but it’s not all that matters, and so you simply should not be miserable at the thing you are doing with most of your waking hours. Second, I actually do think people are better at their jobs when they’re not miserable.”
She has explicit fundraising goals she needs her team to hit, and she holds them accountable for doing so. But those goals, she believes, should not require her team or her to sacrifice sick leave when they need it or the full parental leave they’re entitled to. If she needs to adjust those goals or better manage her own bosses’ expectations in order to relieve some amount of stress or suffering for her team, she’ll try to find a way to do it.
Leaders can’t tell our teams what they should do with their lives. But we should facilitate environments so the folks whose life at work (or life at hobby, if appropriate for your leadership role) is not totally soul crushing.
This is hard. There are major structural reasons why work sucks. In every recent poll I could find from at least the last ten years, large majorities of American workers rate their jobs as mediocre or bad or similarly use language to describe their dissatisfaction with their workplaces.
In some ways, that’s freeing for leadership. There’s a lot that’s out of our control, including but not limited to the financial realities of running a business or nonprofit combined with a government that wants to do the absolute bare minimum to create a social safety net and leaves much of what should be the welfare state to the discretion of employers.
So knowing all that, we can and should do everything in our power to accomplish our goals while making the day-to-day experience as minimally miserable as possible. Burnout doesn’t have to be inevitable—there are things we can do as leaders to, if not avoid it entirely, at least stave it off for a while. And as a bonus, the things we do to make work more sustainable for our teams also make it more sustainable for us as long as we actually follow our own instructions.
Remote or flexible work is key, as we’ve already touched on. There’s more, though: paid time off, vacation, and sabbatical policies, a four-day workweek, and family leave are near the top of the list. We’ve got to set up the policies and then take the rest ourselves.
This is going to be one of the most hypocritical sections I write because holy shit, am I bad at taking time off. Like so many workaholics, I’m not good at doing nothing—unplugging? Not looking at my email? Lounging around the apartment all day? Couldn’t be me.
I intellectually, emotionally, and physically know this is bad. I came back from maternity leave with my first daughter in March 2022 and didn’t take my first real vacation from work until mid-July 2024—and even that my husband and therapist both had to gently force me into doing. This is not a brag; it’s a shameful admission of failure. I am aggressively intentional at celebrating people who take time away from work (for whatever reason— vacation, being sick, caregiving, whatever) and really bad at actually doing it myself.
In the months leading up to that vacation, I could feel the effects of that extended work without rest—my temper was shorter, my exhaustion was more bone-deep. People would ask how I was feeling, and I’d say that I was eager for the physical trauma that comes with childbirth if it meant I could just get a break. (I was only kind of joking—2024 was a tough time to be a professional Democrat!)
It made me feel better to hear so many next-gen leaders identify a similar challenge with stepping back. Gillea Allison, the millennial publisher of D magazine, told me that “it stresses me out when I’m on vacation.” Some folks pointed to work obligations that draw them back into their emails or crises that come up only they can solve. Others described an unbreakable addiction to work, to feeling needed, to feeling useful, to losing yourself in a project that distracts you from your “real” problems. So many folks named the same thing I struggle with: We really want people to take time off, but we exclude ourselves from that narrative.
Taking time off, both in short bursts and over longer periods of time, is one of the most prominent ways in which leaders can model good behavior for work-rest integration. So many of us struggle with it, in part because we feel like we got to this point as leaders due to our work ethic. We’ve absorbed #hustleculture and the need to #riseandgrind into our bones—we got here because, we tell ourselves, we were willing to outwork our peers. We’re able to succeed as leaders because we’re willing to do whatever it takes, putting our own personal needs aside if we must.
I’m telling myself this as much as I’m telling you: Our suffering has no greater purpose. Our teams would have every right to be bitter if we tell them to take vacation but don’t take it ourselves because our actions speak louder than words. We’ve got to show them it’s okay to step away from time to time, and we’ve got to build resilient systems that can handle an absence now and again.
Vacations don’t have to be weeks on end. Ilana Glazer, the millennial comedian and activist you heard from in part one, described the small-but-meaningful decision to turn her phone off for Shabbat—from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown—as an “extremely impactful mode of rest” for her. Structurally, she tries to set it up for her team so that everyone has at least one week off every three months. If this works for you or is within your sphere of influence, consider implementing it.
Another option: Make vacation less stressful by ensuring you’re not missing anything when you take it and simply shutting everything down. Take a look at the calendar and align your team activity with when people are already requesting vacation days. How much work is really getting done the week of July 4—can you close down that entire week and give people a summer break? How about the week between Christmas and New Year’s—do you really need to be fully operational?
The answer might genuinely be yes. But also it might be no if only you had a little bit of time to plan for the closure, create some in-case-of-emergency response plans, or have a skeleton staff on call. You won’t come back to the inbox from hell if there’s no one at the office sending emails to begin with.
And yet another option: Your time off can also be longer! Run for Something has a sabbatical policy we’re proud of: After working for the organization for three years, you can take up to a month off. Each additional year you’ve been with the organization adds another week to your sabbatical allowance. My cofounder, millennial Ross Morales Rocketto, took a six-week sabbatical in the summer of 2023. “Sabbaticals are great, A plus,” he said, reflecting on the experience. “I don’t think I would have made it through 2024 without that time.” Stepping away from his leadership role gave him the space and time to think through what he wanted his future to look like and reenergized him for the work. Our policy is good, but in an ideal world, a sabbatical policy might be “three months off, once every five years,” he suggested because the more time away, the more you can genuinely unplug and come back ready.
If you’re not sure your organization can handle people being out of the office for longer stretches, consider it as a retention tool. Great people will stick with a team if they know they get a break. You should also reconsider your staffing structure because you should be ready to have people taking comparable lengths of time out for family leave (which we’ll get to in just a few pages).
First, let’s get into the ultimate solve for needing a break and the only reason I’ve been able to go this long without a true vacation: the four-day workweek.
