Nice Work: Welcome to NO-vember

There’s this mentality I still hear way too often from older leaders: that giving people a paycheck entitles them to demand whatever they want of their workers. 

Your CEO screams at people? Well, so did Steve Jobs—and those high standards got us the iPhone, after all. Don’t take it personally! Your coworker keeps talking over you in meetings? Just try to be more assertive. Payroll screwed up your direct deposit? Don’t make a fuss—they’ll get to it when they get to it. 

You can see that last idea alive and well in this Ask A Manager column from the other day. A manager writes in upset that their new employee, Jane, wasn’t “respectful” enough after her new company failed to pay her. Three times. In a row.

Ask A Manager’s Alison Green gives a great response: “you are very, very wrong about this situation, both as a manager and as a human.” The person lacking respect here isn’t Jane—it’s the manager. 

But I keep finding myself returning to a passage later in Green’s response: “You say Jane doesn’t seem to understand she’s entry-level and not in charge,” Green writes. “Jane is very much in charge of where she’s willing to work and what she will and won’t tolerate. Every employee is, regardless of how junior or senior they might be.” 

Of course this is true—but it doesn’t always feel true, does it? 

I can understand why. Most of us have bills to pay. We worry about affording college for our kids or being able to retire someday. We fret over how future employers will interpret a résumé gap. And if you’re in my age range—elder millennial, thank you for asking—you might also be carrying around extra anxiety learned through starting your career during the financial crisis.

It’s still true, though: each of us gets to choose what we will and won’t tolerate at work. Those choices have tradeoffs, some of them major—if Jane quits because she’s tired of payroll problems, she’ll lose her income entirely, and likely need to look for a new job. But it’s still a choice, and seeing it as one matters. 

When we feel powerless, we tend to revert to extreme thoughts: Things will always be this way. There’s nothing I can do. I guess I just have to put up with this. But when we acknowledge that we’re making choices, we regain access to critical thinking. We can ask ourselves whether saying “no” to our manager is really too big of a career risk to take. We can check in with our values, and ask ourselves if the ongoing moral injury of working in a place that violates our sense of right and wrong is truly worth the paycheck or the prestige. 

It doesn’t even mean you need to make a different choice—there are many reasons you might stay in a problematic organization or choose not to say “no” to a toxic boss. But by acknowledging that we do have choices—even if they’re imperfect and constrained—we start putting things into perspective. We can see what tolerating toxic workplaces is truly costing us. And we can start to imagine ways we might stop tolerating them. 

***

I was thinking about all this as I read this NYT piece last week about the 37-year-olds who are afraid of the 23-year-olds who work for them. I usually hate these sorts of intergenerational culture war articles, and that headline is absolutely clickbait for workers my age. But this piece isn’t really about side parts or skinny jeans. It’s about younger workers rejecting the idea that they have to tolerate inflexible working conditions and command-and-control management models. 

It’s about power: 

You can see similar trends at play with “Striketober”—named such because so many workers—from nurses to bus drivers to factory workers—went on strike last month. You can see it in the various “NO-vember” posts flying around social media, exhorting people to say no to unpaid labor, burnout, and things that “steal your joy.” 

And you can also see it with “young people lying flat”—a movement that started in response to China’s absolutely brutal “996 work culture” that’s now gaining steam in the U.S.

“Lying flat” gets called lazy a lot, but I don’t see it that way. It takes a lot of courage to keep rejecting the status quo—especially when everyone from your parents to your peers is telling you to get back to the grind. 

***

I’m not suggesting you “lie flat” this winter—unless you choose to, that is. But we’re on the cusp of our second pandemic winter here in the Northern Hemisphere. We’re burnt out, fed up, and reeling from 20 months of adjusting to new stressors and letting go of old plans. Meanwhile, there’s a worker shortage across loads of industries, including tech. Economists say that workers have more leverage right now than they’ve had in years. 

There’s never been a better time to take a hard look at what you’ve been tolerating—and, if you’re in a leadership role, to look at what you’ve been asking your team to tolerate, too. 

There’s never been a better time to question the defaults you’ve accepted, and choose something new instead. 

Wishing you rest and reflection this month,

— Sara

Latest Strong Feelings episodes

Episode 98: Feeling Ourselves
with Alla Weinberg

Take a moment to check in with your body—yeah, right now! Do you feel tension in your shoulders? A clench in your jaw? A heaviness in your chest? Those feelings have something to tell us—and it’s time we tuned into them at work, says Alla Weinberg.

Episode 97: Nice White Ladies
with Jessie Daniels

When do white folks learn they’re white? And how do they start to understand the scope of benefits that whiteness affords them? For Jessie Daniels, these uncomfortable questions are only the beginning.

On the reading list

1. The Language of Ambiguous Grief

2. The Future of Work Should Mean Working Less

3. The People Penalised for Expressing Feelings at Work

4. This is why you’re really burned out