Senior leaders tend to hold two stories about Gen Z at once. One says they are lazy, entitled, and uncommitted. The other says they are digital natives who will figure the rest out on their own. On this episode of Courage to Advance, host Kim Bohr and guest Ashlynne Valdez, PHR, make the case that both stories are wrong, and that the cost of believing either one shows up in the same place: retention numbers, a thinning hiring pipeline, and the talent an organization cannot seem to keep.

The problem Ashlynne names is not a generation. It is what happens on day one and every day after. Too many new hires are handed a laptop and a desk and told good luck, with no clear deliverables, no KPIs, and no sense of what success actually looks like. She lived it before founding her firm: capable and ambitious, but with no way to know whether she was doing the job well. The realization that reframed her career was that the failure was not hers, and it was not unique to her.

Ashlynne sits in a seat almost no one else in this conversation occupies. She is a Gen Z professional and a certified HR practitioner, speaking from inside the generation and inside the function where assumptions about that generation meet payroll. She is the founder of SoundHR, a boutique HR and recruiting firm, the organizer of DisruptHR Las Vegas, and the president and founder of the People & Profits Association, built on a simple premise: when you invest in your people, your profits follow.

The conversation covers what leaders misread about Gen Z, the low-cost moves that build loyalty, how to use AI to build structure so leaders can spend more time being human with their teams, and the pipeline risk of cutting entry-level roles just as AI reshapes them. It lands at a moment when disruption is the norm, not the exception. SparkEffect’s Trust in Turbulence research found that 71% of organizations face significant disruption, yet only 36% emerge stronger. How leaders treat the newest people in the building is one of the quiet lines between the two.