Nothing says “Get off my lawn” quite like a gathering of grizzled advertising executives complaining about the next generation. Hopefully that is the exception, not the rule, during The Room gatherings, but a recent dinner found us old-timers doing just that. As luck (and timing) would have it, I was in the midst of writing this newsletter, and the conversation led me to deeper introspection of what this really means.
We bitch and moan that they jump jobs too fast. We roll our eyes when they ask for a promotion after twelve months of managing spreadsheets and dashboards. We wonder why they lack strategic intuition, why their client presence feels muted, or why they cannot read a room.
The uncomfortable truth is simple: we built this problem ourselves.
Advertising has spent the last decade convincing itself that the future belongs entirely to automation, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. In the process, we stopped teaching the next generation how to think. We reduced a craft built on persuasion, courage, and instinct into a series of mechanical tasks. Then we wonder why junior professionals treat the work like a checklist rather than a discipline.
We are failing our rising leaders because we only ask them to execute. We do not ask them to endure the friction that actually builds a perspective.
Years ago I reviewed a media plan with one of my superstar junior team members. They had mastered every platform dashboard, pulled all the right data, and built impressive slides. Yet when I asked them to tell the campaign’s story, they froze. They had spent years perfecting the tools without ever being asked to develop a voice. And I realized I had been shielding them, not “allowing” them to present their work to “protect” them from a challenging client.
Friction Is Where Growth Lives
When senior leaders talk about their defining career milestones, the stories are never about software. They are about high-stakes pitch rooms, messy client debates, standing at a whiteboard until midnight, or building relationships over dinner and a cocktail (or, if I’m being honest, cocktails plural).
We preach the irreplaceable power of in-person connection. We carve out massive budgets and leave our families for a week to attend Cannes, CES, and Possible because we know that real influence happens face-to-face. And we (not-so) humble brag about it on LinkedIn.
Yet when we return to our desks, we ask our teams to operate in an echo chamber of Slack pings, email threads, and automated dashboards. We block off our own calendar for strategic thinking, but we measure our team’s value strictly by how fast they complete mundane execution.
We took away the hard things and, in doing so, stole the reward.
Career growth is not built by pressing a button faster. It is sharpened in the discomfort of formulating an original idea, defending it under scrutiny, and navigating complexity. If we keep treating young talent as mere operators rather than apprentices to a craft, our industry will face a massive leadership vacuum.
Building Thinkers, Not Task-Masters
Reversing this requires deliberate mentorship and actively disrupting our daily management habits.
We need to strip away the safety net of digital distance. Stop allowing junior team members to hide behind emails, Slack threads, and status decks. Bring them into the room, require them to present at least one agenda item and, when they deliver a report, demand a point of view rather than just a data pull. Challenge them to explain and defend what they believe the business should do next.
We must recreate the apprenticeship model locally. You do not need to fly an entry-level planner to the South of France to teach them presence (though you should, however, consider that for your favorite The Room newsletter author). Take them to local partner meetings, bring them to industry lunches, have them attend and, eventually, participate in panels.
Lastly, and most importantly, we need to teach the art of productive friction. Stop solving every complex issue before it hits their desk. Let them sit with the discomfort of an ambiguous brief before handing them the answer. Let them work things through, make mistakes, clean up the mess. Allow them to present, debate, get the tough questions, and, yes, sit in the uncomfortable silence while they search for the answer.
The Real Test of Leadership
It is easy to blame a generation for wanting the title without the time. It is far harder to admit that we have stopped investing the time to teach them what the title requires.
Take a hard look at how you managed your junior staff this week. Did you challenge them to think, or did you simply hand them an assignment to get it off your plate?
Tomorrow morning, stop managing for speed and start managing for depth. Put a junior colleague in an uncomfortable, high-visibility spot—and stand beside them while they learn how to handle it.