The little con and the big con
Photo by Pixabay.
When they were really small, our family implemented daily dessert for any kid who had a good dinner. Good as defined by two key factors: diversity of foods consumed and ability to sit at the table instead of crawling under it. What started as a temporary measure to motivate vegetable consumption, quickly became structural. Years later, they still expect dessert. Every. Single. Day.
Meals in our house close on a sweet note. Usually small. Usually something that doesn't need extra dishes or cutlery. Tonight, it was chocolate malt balls. Three of them.
Without a word, the 6.5 year old lines up the three chocolate balls on her placemat. And starts moving them around. One following the other. She says, "One of the balls has a dent." She keeps moving them around. And then looks up and says "Can you guess which one it is?"
We guess and get it wrong. She is delighted. We have a follow-up question. "Um, where did you learn 3-card monte?"
She shrugs and says, "I know the one with cups."
House of cards
We have no idea where the kid learned to street hustle. We don't even know if she's aware it's a con. But maybe that just makes the whole thing more convincing.
There are cons where everyone is in on it but you. Where the entire thing is rigged. And once you figure out you're a mark, it's no fun to play anymore. People are ok to play and to lose. But games where there's no hope of winning? It's really hard to re-engage when it's all built on lies.
It's been a loud week for work-related headlines. And no topic louder than Quiet Quitting. Quiet Quitting is what happens when you figure out that you are the mark. And the game is rigged. And you don't want to play anymore.
Over the past few weeks, TikTokers and The Wall Street Journal editorial board have been in a slap-fight. With TikTokers talking about Quiet Quitting. And the WSJ responding with their usual grumpy, get-off-lawn stuff. Everyone in their usual spots. No surprises there.
But our two favourite adjacent takes bring nuance to what is otherwise a boring internet fight.
Anne Helen Petersen (aka AHP) wrote a quick post to point out that the TikTokers are re-inventing "work to rule" from whole cloth. As parents of a 12 year old who recently "discovered" Nirvana and thrifting, we are familiar with this phenomenon.
Around the same time Ann Friedman put out a seemingly unrelated piece about women and the death and rebirth of ambition. It never mentions Quiet Quitting. Not once. But read this quote and tell us it's not part of the same damn conversation:
“Yes, I’m ambitious,” a friend told me recently, “but climbing the corporate ladder does not interest me like it used to. A title, a bump in pay—it’s not satisfying. What I need to feel successful and fulfilled is completely different. Am I doing something that brings satisfaction? Do I feel like I’m learning? Do I feel like I’m contributing? Do I feel like I’m connecting to other people? Do I feel like I have flexibility in this new way we live and work? Am I given not only responsibility but autonomy? Am I in a place that aligns with my values? The things that I am looking for have changed.”
Sleight-of-hand
Six months ago, we talked about party snakes. We told you that your people were looking for somewhere meaningful to put their energy. We said,
"If we're right about this prediction, the amount of energy coming at you is going to be intense. The question to ask is: do you have somewhere for that energy to go?
"And no, we don't mean, 'Sure, they can do the job we already pay them to do but with more... energy.' They're gonna want a better answer than that."
In the months since we wrote that, we've gotten to talk with hundreds of leaders. Leaders in orgs that are growing, thriving, re-imagining what they're capable of. And leaders in orgs that are struggling with core questions of what they do and who they serve. And leaders who have walked away from organizations that were no longer the place for them to be.
The stories are individual and nuanced, but the pattern is consistent. What they tell us about their people and about themselves is a thing you already know.
When you are doing work that...
you give a shit about
in an environment that supports you
...you are unstoppable. And when you aren't, you aren't.
Those two ingredients come up again and again. They've been the same ingredients since Andy Grove was writing about them when we were the kids playing with our dessert. They've been the same since Drucker before him. There's a whole trade press devoted to re-discovering and re-naming them every five years. Is it "giving a shit," or "ambition," or "employee engagement," or "hustle"? Is it "Quiet Quitting," or is it "work to rule," or is it "presenteeism"?
The thing to notice is how much ink that same press spills on misdirection. On shifting the blame from employer failures at #2, back onto workers' failures at #1. It often rhymes with "Nobody wants to work any more." It's comforting. It gives you a way out of accountability for the health and engagement of your team. And it's a con.
Three-Card Meritocracy
Is Quiet Quitting a by-product of three years of pandemic anxiety? Sure, yes, fine, obviously. Is it rooted in the seeming futility of striving for a 5% pay bump while the world burns and colleagues burn out? You bet. Is it exacerbated by a gloomy economy causing bad bosses to be worse? It sure is.
But a far more productive place to spend your time is on those two ingredients. Do my people give a shit? Does our environment support them? Or, in terms our 6.5 year old would understand:
Is the game fun?
Is the game rigged?
Every public-speaking student gets told to remember that the audience wants you to succeed. And as a boss, you should know that your people generally want to give a shit. They want to do good work. To believe that their work has meaning and impact. And they'll be pretty receptive to your earnest attempts to tell that story. A lot of games can be fun.
Unless the game is rigged. Unless your people can't win because the rules keep changing. Or because we tell one story when we're hiring, but a different one once they're in. Or because the rules say "meritocracy" but the org chart says something else.
This Quiet Quitting thing may be the topic du jour, but it's not universal. There are people out there doing engaged, enthusiastic work. There are organizations shining bright and without burning out.
If you're sweating it, worried that it's happening with your team, here's our advice. In the short run, you can build excitement and interest by focusing on "do people give a shit?" Tell a compelling story, by all means. It matters. But 3-card-monte is also about setting up a compelling story. So, for the long run, focus more of your attention on, "is our game rigged?" That's where you'll figure out why they don't want to play any more.
- Melissa and Johnathan