Quiet quitting or just redefining what success looks like for you?

Several conversations in the last couple of weeks have made me think about success and what it looks like for different people in a professional environment.

The first occurred on a podcast I recorded with the founder of Copy Club, Lottie Unwin. We were talking about the expectations of people in a professional capacity always to want to climb up the career ladder and stretch in their roles. When actually, some people are pretty happy in the position that they are in - consistently delivering without wanting to go for a promotion. You can listen to the podcast in full here.

It can feel like a strange concept that someone wouldn't want to improve and stretch in their role. But, from personal experience, when I worked in a corporate environment, it was one of the things I strived for - always clawing for that next promotion, that next big project. Perhaps to my detriment in the end. I didn't know how to define success if I wasn't considering a promotion at work and the next chapter in my career. Honestly, I didn't understand people who didn't think this way. It seemed alien to me.

On reflection, my success in life was very connected solely to my career.

It feels like quiet quitting has a similar sentiment. According to Guardian Columnist, this apparent 'craze' that has popped up is "the newly coined term for when workers only do the job that they're being paid to do, without taking on any extra duties or participating in extracurriculars at work."

Is this quiet quitting, though, or just putting boundaries in place and not saying yes to everything that comes across your desk because it's considered an opportunity?

After a few brutal years of dealing with COVID and working from home becoming a blur with your life outside of work, it's easy to see why there was a massive shift in people's priorities and that suddenly, work wasn't as crucial to the majority as it had been before.

For many people, the lockdown was a reset, a way to pause and redefine what success meant and reevaluate how they wanted to spend their time.

Are you a rock star or superstar?

Another thing to consider is that maybe more people want to be rock stars at the moment than superstars. The rock star/superstar analogy comes from a book by Kim Scott called 'Radical Candor.'

The idea is that you have two types of stars in your team - rock stars and superstars, and for a team to be successful, it needs to have both. The rockstars are the 'rocks' of your team. They're reliable and happy to turn up and do their job to a high standard every day.

Then there are the superstars, the ones looking for the next challenge. They are ambitious and want to continue to climb up that career ladder at pace.

Whether people are 'quiet quitting,' setting better boundaries, or have decided to become a rockstar and not a superstar, it's important to remember that everyone will define success differently. And whatever that definition looks like, the critical factor is to be able to communicate this explicitly whether you are managing a team or part of one.

Find out more here about improving your team dynamics and communication skills here.