We signed. They didn’t: the contract younger leaders never agreed to

By Eylem Samland, FIERA Leadership. Published 2026-08-03.

A few years ago I gave one of my team members a stretch project. He was 26. Bright, but new. The kind of assignment that in my generation would have been received with wide eyes and a quiet thank you for believing in me.

He thought about it for maybe five seconds. Then: "I will take the client-facing part. I will not do the pipeline reporting. That is the head of sales’ role, and I do not want to step on it."

I froze. In twenty years of climbing, I never once responded to a stretch project by picking which parts I would take. It did not occur to me it was an option. I would have taken all of it, smiled, delivered it three weeks later, wrecked but on time, and been grateful.

He was not being difficult. He was negotiating.

At first I was irritated, and I told myself the standard things. He does not understand how careers work. He has not paid his dues. He is not being a team player. Those were the sentences I had been trained to think.

But the longer I sat with it, the harder it was to find anything actually wrong with his answer. He took the part of the project that would develop him. He declined the part that would have duplicated work someone else was already doing. He did at 26 what I did not figure out until my late thirties.

My irritation was not about his judgement. It was about the deal I had signed and he had not.

The deal we signed

Take everything you are offered; sorting scope is disloyal.
Visible exhaustion is evidence of commitment.
Say yes now, and the organisation will look after you later.

That contract was never written down, and for many people it was never honoured either. A generation watched it not be honoured, and declined to sign.

What this asks of you as a leader

Notice when your reaction is about your own history rather than the work. Irritation is data about you first.
Say what the stretch is for. If you cannot explain what a piece of work will develop, do not be surprised when someone declines it.
Treat scope conversations as a skill you want, not a defiance you tolerate. The people who can negotiate scope at 26 are the ones who will still be functioning at 46.
Be explicit about the exchange: what they give, what they get, and by when. Assumed contracts are how good people quietly leave.

If the generational gap in your team keeps showing up as friction, it is usually a contract problem, not an attitude problem. See leadership workshops