Quiet quitting wasn’t a rebellion. It was a signal. Not of laziness—but of limits. When people stop going above and beyond, it’s not because they lost work ethic. It’s because leadership lost them.
Broken trust. No vision. Empty words. Unkept promises. That’s the real story behind disengagement. People checked out when they stopped believing their extra effort mattered—when leadership treated culture like a slide deck instead of a responsibility. Blame the buzzword all day. The root cause is leadership fatigue, not employee entitlement.
But here’s the other truth: people also come back. They re-engage when leaders communicate clearly, follow through, and treat their teams like partners, not tools. That’s not theory—it’s reality. Listen to the ones who left. Learn from the ones who returned.