Forget “Quiet Quitting”…It’s Quiet Firing We Need to Talk About

Milton from Office Space: quiet firing, personified

There’s been endless talk about the recent trend of “quiet quitting”. Endless debate over whether it’s emblematic of the laziness of the workforce, part of the new, post-pandemic way of working, or a long-overdue mass realization that part of work/life balance is indeed “life”. I have my own thoughts on the subject (for the record, I’ve long known that working longer doesn’t equal working smarter and that time away from the desk can often lead to the most creative, disruptive ideas). But this subject doesn’t need my voice contributing to the cacophony. Instead, I want to talk about a phenomenon that’s been around for much, much longer than quiet quitting, and that’s quiet firing.

Quiet firing is the passive, or passive-aggressive, method managers use to force a low-performing or ill-fitting person to leave an organization. It’s often referred to as “managing out”, but I’d argue that there’s not much management happening at all, at least not much good management.

Does this sound uncomfortably familiar? If so, I’m not surprised. I spoke with several leaders at various levels and nearly all of them admitted to executing this kind of quiet firing at some point in their careers. And, full disclosure: I’ve done it myself, back when I hadn’t yet learned what good people management looks like.

So why does quiet firing happen? It usually stems from a reluctance or an inability to have a tough conversation. Sometimes we, as managers, let a subpar performance or problem behavior go on for so long that by the time it’s intolerable, we feel it’s too late to address it, that it wouldn’t be fair to penalize someone for behavior we’ve long tacitly condoned. We know it’s our fault for not acting sooner, but now we feel like we’re locked in to allowing the issue to persist. So we quietly fire the person, hoping they’ll either become so disempowered that they fade into the woodwork or that they leave of their own volition.

We do this in a number of ways:

1. Overtly playing favorites. We laugh and joke and pal around with other members of the team in a manner the target can’t help but notice.
2. Disdainful or dismissive body language. We might be smiling and displaying open body language in a meeting, until our target enters the room or speaks up with an idea. Then our face instantly falls, we cross our arms, we look away, or we angle our bodies away from them.
3. Exclusion and disempowerment. This is a biggie. We hold meetings, and make decisions, about issues that our target really should own or contribute to, but we exclude them entirely. We ask other people to do work or take on projects that the person we’re quietly firing would ordinarily do. And we micromanage the work that remains on their plate. Brick by brick, we demolish their confidence.
4. Nitpicking. Instead of addressing the larger, systemic issues with their performance or behavior, we pick away constantly at their every small move. We criticize and second-guess every decision they dare to make.
5. Withholding praise. When our target performs well, we fail to acknowledge their good work, while loudly lauding their coworkers’ successes.
6. Shooting down ideas. We don’t even wait for them to finish their sentence before we jump in and explain why their idea can’t possibly work.

In other words, we isolate, shame, gaslight, and humiliate someone we didn’t manage well. We victimize them twice.

All of this can be prevented. In the words of the brilliant Brené Brown, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind” When we fail to have the difficult conversation immediately, when we pass up an opportunity to give quick and direct feedback, when we shy away instead of leaning in, we set people up for failure. On the other hand, when we provide discrete goals, defined success metrics, and direct feedback, we give people the gift of clarity. When folks know what is expected of them, they can rise to the occasion. And if they don’t, we can continue to coach them, or we can let them go based on the evidence that they’re falling short of our expectations. And we can do it unquietly.