Hilary DeCesare is a Transitional Expert & Executive Coach as well as CEO of The ReLaunch Co.
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The Great Resignation didn’t start with the pandemic. While the events of the last few years have sent seismic shockwaves through HR departments and disrupted corporate management, Harvard Business Review notes (registration required) that the Great Resignation is actually a longer-term trend that was only accelerated by the pandemic.
The resignation rate had slowly been climbing since 2009; it was jolted upward by more recent unsettling uncertainties and perhaps spurred in part by the stimulus checks of 2021. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 47 million Americans then voluntarily quit their jobs—an unprecedented mass exit from the workforce.
Gallup data shows that nearly half of American workers are actively on the hunt for new opportunities. Gallup calls this the “Great Discontent.”
More to the point, when considering the facts, I call it the Great Fed-Up Nation—and women are leading the way. According to new data from McKinsey & Co and LeanIn.org, the burnout gap between women and men has nearly doubled—so it’s not surprising that more women than men are leaving their jobs. Then there is the one-third of American women who haven’t quit yet, but are actively considering it—a number that is creeping upward. There are numerous documented reasons (paywall) for this, including the gender pay gap, hybrid workforce demands on mothers, the resignation itself and fewer staff members being left to handle more work. Longer shifts, later nights, unused vacation days...
The coup de grâce, for me, were the latest reports of “quiet quitting” (paywall). Led by Gen Z, age 25 and under, and accompanied by a push on—where else?—TikTok, this movement encourages doing the bare minimum on the job “to avoid burnout.” The mantra is: “Stay on it, but focus on things you do outside the office,” or separating one’s career from one’s self.
But the drop-out phenomenon is multigenerational as well as multigender. The latest group to check out and quit are older, tenured employees. It all adds up to: “I’ve had it.”
The tipping point, I propose, is not the job itself, or “work-life balance,” but the values involved. At a certain point, if your own values are secondary to those of your company, you may be comfortable financially but you'll be uncomfortable emotionally. I know I considered my job a success: helping bring in—and being well compensated for—over a quarter billion dollars in revenues for a major technology company. Yet, the agonizing personal conflict that something had to give was relentless.
When circumstances you cannot change make it impossible to stay in alignment with yourself, your discomfort is telling you that you have a choice to make. When you lift your head from the keyboard and look around and see a landscape of emotional barrenness, when there’s nothing but empty air left on either end of the scale, balance becomes irrelevant. There is simply nothing left to commit to. But once you allow yourself to get out of your head and into your heart, you will be able to seek something more closely tied to your emotional self. Freeing yourself from beliefs that limit your growth and leave you stuck in place is the first step.
Even Sheryl Sandberg, queen of "leaning in" (working harder and giving more to the company) has stepped back, leaving Meta Platforms to give more focus to her passion for supporting women, and her family.
For the Great Fed-Up Nation, it turns out that "leaning out" may be the new leaning in.
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