Bridging Values with Suzy Welch

In September 2025, Suzy Welch made waves with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that asks a question many, it seems, were already asking themselves: “Is Gen Z Unemployable?“

Welch is an author and professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, and widely known as the founder and C.E.O. of Becoming You Labs, a think tank and product design studio that helps disseminate Becoming You to schools and organizations around the world. Becoming You is a methodology — as well as an NYU class, a workshop series, and a best-selling book — she designed to help people land on their best-suited career path. The underlying premise of the methodology is that our purpose pathways lie at the intersection of our values, cognitive and emotional aptitudes, and economically viable interests. For the values-discovery piece, Welch invented the Values Bridge, a scientifically validated assessment that ranks individuals’ values from one to 16 and measures how fully they are living each one, or not.

Aggregate data from the Values Bridge unearthed the concern that led to Welch’s Journal article. In it, she describes discovering that the most-held values among Gen Z are: eudemonia (often referred to as self-care), voice (the expression of individuality), and non sibi (helping others). But when she surveyed a group of hiring managers about the value they most want in their employees, the answers instead prized: achievement (drive for success), workcentrism (desire for work to shape life), and scope (desire to learn and for adventure). Only 2 percent of Gen Zers — 154 out of more than 7,500 — identified the three values deemed most desirable by employers in their top five.

This priorities gap between employers and young staff gave evidence, and voice, to a common feeling among business leaders that Gen Z just didn’t seem to work all that hard. On the other hand, many praised the rising generation’s apparent sensibilities towards work-life balance and wondered aloud whether there was ever a time in which the older didn’t criticize the ways of the younger. 

In this candid interview with Welch, we zoom out to explore what motivated her work on values and how to interpret the data that continues to drive a national conversation. 

For more complete definitions of the 16 values, please see the Values Bridge index. Values discussed in this interview include the aforementioned eudemonia, voice, non sibi, achievement, workcentrism, and scope — as well as affluence (wealth), familycentrism (desire for family to shape life), and belovedness (romantic love).

LW: What inspired you to start the Values Bridge? I’m guessing it was an extension of Becoming You?

SW: Well, Becoming You is a methodology that helps students answer the question, “What should I do with my life?” It’s a 22-part methodology, and it excavates three data sets: your values, your cognitive and emotional aptitudes, and your economically viable interests. I used some of the very established psychometric instruments to help students identify their values. And while some of this work is incredibly renowned, I felt frustrated that it didn’t do exactly what I wanted. 

At the time, I was developing a new values inventory. I did this as part of my Ph.D. work. And then I set about working with psychometricians and behavioral scientists to create the Values Bridge. It was lucky I didn’t know what I didn’t know because that took about a year and a half of the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life — but worth it. I introduced it in beta to my students at NYU and immediately realized that it could so broaden and deepen their understanding of values. So we pushed forward with the tool and finished it, and then were able to release it to the general public. And then of course, it immediately started getting adopted by a lot of schools and other institutions because of its efficacy and because of the conversations that it started and because of the understanding that it opened up. 

LW: Got it. So what would you say is the big difference between what you created and what existed in terms of value assessments?  

SW: The most frustrating thing about the other values assessments is that they don’t allow people to have conflicting values: If you have values that are conflicting, one cancels out the other. And that’s just not how life is. People walk around with conflicting values. They value affluence, and they value self-care. They value achievement, and they value familycentrism. And so the Values Bridge captures and reflects back to you these conflicts and allows you to then say, “Okay, well, how am I going to resolve them?” It doesn’t negate the reality of a personal experience. So I think it’s just a very subtle instrument because it’s the newest, and I had the benefit of all the great work that’s been done in the field of values over the past 150 years to help me create a new tool.

LW: And without asking you to go through your entire Ph.D., what is so important, especially for young people, about understanding or knowing what your values are? 

SW: I think that it’s every single human being; it has no age bracket to it. We all do better by understanding our values because our values are our whys. They are why we do things. And so I think the more we understand why we do things or why we want to do things, the better we operate in the world — the more compassionate self-awareness we can have, but also the more compassionate self-awareness we can have of others. I mean, the name of the tool is the Values Bridge. The idea of it is to build bridges so that people can talk to each other about their values. We have to stop judging each other. The Values Bridge is completely agnostic. It’s like, if you’re not hurting anybody, your values are your values to live. 

But also, to be quite practical about it, you need to know your values so you can figure out what to do with your life. The premise of the Becoming You methodology is that the most aligned career is one that’s at the intersection of your values, your aptitudes, and your interests. So I have a singular purpose with this process, which is to get you to the right job. And you need to know your values because to work in a field or to have a job that doesn’t align with your values is actually quite a painful thing. It’s kind of a dull ache. And anybody who’s done it can tell you, “Yeah, it hurt.” I don’t want anybody to be in that kind of job. That’s what it’s all about.

LW: The op-ed you wrote on the top values of Gen Z was definitely a conversation-starter. Do you often get put on the spot to explain Gen Z and why they are the way they are?

SW: I do. And I say it’s not my area. I’m always asked, “Oh, can you please explain why Gen Z has eudemonia as their number one value?” And I say, “I have no idea.” My hypothesis is just like yours: They went through the pandemic. They found out that anything could fall out the bottom at any time. They decided they didn’t want to postpone joy. They decided they didn’t like the bargain their parents had that you waited to have joy. And they said, “We vote no.” That’s my theory. It’s a hypothesis, but I am not saying this in any way as an authority. My area of focus is not values formation; it's values expression. I don't try to figure out why you are the way you are. I take you as you are and say, "Given that, what should you do with your life?"

LW: One of the both really interesting and also challenging pieces about the top three values for Gen Z, I could see, is that they have voice and eudemonia — and then they also have non sibi, or wanting to help people.

SW: And those are not in conflict.

LW: They’re not?

SW: They’re not in conflict. The problem is when number four is affluence, as it typically is. Taking care of yourself, having a lot of individuality, and helping other people — on a one-to-one basis — are completely doable all in the same hour, with no conflict whatsoever. It’s then, again, when you get affluence and achievement up there in the top five, too. Even if achievement keeps coming up with Gen Z — which it appears to be in early, early, early data — it’s going to bump into eudemonia. It may be rising, but it’s still going to hit a ceiling when it hits eudemonia because really there’s a big conflict between achievement and self-care.

LW: Remind me, do other generations, older generations, share eudemonia and voice, or are those very specific to Gen Z?

SW: It’s not very specific to Gen Z, but it’s absolutely age correlated. The older you get, the lower eudemonia goes. By the time you get to my generation, eudemonia is peripheral — in the bottom five. You can almost draw a line; every generation, eudemonia goes slightly down. Same thing with voice. Non sibi is a generally strong American value. It’s very high across all generations. 

LW: With the Gen Z findings, did you find people’s reactions leaned more toward “Why is Gen Z like this? How do we fix them?” versus “They’re telling us something; let’s find out what it is”? 

SW: When I talk to business leaders, which I do a lot as a board member and a person who is in the corporate world, they are not surprised by the data findings. They say, “This is what we’re experiencing.” And then, depending on the hiring power of the company, they have different reactions. 

If they’re Goldman Sachs or if they’re Meta, they say, “This is not our problem because we get this 2 percent [of Gen Z with achievement, workcentrism, and scope in their top five values]. Those are our people. They want to work for us, and it’s easy for us to find them.” Some companies have less hiring power. They don’t have as good brands. They’ve had financial troubles. They want the 2 percent, but they can’t get them, and they express frustration. Then there are other companies that have no hiring power, and they are like, “Well, this is just a problem that individual managers are going to have to handle on a one-by-one basis.”

Gen Z’s reaction to the data was varied. There were some Gen Z people who said things like, “Why would I want the values of the older generations? Why would I want the values of hiring managers? I don’t like their lives. I don’t like what they’ve done to the world.” But some Gen Zers see the results, and they see themselves, and they think, “Oh God, this is tough because I do have affluence at number four or I do have achievement at number five. What am I going to do about this?” And that’s a real conversation. 

I don’t believe people should try to repress their values. I think that’s very painful. I don’t think that people should not be who they are. At the same time, sometimes when I have students who are really conflicted, I say, “Is there a possibility you look at your life as seasons, where maybe you are going to be in a season where values that are not your top values are going to be more expressed?” But look, I can’t tell them what to do. The only ones who I could really give strong advice to were my own four children, but even with them, it was a dialogue. 

LW: There’s something that feels sort of aspirational about values. So, if my values are X, Y, and Z, does that mean that I actually fulfill those in the way that I act?

SW: Actually, this is a point I should have made earlier — thank you for jogging my brain on it — which is that one of the things that I really wanted to do is test what your values are and how much you’re living them. That is one of the most important pieces of data the Values Bridge gives you. We give you your authenticity gap score.

Here’s an example: Scope is the value of how much action you want, how much activity, how much learning, how much growth, how much travel, how much adventure. What we see all the time is that women in their 30s and 40s who have high scope have a huge authenticity gap. It can be 90 percent. And what’s the reason? Typically, these are your childbearing years, and when you are raising little children, you just don’t get to have a lot of action and activity and travel and adventure and learning. You’re not able to express your scope. You’re going to do it later, and you know that. Sometimes the kids go away, and your authenticity gap closes. 

So for all of the people who take the Values Bridge, you do get those gaps. A lot of times my students will get back their results, and they’ll see that eudemonia is their top value, and they’ll see a gigantic authenticity gap. And then they’ll see achievement is down at number eight, and it has no authenticity gap because they’re fully expressing it. In fact, sometimes they have a negative authenticity gap because they’re overexpressing it. So one of the things I like about the tool is that it’s like a report card. It’s almost like a doctor’s report on how much you’re living each value. And a lot of times my students are not as shocked about their rank-order values as they are about their authenticity gaps. Because they look at it, and they go, “Oh no, this is absolutely a self-portrait. This is exactly where I’m feeling pain.”

LW: You have an idea of what your values might be, but once you’re faced with the fact that you’re not fulfilling them, that could be very distressing.

SW: Yes, it can be distressing, and then illuminating. They want to know how to fix it. I can’t tell you the number of times — this happens to me every single class — the kids get their results back, and then at the break, there’s a stampede of young women down the stairs because what they’re all getting is voice as a top value and an authenticity gap of 60-plus percent. And they’re like, “I am clearly not using my voice.” I’ve seen students literally in tears saying, “This is putting words and numbers to my daily experience.” It’s very poignant. And my female students say to me, “Can you please teach a class on how I can have no authenticity gap with my voice?” And I say, “I wish I could.” Right now, I’m teaching as many classes as you can humanly teach. But we’re trying to create curricular materials so that we can walk them through that process.

LW: Bridging authenticity gaps almost feels like a class that is life in some ways.

SW: Yeah, it is. I often say, “Welcome to life.” I say it all the time when they talk to me about their gaps and their disconnects. There’s this function where you can check a box and your values come up next to your partners — because many of my students are married, because I teach MBAs. And then they do it, and their partner takes it, and they see where their gaps are. And they say, “Well, I have belovedness at number one, and my partner’s belovedness is at number 16.” And I say, “Welcome to life.” This is the work of our life.

LW: So from the hiring perspective, is it possible that a hiring manager who thinks they most want achievement and workcentrism actually has a favorite employee whose top values are eudemonia and voice? But maybe with an authenticity gap? I wonder if those kinds of things have come up for you.

SW: They come up all the time because we work with so many companies. It’s very, very interesting to see how the Values Bridge is being used in organizations. And look, some of it’s kind of out of our control. Companies take it, and they use it as they want. Some companies use it as a team building exercise. People can just learn about each other’s values so that they can have more compassionate awareness of each other and more words to speak to each other. 

But definitely, we see, all the time, organizations using it to hire. Many times, people who are coming to my company take it, and I see their values as part of the interview process. But for me, it’s always just a conversation. I would never say, “Oh, I’m not taking somebody because their top value is X.” 

LW: Do you think that what different hiring managers look for might vary depending on the industry that they’re in?

SW: I don’t think so. Not with values. Maybe between nonprofit and for-profit. But in any for-profit environment, hiring managers generally want people who want to win and work hard.

LW: What do you think this all means for the future of work? It sounds like at top companies, they’re going to hire who they’re going to hire. For the rest of Gen Z and for the rest of the companies, how might things change? Will Gen Z not be hired? 

SW: Oh, I don’t know. Look, regardless of their values, Gen Z’s having a very hard time being hired right now. I was just at the Wall Street Journal the other day going over the data with them. This is a tough job market. And values may be playing a role in it, but there’s a decrease in entry-level jobs, and there’s an increase in the amount of experience that is being expected for entry-level jobs. This is not about values. And how this plays out, I don’t know. 

I think we’re in a great moment of holding our breaths because if you have 10 economists in the room, five think that A.I. is going to actually start creating many more jobs and this great flourishing; and the other five are going to say we’re going to be working three days a week and most people will not be employed and we’re going to have to go to universal income. There’s no accepted narrative about what’s about to happen. The jury’s out.

LW: And for people working in colleges, do you find that this values work is impacting their job? Or how do you guide them in terms of what students today need to be prepared for?

SW: We’re just so amazed by the interest in the Values Bridge at the college level. Every kid entering Wharton is taking the Values Bridge. This is a new thing. It’s beautiful. And there are many other schools — 170 schools or something like that — right now using the Values Bridge with undergraduates to create a common language, to build bridges. 

Look, career offices are trying to get kids into jobs that make sense, and the Values Bridge is another tool for them. More than ever, given the price of college, parents are saying, “My kid’s got to have a job coming out.” So I think any tool that can help kids figure out what their job paths should be and help kids get employed coming out of college is going to get a good hard look by colleges. And I think, more than just the Values Bridge, colleges are interested in the entire Becoming You methodology because values are not enough. If you just get a job based on your values, but you don’t have the aptitudes or the interests, it’s not as sustainable. 

LW: Right. Well, I like the idea, too, of creating this language for students. So if they’re all coming in and taking this test, they can then have conversations about it outside of class. It might just come up, and it contributes to their knowing better what they want and what they don’t want. 

SW: I know. And what you seek when you are in any kind of community, like a college community, is a common language — a shared language that increases compassion instead of polarization. I love it when I see my students using language to talk to each other, and it’s just fun. It excites me because it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.