How to Reengage Quiet Quitters
Who on your team shows up to work without really showing up? You know these people…their body is present, but their hearts and minds have checked out.
In the Navy, we’d say these folks were on the ROAD program: Retired On Active Duty. They were still in uniform, but any sense of initiative or motivation was long gone…as if they’d already retired.
Quiet Quitting is not a new thing. Disengaged employees have been around since the beginning of civilization.
Why has this lingered for millennia? Because leaders don’t know how to handle it.
The Motivation Matrix
This subject always comes up in Leader of Areté and our other coaching skills programs. When we teach leaders how to coach, we also teach them when and whom to coach. It’s such good material that my students’ reactions would make you think they had just been handed the Rosetta Stone!
Here’s why I think the concepts we teach feel so profound. We have lots of ways to work with motivated but unskilled people. We have fewer, but still effective, ways of supporting motivated, talented people. But leaders have only three ways of interacting with talented team members who’ve lost their spark: counsel, ignore, or remove.
Mostly, leaders treat them like a highly contagious disease. Isolate them. Move them. Whatever you do, don’t let them infect the others!
We can do better.
Start with Empathy
I teach a model for understanding who is ready for coaching, what to coach them on, and how to approach them. When I explain the category that Quiet Quitters belong in, I ask students to identify a time when they’ve been in that category.
Here are a few examples of what they say:
Right after having a baby, especially if the child had medical complications
When they were in a job with very little room to grow or promote
After completing a high-stress project and feeling burned out
When working with a toxic boss, and often even after the toxic boss has left
In the midst of significant organizational change or transitions in their personal life
The problem is not that Quiet Quitters exist.
The problem is that leaders don’t have a positive way of engaging the disengaged.
If you’ve got team members in the “talented but disengaged” group, and you’d like to reengage them, here are a few tips:
Approach with empathy and humility. Appreciate the fact that you don’t know what you don’t know about their experiences and what might have landed them in this category.
Be clear AND vulnerable. Concisely describe the consequence of the status quo—what happens if performance or presence doesn’t improve? Admit to the role you’ve played in perpetuating the status quo up until now.
Ask them to work with you to change it. This must be a collaborative process. Otherwise, it’s just more of the same: counseling.
Build rapport through genuine curiosity. Demonstrate your empathy for their journey. Explore what’s led them to this point with an open heart and mind.
Get buy-in on the path forward, with each of you making high-value commitments to each other and to the process. Your role might be to develop alternative schedule arrangements, switch the projects or team they’re on, invest in their development, or connect them to potential mentors.
Establish a follow-up plan and stick to it! Hold the space in your calendar as a sacred commitment to the relationship. Your consistent presence may be more beneficial than any other support you offer to them.
Coaching isn’t just for high achievers
If you’re only coaching your most motivated team members, you may be missing out on an opportunity to light a spark in your quiet quitters. Coaching works with this group because it doesn’t exacerbate the situations that dimmed their light.
When you coach them, you walk alongside them, rather than play “rock, paper, rank.”
When you coach them, you invest in fully understanding their paradigm, rather than tell them their perspective is wrong.
When you coach them, you uncover deeper purpose and personal ideals, rather than fit them into a predefined box.
When you coach them, you discover new paths forward together, rather than dictating the next steps.
Who on your team is in this category, and how will you approach them differently?