Everyone is Quitting

Never quit.

Stay the course.

Good things come to those who wait.

But in recent months, the many persistency cliches of years past have fallen on deaf ears as Americans have left their jobs in droves.

The 2021 quit rate was the highest of any year since the government started keeping these stats two decades ago. In November, 4.5 million American workers alone turned elsewhere for work.

The jobs site Indeed recently released a survey of 1,000 workers who had left at least two jobs since March 2020. Of the respondents, 92 percent said: “The pandemic made them feel life is too short to stay in a job they weren’t passionate about.”

“People have been living to work for a very long time,” Karin Kimbrough, LinkedIn’s chief economist, told 60 Minutes. “I think the pandemic brought that moment of reflection for everyone. ‘What do I want to do? What makes my heart sing?’ People are thinking, ‘If not now, then when?’”

So what does this mean for us as leaders?

As much as we may be tempted to dismiss these “quitters” or lament how they don’t have the work ethic of decades ago, this is the new leadership reality. And those of us who don’t adapt our culture to these various trends can easily become obsolete.

Our team members want some quick results, they want a greater collective purpose, and, now more than ever, they want to know their value as more than stats producers and revenue drivers.

Simply put, they want a “Why,” and if our answer is “Because the salary is good,” or “We have a rich tradition here,” chances are that’s not going to be nearly good enough.

This begs some key questions of us:

1. What are we specifically doing to create a collective sense of purpose among our individual team members?

2. What tangible strategies do we have in place to show that we value our team members beyond production machines?

3. What are we doing to ensure our team members are at the very least seeing some small wins early in their tenure so they don’t grow frustrated or bored?

4. What are the realistic growth opportunities for team members within our organizations?

5. What are our team’s existing weaknesses that might make someone want to leave?

There are no easy or obvious answers to these questions, but it’s imperative that we begin to consider how we’re going to adapt to this rapidly-evolving work and leadership landscape.

We can carry on like we always have. We can dismiss the quitters. We can bemoan them and be nostalgic for the “good-old days.”

But the harsh reality is that failing to transform today can easily lead to our own irrelevance tomorrow.

And once that label’s on us, there’s no quitting it.