Quiet Quitting and Middle Leaders

This should raise more questions than answers.

Generalized solutions with sweeping statements won’t work here. Neither will a quote from a 'guru' who has written about leadership but not actually done it.
It’s not a “5 top ways to…” piece.

We need to think about the middle leaders’ part in Quiet Quitting. Yes. That new thing that has been around for as long as people have been employed. Its name doesn’t sit right with us either, but now isn’t the time to discuss that.
Commenters and contributors are writing a lot about what Quiet Quitting actually is. This is reasonably helpful but let’s not forget, we’ve always had the ‘minimal effort crew’.

We ask: is this the same?
I’ve spent hours reading about Quiet Quitting. As you would expect, there are different views. This is good, but it highlights the problem it poses for leadership at all levels. A LinkedIn thread responding to an Arianna Huffington post, has many shades of different opinions. There is a range of comments responding to this view:

 “Going above and beyond doesn’t have to mean allowing ourselves to be burned out. Pushing ourselves beyond the bare minimum is how we grow, evolve and expand our possibilities.”

Whilst a lot agree, the opposition is vocal. Posters point at “toxic bosses”, organisations that couldn’t care less about their workers conditions and that “Quiet Quitting is “unhuman”.
Others say that it is give and take, a two-way street and that knowing yourself is important.
The discussion can get deep. Away from LinkedIn: In the 29 August article for Business Insider, ‘Quiet quitting' is nothing but pro-boss propaganda, Ed Zitron reckons most of what is written about it is little more than ‘boss victimization’ when actually it is a simple act of workers doing something called ‘going to work’. He argues that it is not workers refusing to take their jobs seriously as is portrayed in a lot of current comments and articles, but more like propaganda to punish workers for not doing unpaid labour.


But perhaps the roots are here. In McKinsey Quarterly (Jan 2022) Aaron De Smet and Adria Horn suggest that employers are not sure why employees are “leaving in droves”.
This raises the question: Is the Great Resignation at the opposite end of the spectrum where the Great Quiet Quit starts?
The article goes on to suggest that we weren’t prepared for the trauma and disruption over the last two years. Good point. How can we set our expectations when we don’t know what the expectations are based on? Is this powering Quiet Quitting?

How do middle leaders fit into this? You can expect that every conflicting view and any shade of opinion can be had by your team members and your managers.
MTi CEO Richard Bradley can see the problem. “You get top managers who demand that certain targets are met but a lot of the time those expectations don’t match the provision they give.
The workforce is saying ‘We’re going flat out! We need help here’. This needs to be relayed to senior people. Good middle leaders can do this.”
Richard believes that a lot of organisations need a re-set. The work he has done to develop MTi’s Team Evaluation Review will help here. Where is your team? What are their expectations?

We know that effective middle leaders and managers are alert to quiet quitters. They are in a good position to uncover why they have taken on this stance and judge if their actions have a genuine cause. Are they skiving or are expectations outstripping realistic worker capacity?

Let’s make no mistake, attitudes are changing and a lot of us have new expectations - expectations of our managers and their expectations of us. Middle leaders need to be part of the two-way communication that helps this happen.
Organisational culture needs to be built around inviting and expecting middle manager input. That way, expectations will be better understood and Quiet Quitting not needed.


There's more to come on this.