why you should quiet quit too

This week an old friend of mine posted on Linked In about the current media fad of chatting about Quiet Quitting. I hadn't really read anything about this, so I wasn't even sure what the term meant. For those of you ignorant of this like me, Quiet Quitting is when someone reduces their hours and responsibilities at work to what they are contracted for. I believe in old union speak this would be called Working to Rule. His point was positive, asking people to back off and not to judge others for wanting to create space in their life for things outside of work.

Because the Internet knows us better than we know ourselves, YouTube offered me up this video the next day about a woman firing her first direct report because he kept boundaries between his work and the rest of his life. As the host of the video says, this woman has not only removed her former report's means, but also criticised him publicly and used him as an example to the entire world of how not to have a career. Not exactly a stunning example of leadership there.

One of the principles of the agile manifesto is:

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

If you're trying to work with agility, then you should be Quiet Quitting and be proud of it.

For me, having a balance between personal and professional time means that I can utilise my personal time to enhance my professional time and vice versa. There is nothing that I do in one part of my life that doesn't have an impact on another part of my life. Raising toddlers has taught me a great deal of patience and how to talk someone through an emotional situation to arrive at a plan that allows them to achieve what they want within the constraints that exist. This definitely makes me a better coach than I was before I had children. Likewise, my drive to become a coach gave me the awareness and knowledge that it is possible to talk someone through an emotional moment to reach a constrained goal, which definitely made me a better parent than I would have been before I started learning how to be a coach.

Cross pollination is something that leaders should be encouraging their employees to foster. This is part of how we can build more diverse cultures within our organisations, and that inevitably leads to more creative work being produced.

This week I wrote What I’ve learned from a decade of journalling over on WordPress.