Give less shit
Why giving less shit is necessary
This piece is in response to the many people who come to me to navigate politically delicate situations and moral dilemmas, whether at work or in other areas of their lives, and to learn how to withdraw from them without making things worse. I wrote it because people’s default response in these situations is to give more, explain more, and fix what’s happening, and that’s what backfires. This article explains how to give less shit in practice.
Who needs to give less shit
There are people who take their jobs more seriously than the workplace does.
There are two types of over invested people.
They invest heavily in the work itself and focus on delivery. If something isn’t working, they try to fix it. If a process is inefficient or risky, they point it out because they assume improving the work is what they’re there to do.
They invest heavily in the relationships around the work and focus on connection. They make themselves useful and supportive so they’re treated well, assuming that if they behave reasonably, others will respond in kind.
Both approaches are based on the same underlying assumption that effort will be recognised and reciprocated. These patterns aren’t limited to work. Work makes them easier to see, but the same behaviour applies anywhere there is something at stake.
Why giving a shit backfires
There are three types of people this workplace accommodates.
The self-serving operators.They present themselves as values-driven but they’re self-interested and narcissistic. They use people and values language to advance themselves and are comfortable undermining others if it benefits them. There’s no tension between what they say and what they do because they believe they’re doing the right thing and can always find fault in others, not themselves. They’re effective at wielding authority in a command and control style and crossing boundaries to stay in control — and everyone should know it.
The detached participants. They treat the role as a job that pays the bills and nothing more. They focus on tasks and salary and have no investment in how the work turns out.
The compliant adapters. They’re long-tenured, reliable workers. They stay out of politics and don’t challenge it. When things don’t make sense, they adjust themselves to fit cultural norms and keep going.
The over invested people are outside all three groups. They invest heavily in the work itself and focus on delivery. If something isn’t working, they try to fix it. If a process is inefficient or risky, they point it out because they assume improving the work is what they’re there to do. Others take a more nurturing approach to try to keep people on side and soothe mounting tension.
This creates tension because the way things are set up isn’t designed for that level of engagement. It relies on people either using the workplace as it is, ignoring it, or adapting to it. Their approach exposes gaps that others have learned to work around. As a result, they become the point of friction and a risk to how things are currently done, rather than examining how the work is being done. Once they’re seen as a threat, they’re pushed out through scapegoating and other forms of humiliation.
What happens when you keep giving a shit
When people who perform at a high level are good at getting shit done with high quality outputs, they expect that if a workplace chose them, it’s assumed that others function in a similar way. They begin to realise that this isn’t the case when the workplace starts to turn on them for doing a good job. Doing a good job often means noticing problems and raising them to make improvements.
This moment is becoming more visible across industries. Anuradha Pandey recently described the experience of realising that her strongest capabilities were effectively invisible within the systems she worked in. She frames it as illegibility, where skill sits outside what institutions can recognise or reward. This is often the point where the system registers someone operating outside what it can easily categorise or control and activates its immune response against them.
Once this happens, it’s hard to turn things around and return to the reality they had when they first started meeting their targets or when they were acknowledged for their work. Those days are done and now they’re the culprit behind the issues their work exposed. They think the problem is their performance, so they increase it. The more they do, the more they become the problem. At this point, there’s nothing to fix. They’re trying to solve a problem that’s no longer about the work.
People come to see me when they’re dealing with coworkers in the latter category because the doing of the job has become entangled with a tarnished reputation and undermining behaviour by others. Instead of switching off and not taking the job seriously anymore, they get more invested in proving their value and regaining approval from the authorities that devalued them. In doing so, they work harder on the tasks and show the lengths of their accountability, sometimes involving admitting fault when there are multiple contributing factors to an issue.
They’re working hard to show how accountable and trustworthy they are while expecting others to step up and do the same because that’s what you’re supposed to do at work.
This isn’t how the real world works.
Being accountable works against them in a workplace filled with people who look stressed and busy and are mostly delegating their tasks or inventing new processes instead of following ones that already work. They’re busy having meetings, discussing others behind closed doors and how to manage them, instead of focusing on completing the work they’re responsible for.
Why this keeps happening (even in good teams)
Your job isn’t only about doing the tasks. It also involves relating well to others at work. This is often the harder part of the job as no one prepares those entering the workforce for the political side of work. We’re still indoctrinating people into believing merit and hard skills are sufficient competences for career success instead of also training people to spot and outsmart the narcissistic boss, leader or peer you will inevitably work with. Not everyone with authority is reasonable or secure, and not all decisions are made on the basis of what works.
The tasks that need to get done are made more difficult because of the people involved. Without this, people walk into workplaces assuming they’re being evaluated on the work when they’re being evaluated on something else entirely.
The environment you’re actually in
Let’s put the job in context. You’re part of a larger ecosystem functioning to maintain an institution that is highly dependent on its reputation and revenue. These are the most important things to any institution. You would think your role would involve identifying risks to either of these things and to make improvement. In reality, your job is to avoid flagging faults or flaws that would interfere with the ideal self-image of the institution and the leadership who represent it, and whose authority (privileges) is dependent on it.
What I’m describing is a feature of a low trust, highly political institutions. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a high trust, high performance team. You’re still operating within an ecosystem that expects teams to live up to its reputational fantasy. This is the reality of institutions today. It’s our human condition manifest in the most ingenious and dire ways.
Within this context, the response to over invested people becomes more predictable.
This is the institutional immune response. When someone disrupts how the workplace is functioning by exposing gaps or attempting to change how things are done, they are identified as the disturbance to the environment. What follows is protection of the culture, rather than correction of the issue. Their behaviour is closely monitored, informal stories begin to circulate about their impact, and their actions are reframed as disruptive rather than useful. Managers and colleagues who have not addressed these issues directly begin to manage the person instead, often through exclusion and undermining. In some environments, this escalates into direct targeting, particularly where there are individuals who benefit from the existing dynamics or feel threatened by change. The focus shifts from what has been exposed to removing or neutralising the person who exposed it, allowing the environment to return to how it was.
Eventually, the doing of the job becomes entangled with a tarnished reputation and undermining behaviour by others. Instead of switching off or taking the job less seriously, the over invested person becomes more invested in proving their value and regaining approval from the authorities that devalued them. They work harder on the tasks and demonstrate accountability, sometimes admitting fault when there are multiple contributing factors to an issue. They’re working hard to show that they’re accountable and trustworthy while expecting others to step up and do the same, because that’s what they understand work to require. The more they invest, the more they are drawn into it, and the more their effort is used against them. Burnout sets in from the ongoing strain and confusion, and from trying to fix something that isn’t going to change through effort.
Give Less Shit
Instead of giving more and watching it backfire while it wears you down to burnout, it’s necessary to take a different approach.
Give less shit.
This doesn’t mean doing poor work. If you’re working somewhere, your name is attached to what you produce, so you still need to maintain a solid work ethic, and you’ll feel it if you don’t. It’s that your work ethic is probably higher than what the role requires. Giving less shit means reducing your effort to the level the environment actually demands without lowering your standard.
The rest of this piece breaks this down in detail so you can apply it to your own situation. Upgrade your subscription for full access.
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