One of the unpleasant truths of leadership is that the people who populate your organization (at all levels) are constantly trying to divine your position on myriad topics - everything from purpose and vision to the stack ranking of current-period priorities. Like it or not, as a leader, you are a significant topic of conversation and your position on issues matters.

The less visible you are, the more active the water-cooler will be. Infrequent communication from the top provides more oxygen for conspiracy theories and rumors to thrive. Conspiracy theories and rumors breed significant emotional waste that can negatively impact morale, engagement, and productivity.

I speak frequently about the benefits of adopting a continuous improvement mindset and practice—so much so that the premise of my second book, The Balanced Business, is that smooth workflows create an environment that fosters organizational accountability and allows trust to flourish. There are many preconditions to the establishment of smooth workflows, but one of the most important is to create clarity about how the work gets done in your business.

What do your people want (other than more money)? They want clarity, autonomy, empowerment, respect, and organizational accountability. They want to make a difference and do good, meaningful work. They want to know that leadership cares and that everyone in the company is rowing in the same direction with the same commitment and vigor that they apply to their own work.

Operating in the absence of organizational clarity means that unwritten rules and ad hoc processes become the norm. Since nothing is codified and communicated, the organization’s culture becomes one of firefighting and crisis management. Fiefdoms are established, job protectionism flourishes, and information about what’s really going on is traded like state secrets.

Requiring everyone to sit next to each other in a physical space will not drive an enlightened corporate culture—giving individuals and teams meaningful work and a sense of purpose is what matters.

The name “quiet quitting” is problematic because the phrase implies that something nefarious is going on—namely that an individual has checked out and is dead weight to a company or team. The phase is unnecessarily sensational and leads many to jump to the conclusion that quiet quitters are detrimental to company performance and team morale. In my opinion, we need to quickly relegate this phrase to the historical annals of corporate and popular vernacular.