Quiet Quitting and Firing: A Game of Expectations (Ep. 107)

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Quiet Quitting and Firing: A Game of Expectations (Ep. 107)

September 14, 2022

The buzz has been around for a bit this summer – first on quiet quitting, then on quiet firing, as if this were some new response to a dysfunctional working environment going through a difficult time.

I need to catch myself on these things – and move away from my Gen X “get off my lawn this has been around forever watch Office Space” initial response (which is accurate) to a “this can be solved if we fully understood what we are talking about” more appropriate response. I explore both on the podcast.

As with most buzzwords, much of the commentary is driven by people who don’t understand it – either they have drunk too much of the corporate Kool Aid, are too elevated to understand the working person, or never worked in an office.

But as a person who surely quiet quit in the late 90s and early 00s, I can tell you it’s real, it happens, and it’s also OK.

We need to take an elevated look at what we want from our workers, and how to communicate those expectations. Yes, the individual has a responsibility to execute on what we pay them for. That said, the organization has an obligation to communicate expectations of those employees in an effective way, and treat them with the respect that would encourage them to accomplish it.

Much more detail on the podcast, and I’ll put the transcript below so you can read it – but we need to think beyond just doing tasks – it’s an elevated, philosophical view of what drives our workers, where they came from, and what gets them to the finish line. None of it is “wrong,” it just “is.”

I hope you enjoy – lots more to be said – and I’ll chat with you soon!

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Click Here for an Unedited Transcript of the Podcast

Welcome to bellwether I’m back after a nice short break over the summer episode, 107, we’re gonna cover quiet, quitting, the nice little buzz that’s going around on quiet, quitting, but then also, you know, there’s another aspect called quiet firing, which kind of is like the tail end of this little comment that, that flew across us in this lovely summer of 2022. I’m gonna give you my thoughts because everyone’s got an opinion on it.

Everyone’s an expert on it, just like every other buzzword. And when you don’t have context and you could tell how many people really either have drunk too much of the corporate Kool-Aid or have never worked in an office. <laugh> giving lots of advice on quiet, quitting, and quiet firing. Um, number one, I, I wanna start with quiet quitting, uh, because it’s not new and everyone’s talking about gen Z doing quiet, quitting, and it’s whole new thing.

And, um, it’s not new. It’s been around forever. I was doing it back when I was in corporate. Plenty of other people did it when they were in corporate. There’s a whole movie on it from like 30 years ago called office space. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. It’s fantastic. Um, I forget the guy’s name, but it’s Jennifer Aniston. Everyone knows that, uh, everyone knows her. Um, and it’s a lot of, you know, the, the famous line outside of, you know, giving back my stapler and I’ll burn the place down was, uh, the guy basically looks at the consultants and says, look, I could push out 10 more TPS reports company makes a little more profit, but I don’t see another dime.

Where’s my motivation. And it’s true. It’s the big kind of elephant in the room of, you know, the, the line that comes from corporate that people are hip to is we’re family. And let’s do it for the company and we’re good together and let’s do more and we’re gonna go above and beyond. And we like it, but nobody really gets rewarded for it. It’s this kind of language that comes out this speech that comes out to people to say, we’re going to do this.

And then when they say, well, can I get a bonus? We’re like, ah, well, sorry down economy. And sorry, we’re laying off 30% of the workforce and sorry, we’re not doing this and sorry, you’re not getting a promotion and sorry. And so people are just, you know, they’re kind of fed up with it. And, um, and that’s just kind of why people just say, screw it. You know, you’re paying me to do a job, I’ll do the job, but don’t yell at me to, to do more than, than what’s expected.

And it’s an interesting, it’s an interesting argument. And I think it’s a fair argument. Um, I remember applying for a job at a big bank. I got the job, uh, and then they switched the job on me, but whatever. Uh, and I met someone who was gonna be reporting to me and she said, look, my only question for you is this. I don’t want a promotion. I don’t want to do anymore.

I’m happy where I am. I wanna spend time with my kids. I’ve got all. And this was, maybe this was 10 years ago, at least 10 years ago, maybe 15. I’m happy. I don’t wanna go above and beyond. I don’t wanna work here till eight o’clock at night. I want, I’m happy. I’m gonna do a good job in my role. Are you okay with that? And I said, absolutely, that’s perfect. You know, we’ll constantly talk about, you know, whatever it is that you want.

And if you want, if that changes, we’ll talk about it. We wanna make sure that we’re getting whatever you need. And I didn’t just say that cause I was interviewing, um, and it was relieving to her, right? Because we constantly say, well, what are you doing? What are your goals this year? How are you going to improve? And we’re force feeding this stuff down. People’s throat, you have to evolve and you have to get promotions.

But look, when you go up a promotion thing, it’s a pyramid. There’s only so many roles and a lot of people aren’t going to get it. And so why would they go above and beyond? They’re being told what to do. They’re doing work. They don’t want to do. And you expect them to spend extra hours at work, to do stuff, just to kind of move the needle along. Doesn’t really add up.

Um, it may not be a popular thing to say, but it’s reality. And let’s just cut the BS it’s reality. And, and you know, oh, who’s the shark. There’s one of the guys from the shark tank, the bald guy, um, he calls himself Mr. Lovely or happy or whatever it is. Um, he, he had some video where it was like a diatribe about how quiet quitters, they’re bad for culture and you’re bad for the business and everything else.

And, um, I, you think they care, right? I mean, telling quiet quitters that they’re bad for corporate culture is like telling heckler it’s bad for people trying to pay attention during a comedy show. Like they don’t care. Uh, and you’re yelling at the wrong people. And rather than yelling at people who are quiet, quitting, which by the way, isn’t a bad thing. It’s just a stupid conversation, right? What is quiet, quitting, they’re doing what you pay them to do.

And then stopping. That’s not a bad thing, right? It’s why do we expect people to do more than, than what’s expected for us, right. That’s bonus, that’s extra. Um, and, and the reality is nobody likes to be told what to do. That’s why I left corporate. Right. I did one of those little personality assessments, um, is when you become a coach and you’re, you’ve got, you need to have assessments in your arsenal.

So you gotta do what they, what you’re making other people do. I gotta pull myself through it and the guy’s reviewing it. And he says, wow, you’re pretty hostile to authority. And I said, oh, okay. That’s good to know. Right. I wish I knew that at the beginning of corporate <laugh>, but people don’t, nobody wants to be told what to do. Nobody wants to be given a project and say, you do this.

Um, just nobody likes it. And I think there’s, there’s, there’s philosophical phases of workers. Okay. Because when, when I say you’ve got an employee, you’ve got a worker, you have something, you have an image in your mind of who that is and what you expect of them. And we never talk about what expectations are. I’m gonna talk about that in a minute. How do you communicate expectations? But philosophically, I feel like there are different, there are different phases of workers.

There’s this old mentality. And it still trickles through right. Pick yourself up by the bootstraps and work hard. And if you do hard, good honest work, you’ll get your raises and you’ll get rewarded. Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. And guess what? That’s a load of bullshit. We know that’s bunk. We <laugh> right. We know that we know that trickle down, economics doesn’t work. We know all of that stuff. Um, they get extra profit and if it comes into my business, you know, I may hire people, but if I don’t need to hire more people, I’m not gonna like, just give it out to people.

That’s my money. Right. We made profit that’s companies exist to create profit that’s okay. Um, but we know that, and everybody knows now, you know, doing hard work does not guarantee you anything. And people are realizing they have to take more control over that. And that that’s the, the quiet, quitting aspect is, you know what, I’m gonna do my limited time here, but I’m gonna do something else on my own so I can make my ends meet and I’m gonna do what’s best for me.

And that’s okay. Right. This whole fascinating, I, someone told me the other day, I’m trying to pay someone 20 bucks an hour and I can’t find a single person to do it. And what I wanted to say to them, I should have, would you do it for 20 bucks an hour? And of course the answer’s gonna be no, right? So you can’t pay someone, you know, anyway, whatever that’s going into a, a different thing.

But so look, you can work hard. Um, and you could be a hard worker. That’s great. But if you’re sitting there building, uh, uh, or digging a tunnel, right? Cause working hard is different philosophically, right? There’s, there’s different definitions of working hard. You can work lots of hours. You can do a very physical, hard physical work. The world has changed on what hard work really means. And you could work really hard digging a tunnel.

But if the expectations are, we need a bridge, then the fact that you worked really hard is fairly irrelevant because it’s not what people need. And so you could work hard, but you’re kind of shit outta luck. And so that’s this, this philosophical idea of hard work and everything that’s out the window. It’s not really relevant right now. And, and if you believe that either at the top of the chain, looking to hire people, doesn’t work that way.

Okay. And people realize you have to change the way you’re talking to your employees. If you’re looking for it and you’re stuck in this, I’m working hard. Guess what? Your promotion’s not really coming. Maybe in a government job where they give promotions to people who have been there for 30 years, but you know what, that’s why it’s such a bureaucratic mess, right? A bureaucratic mess. That’s not gonna get anything done because those people are just putting in time and it’s not really evolving.

Um, but then there’s a second phase. There’s another kind of group of people that would sit there. So I would say that’s the idea of old idea of people working hard. Then there’s another kind of group which I’m gonna call the group that needs a job. Right? And we’re talking about this in the context of quiet, quitting, those people who need a job, because I’m gonna go broke. If I don’t have it, or I don’t want to go back to whatever I came from.

Um, it’s, it’s very much an immigration mindset. And I think of, you know, the old Irish coming over, leaving poverty in the, the 18 hundreds and, and the disaster that Britain had had thrown on them and the, the famine and all of that stuff. We’re leaving political turmoil. We see that with a lot of migrants now where the poverty that’s in central America, we see those people coming up. Now, those people, I speak to people in HR, they say, I will hire those people 12 days out the week, cuz they will put in the extra time, cuz they’re setting up the next generation.

They don’t want to go back to what they had experienced. Right. There is a fear and a need driving that now to be fair, some of ’em get taken advantage of a lot of ’em get taken advantage of, but there is something ingrained in them based on their experience that there is no quiet quitting. They will do everything to make sure that they drive this home. And that’s fantastic. Right? It’s great.

Not great what they came from and everything else, but it’s true. And so they’ve experienced pain. They don’t wanna go back to that. Then you’ve got another group of people which are a few generations after and that’s where most of America is a few generations after. And I hear a lot of people telling me, well, my ancestors worked really hard to get, um, our family set up today and that’s great, but what are you doing today to work hard?

And this goes back to the working hard thing. Um, we think we work hard in many ways and in a lot of ways, we don’t in a lot of ways and this is just real talk. We have this inflated sense of, of what we can do, um, as individuals and, and, and what we’re entitled to and, and everything else. And the people screaming about entitlement are just as entitled as everybody else.

Um, this is not a, a, a right side left side or anything. Entitlement just kind of goes political, which I don’t like to do. But, um, the world has changed most of the us. Um, the ancestors did the hard work for us and we are reaping the benefits. And if you are working with these people, which is the majority of you, uh, you have to think about a different way to get them engaged at work.

There’s nothing wrong with it. Look, we’re lucky to have ancestors who did it and we’re sitting here and we’re, we’ve got the benefits of it and it is what it is. And we were born into it. And there’s nothing, it’s not a problem, right? It’s not our fault. Um, but the majority of people who grew up in a successful America need a different way to be engaged. And question is how do you get them to care?

How do you get them to want to do this type of work? And, and, and this isn’t new, it’s not a gen Z challenge, right? This is, you know, partly gen X challenge, a definitely a millennial challenge, partly you know, everything from, you know, we had major growth in the fifties and it’s been phenomenal. And after world war II, this country’s been the greatest place on the planet. And life has been relatively easy.

We’ve had our problems, of course, um, different groups and everything else, of course. But as a general, matter of fact, I don’t think I’d want to be anywhere besides the us over the last 50 years. And that’s, you know, it’s the way it is. So how do you get these people to be engaged and interested in, in creating something and, and the word there is create, okay, people who have grown up where they, they’re not forced to do certain types of work, need to, co-create a solution for your organization.

They need to have ownership of an idea or a project, not just be given a project and say you own it. They need to come up with the idea. And that’s what gets people engaged and interested in doing work. When we think about entrepreneurs, what entrepreneurs really love outside of not having a boss because we’re hostile to authority. <laugh>, um, what entrepreneurs really love is their ability to create and create an idea and see it come to fruition.

And, and, um, when we see entrepreneurs who hire staff, who get to that point, oftentimes that philosophy doesn’t make it to staff. And I work with a lot of small business owners, uh, who are frustrated with what their staff does. They’re frustrated with the quiet quitting. They’re frustrated that the staff doesn’t go above and beyond. They’re frustrated with a lot of different things. And they’re frustrated with not coming up with new ideas and doing all these other things that, that, um, the entrepreneur just naturally does.

And the, the, the example I like to give them is the company failed tomorrow. What would you do? And the entrepreneur and the owner is generally like, I’d go starting a business, no question, no worry, right? Like whatever. I would just do it again. If you ask that same question to staff, their first answer or their, their, their worry would be, well, I’d have to find a job. I don’t know where I’d look, I’d have to go, you know, do all of these types of things.

So one, the entrepreneur makes the rules for themselves and will create something for themselves. Staff needs to find someone who can help them create, you know, whatever, or give them something to do. Both are okay. Not everyone could be just be like this big, you know, entrepreneur creator. Um, but what we wanna do is how do we teach people within our organizations to almost be entrepreneurs and residents. And that is a very difficult, you know, you could be an entrepreneur within the confines of an organization.

And I talked about this a few, um, episodes back on, if I would go back to corporate and I could, I could go back to corporate. Now that I know all that I’ve done, starting a business, launching a business, doing all of this, how do I almost become an entrepreneur within the confines of an organization? And that is your answer. If you’re looking for one to quiet, quitting is how do we get people to almost become learned to become an entrepreneur in residents, right?

You’re giving up your time for something for entrepreneurs. It might make sense to give up your time a little bit and some of your freedom so that you get the flexibility of an office. And you, you get all of these things that you had to pay for before the equipment and the printing and the people and the staff and all that other stuff, you can accomplish more with other people. So it’s not, it’s almost like you are creating your world.

You can do it within the confines of an organization, or you can do it outside and create your own business. Once people are creating something, once they have ownership of it, that’s gonna be a very different conversation in terms of how am I being successful and you know, whether or not you’re being successful. And that’s, that’s kind of an answer to, to quiet quitting is how are we communicating these expectations to our people?

But one more thing on this, because I also want to talk about quiet firing, which is the organization that basically goes silent on an individual we’ve given up on you. We’re just gonna make this place miserable until you go away. And that’s a real thing as well. Nobody’s talking about that as much. We love to talk about the worker and we’d love to complain about the worker. Um, but look, I used to be a worker and I hated it sucked.

Let’s be honest. Right? And, and, um, it’s such an arrogant thing. I’m giving you money. You do what I tell you to do. And that’s, <laugh>, that’s not how it works. The, we have an obligation running an organization as well, um, to not do this quiet firing nonsense. Um, cause I would never tell someone not to quiet, quit, right? My philosophy, I quiet, quit. I did it and I do it again.

Um, but when we talk about quiet, quitting, philosophically, let’s just talk about in theory, you’re getting paid to do a job. I don’t care how many, and this is how I think about work. I don’t care how many hours it takes. If I’m paying you too much to get this one task done. That’s my problem. It’s my job to give you the right amount of task for the amount of money I’m given.

I don’t care when you do it, right? And this is, you know, I’m nimble, I’m small and whatever. It’s a little more difficult and a scaled bureaucratic organization. I get that, but we need to rethink the way we’re thinking about employees. And that’s kind of the big kind of quiet, quitting thing when they’re not meaning expectations. And we just want them to go away. Organizations do something called quiet firing, where they just make the place miserable until they actually go away.

Um, this is where Mr. Happy, wonderful pants, whatever from shark tank, this is where it’s very damaging to culture. And it’s more on the organization than on the quiet quitter individual. Um, so I’ll flip that on its head. It’s up to the company here, um, because it goes both ways. This is where an organization. And, you know, I would say an organization’s terribly, it becomes a virus in the office because what people see is not a miserable employee.

They see what behavior’s being tolerated and the way that a person’s being disrespected. And that becomes massively unproductive and becomes a virus in the organization. People see way more than we give them credit for. And when we see certain behaviors tolerated, why would I go above and beyond? Why would I go do more? Of course I’m gonna quiet, quit. Cause I see what other people are doing. And, and other people aren’t being rewarded and everything else.

Um, there was a study a long time ago. I gotta find it. I keep talking about it. I will find it, um, where they surveyed people who were fired from an organization and surveyed people who weren’t fired. The people who were fired, were treated with the utmost respect, upfront communication handheld through the entire thing. Um, did what they could to get them new jobs, treated them as human beings and everything else.

Those people who were fired, gave extremely high marks on their respect for the company and what they thought about the company and what they ever go back and what they do more for that company. The people who stayed and saw those people who got fired and were not treated with respect, gave like negative scores. I don’t respect the organization and those people are still working there. And that’s the problem is how are we treating our people with respect?

And this is a difficult challenge for organizations, especially as you get larger, because there are a lot of break points, a lot of ropes that can break, uh, a lot of chains that can break in terms of are we respecting our people? And it does have to go both ways. You can’t tell employees to treat your organization like a family, but then not treat them like a family member right back. And there is this theory.

We have theory versus reality. And I talk a lot about this when I’m on my little speaking circuits, um, there is a theory of what we expect and what we want. And there’s the reality of having the conversation. And one of the big skill sets we need right now is how to have difficult expectation conversations. One at the forefront. This is what I expect from you. Do you understand and spit back what my expectations of you are going to be and how you’re gonna execute.

It’s a dialogue when someone’s not meeting your expectations. How do we articulate those details? And how do we do that? If a person has to tell you, you know, when we’re clear on our intentions, when we’re clear on, you know, what we want people to do, people will know when they’re hitting it. And people will very much know when they’re not. And if there is any ambiguity in the conversation between someone’s meaning our expectations are not, um, that’s on you as the person in, in a position of authority and management, nothing is worse than telling someone when you didn’t hit their expectations.

But if someone doesn’t know that they’re not hitting your expectations, that’s on you. We can’t blame them for innocent ignorance. And when you have that conversation of you’re not meeting my expectations, that person’s gonna know if you set it up properly, I know this is what I was supposed to do. It’s just much easier to rip the bandaid. Okay? There’s no big surprise. There’s no difficult conversation. There’s no big blow up.

And it shows everyone else that you mean business and a really productive and, and effective way. And this is what I expected from you. You didn’t hit it, you get it. I get it. Maybe we just go our separate ways. That’s, it’s a logical kind of it happens. Right? And it’s very important going forward. As you talk about your people. And as you talk about your planning and your annual planning and everything else, how do you communicate your expectations of other people?

And this is beyond just the workplace. This is at home. This is your community and everything else. And so quiet, quitting, quiet, firing, not new, but I would say the onus is on the organization to kind of fix it. We can’t blame a person for being lazy, cuz that’s not what they’re actually doing. They’re just doing what you paid them to do. And if you are not setting your expectations well enough, sorry man, it’s on you.

Um, which kind of sucks. Right? And you could go looking for another one. It’s gonna go above and beyond. And that’s why we get this cycle of you go in and you’re raging to do good work and you get about two quarters in and you’re doing great. And then all of a sudden you burn out and you say, this kind of sucks. This is just like the last place. And after a year, year and a half, you’re gonna start looking around and saying, what else do I do?

Um, we haven’t set these people up for success and that’s what we have to do from an organizational perspective. So good luck with it. Um, a little theory, little reality, but I hope this was helpful as you think about your quiet quitting situations and your quiet firing and the way that we’re treating about people. It’s about respect. It’s about expectations and that’s just my opinion. I hope you like it. Have a wonderful week.

I’ll talk to you next week. Next week, we’re talking about politics of the C-suite. It’s gonna be interesting. Should CEOs get political? Oh, it’s I’ve got opinions. It’s gonna be good. I’ll see you next week. Thank you everyone. Talk to you soon.

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