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It’s Time for “Loud Leadership”
Quiet dynamics do not work for new generations of workers.
By Grant H. Brenner and Santor Nishizaki
As the pandemic leaves behind the tenor of crisis, winding down into an endemic phase of vaccine boosters, and attention shifts to new global threats, the workplace-rattled by years of upheaval and economic instability-continues to roil with unpredictability as a young generation of workers seeks out a more comfortable yet elusive reality. Traditional managers, used to expectable norms, are a bit bewildered.
While to an extent it may be old wine in new bottles, updated terminology helps us make sense of changes through a contemporary lens. Each generation seems to need its slang, anyway, in order to stake a claim and feel a sense of ownership. Few people like hearing that we’ve seen this before, and when it comes to the current environment, even if it looks familiar, things are fundamentally different because of rapid cultural changes fueled by social media and the spectre of existential threat omnipresent in the feeds we daily doom scroll. Are we a “ nation of wimps” (Marano, 2004), and if so, whose fault is it anyway?
Quiet quitting (disengaged employees) hit this scene with a big splash: “I’ll do my job, but why would I go above and beyond? I have no idea where things will…
