He's Just Not That Into You: Corporate Edition

Hi! My name is Bree, and I write about how to make work more joyful and less everything. This post was originally published on my Substack. Come on over and subscribe for writing fresh off the presses!

Perhaps you remember the Sex and the City episode or the movie that followed.

Miranda was looking for support from her friends when recounting her date which ended with the guy going home “because he had an early meeting.” Her friends were trying to encourage her, but Carrie’s boyfriend, Berger, had a different opinion: “He’s just not that into you.”

Instead of feeling offended, Miranda found the advice refreshing and liberating. Simple. True. Easy to know what to do with.

It was the antidote to the desperate “how do I get them to like me?!” feeling that can pervade the dating scene.

Ok, now get ready to leap across the analogy chasm with me…

For the last couple years, I have seen countless leaders show up as Miranda. “Why aren’t my people working like they used to? How do I get them more into work?” And countless articles written in the voices of Carrie, Samantha, and Charlotte, telling leaders “It’s ok! Just talk more about the impact and they’ll be into you again!”

But I’m here to tell you: Maybe, they’re just not that into you.

Also, that’s ok! It might even be good…

Before I go any further, yes I agree, dating and employer-employee relationships are not the same and shouldn’t be confused (for a number of reasons). And yes, paying people to work does in fact mean that they should do their work. But wondering why people aren’t totally thrilled and working above and beyond is like hiring an escort and wondering why they’re not falling in love with you.

Ok, back into SFW territory. And let me take off my slightly curmudgeon-y edge. If you know me, you’ll know I REALLY believe that work is good and can be fun and engaging and I want it to be that way for everyone. My beef is not with work—it’s with chronic overwork, which we often look for as a sign of engagement.

It’s almost as if we’ve forgotten what healthy work relationships look like. Sort of like if you were dating someone who was obsessed with you, putting your every need first, and then one day they started operating with healthy boundaries. You might think: “What happened? I liked it better then they constantly doted on me! How do we get back there? That was nice.”

This is what I suspect is happening with leaders. They’re wondering, “What happened? I liked it better when employees doted on my 10pm emails! How do we get back there? That was nice.” I see articles like this Bloomberg one: The ‘Always On, Always In’ Era is Over” and it sings “They’re just not that into you”.

Oops, I got a little spicy again. Let me make another disclaimer here: I also REALLY believe 99% of leaders are good, smart, caring humans who want their businesses to be successful AND want to do right by their people, but can often feel tension between the two. Leadership can also be incredibly lonely and it’s less so if employees are always on.

I recently read something arguing that “quiet quitting” (I know, a loaded term) was the effect of a broken culture… one that leaders could fix to re-engage employees. That is tempting… But I’d argue that lack of obsession doesn’t mean something’s wrong. In fact, it means something is right. Maybe what’s happening is employees are valuing their life beyond work in a way they haven’t before. Maybe they’re performing well at the job they signed up for, but aren’t donating their personal time to the business. Maybe it’s just… healthy. And doesn’t need to be pathologized.

Instead of desperately trying to figure out how to get the stalkers back, maybe this new paradigm is an invitation to a healthier relationship—and not just for employees, but for leaders and the business as a whole. After all, leaders deserve to value their lives too!

So what does health look like?

It’s definitely not work-life balance and shit work. No no. It needs to be BRILLIANT work, but more or less within the bounds of the workday.

When I put on my leader hat, I can feel a part of myself protesting, “But 9-5 is just not how our business works. How are we supposed to keep a project or a business afloat? It’s hard even when we’re all working a lot, and now we’re supposed to work less?”

I tell myself: “Yes. But it’s more than resetting a healthy relationship with work. It’s about resetting the health of the business.”

When something about the setup of the business is off, when it struggles, the easiest lever to pull is to work more, and expect everyone else to work more. Increase the input. No structural changes or transformations needed. Just do a little more and a little more after that. And it’s such a prevalent lever to pull in a societal culture of overwork, we often don’t even realize we’re pulling it, or that it’s not the only lever.

But what if we looked at overwork not as “how we do business”, but as a consequence of an upstream business issue? If employees are saying “the lever of overwork is no longer viable, a.k.a. I’m just not that into you” then what other levers are there?

This probably feels like Business School 101, but worth exploring:

Why are we overworking?

Revenue: Maybe our prices are too low and the downstream effect is that we can’t afford to hire enough people to do the necessary work.

Costs: Our overhead is too high and our business is out of balance. Our ship is too big for our revenue-generating engine and it’s overheating.

Process: Our ways of working are ineffective. We’re leaking time, energy, and money on low-value activities (like bad meetings or projects we should kill already or slow decision making), so the important work is pushed to overtime.

Volume: We are allowing too many initiatives, projects, objectives, etc. into our work streams, too quickly. We aren’t prioritizing or holding a backlog which creates a math problem: the work > people x business hours

Skills: We don’t have the right talent, or our talent is too junior, and therefore the work is taking more time than it would for a bench with the right experience.

Vision: We don’t have a strong enough vision and/or feel momentum in the business which results in people getting bored. We then produce clumsier work and it takes us longer to achieve our goals.

Innovation: We haven’t pushed ourselves and therefore are working too hard on things that perhaps drove the business in the past, but aren’t driving the business today.

Objectives: We’ve set our targets too high given our capability or the market and then overwork in a futile attempt to chase them.

Purpose: We’ve over-purposed, to the degree that we’ve built a culture and shared identity that elevates the importance of our work and the needs of our customers/clients above our own families, health, and non-working lives. It now feels wrong to not overwork.

Do any of these ring true? All of them? If so, I’ve probably written the equivalent of a business horoscope (How did she know?!) These are off the top of my head, but perhaps you can think of others and if so, please share them in the comments! Also, do note that most of the categories above can be shrunk to the function/team level if that’s where you lead.

My goal in itemizing them is to make clear that overwork doesn’t need to be the solution, that a healthy, balanced business can be—one that is more fun and less stressful for leaders to run, too.

I dream of businesses that have (lowercase) slack built into their systems.

Ones that can breathe and dream and build amazing things without the fear of “falling behind”.

Ones that Simone Stolzoff would say offer “Good Enough Jobs” with healthy, non-stalkery ideas about our relationship with work.

To me it’s liberating—just as Miranda felt—for leaders and employees alike.