Welcome to The People Insider — a weekly brief for anyone who employs people in South Africa.

Every Wednesday: one headline, one tool, one leadership story, one stat and one question. Under five minutes. No fluff. Let's get into it.

There is a name for it now, "conscious unbossing," and the numbers behind it should worry anyone thinking about who runs their business in five or ten years.

In Deloitte's 2026 global survey of more than 22,500 people, just 6% of Gen Z and millennials said reaching a leadership position is their main career goal.

Recruiter Robert Walters found that 52% of Gen Z professionals are actively avoiding middle management, and 72% would rather advance as individual contributors than manage anyone.

It's not that they can't lead…

Dig into the why, and this is not an ambition problem. Most young professionals still say they want to lead at some point (Deloitte puts it above three-quarters). What they are turning down is the cut-and-paste middle manager job as it exists today.

The reasons they give, over and over, are stress and burnout, too much responsibility, and a reward that barely clears the extra load. In plain terms, they have looked at what your current middle managers actually carry and decided the trade is a bad one.

What’s broken about management

Most companies’ traditional career progression is built through management. Often, the only way for an engineer to earn more is to eventually become a team lead, and so on.

The problem is that they specifically went into engineering because that’s what they’re good at (working with things, not people). Making them manage people is not good for them or the company.

Why this is a succession risk, not a culture gripe

The numbers are global, but the exposure is local and concrete. If half of your most capable specialists refuse the step into management, the bench you were counting on to run branches, plants and teams in ten years is slowly disappearing while you are not looking.

You will still need managers.

You might just find yourself forced to pick them from a smaller, more reluctant pool, or paying a premium to hire them in from outside.

One of your managers has an employee whose work has slipped. In a review, the employee discloses a mental-health condition, such as depression. Does that stop you from acting on the performance problem? A 2025 Labour Court ruling gives a clearer answer than most managers assume.

In Abels v University of Stellenbosch, a senior administrator was dismissed for poor performance. He argued at the CCMA, and then on review at the Labour Court, that his depression was the real cause and the matter should have been handled as ill-health incapacity, not performance.

The court upheld the dismissal. What tipped it: He had admitted to performance problems before the diagnosis, and could not show that the depression was the actual cause of the underperformance. The employer, for its part, had done the work, a performance improvement plan, regular feedback, and genuine attempts to accommodate him.

A diagnosis is a factor to weigh and accommodate, not an automatic shield. But that only holds if you have genuinely accommodated the person and run a fair process first.

The question worth sitting with: If one of your people is underperforming and discloses a mental-health condition, does your manager know what they can still do, and what they cannot?

7.6 days

That is how much working time the average South African financial-services employee loses each year to technology friction: slow apps, dropped connections, support tickets that go nowhere. It works out to about 76 minutes a week, and Altron's new Employee Technology Experience Index puts the cost to banks and insurers at between R3.2 million and R30 million per 1,000 employees a year.

Nearly half of employees (47%) say that friction has already made them deliver a slower or worse experience to a customer or colleague. It is a productivity tax that never shows up as a line item, and it reaches your customers.

Source: Altron Digital Business, Employee Technology Experience Index (TEXI) 2026 Financial Services Benchmark

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