Your standards aren't theirs to take
Why doing good work in bad times is the most revealing thing about you
Every few months, a new LinkedIn article makes the rounds explaining why middle management should be abolished. Unnecessary layer. Bottleneck. Relic of a less efficient age. Just like Moriarty in Sherlock: Did you miss me? Not really.
I’ve watched colleagues (funny middle management themselves) nod at this content like it’s delivering news.
The hundredth time I caught myself reading one of those posts and feeling that quiet why do I even care resignation (you know — the kind that isn't quite burnout, isn't quite cynicism, but lives right next door to both and meets for the afternoon tea), I recognized it as something worth paying attention to.
When you can feel it
When an organization is struggling, there’s a specific kind of pressure that nobody talks about clearly. Layoffs at companies you’d recognize, leadership churn, strategy that changes faster than anyone can execute it. These create an implicit message: the contract is breaking. And once people sense the contract is breaking, they start pulling back on their end.
This is rational. The company isn’t delivering on direction, stability, recognition, career growth. Why would you hold yourself to a standard they’re no longer holding for themselves?
Most people maintain their highest standards for two or three months after the recognition stops and the reviews get postponed. That’s the “I’m a professional, this doesn’t affect me“ phase. It’s usually real. They mean it.
Then something gives. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. A PR description that’s less thorough than it used to be. A 1:1 that runs out of substance before it runs out of time. A decision left undocumented because who’s reading it anyway. Each one has a plausible reason. Together they’re a drift.
And the internal story that makes sense of it? I’m being strategic. Preserving energy for the next place.
That story is plausible. It’s also, I’d argue, the wrong frame entirely.
The loyalty misread
The mistake is treating your standards as a form of loyalty.
When things are good, your high standards and the company’s interests are aligned. You do good work. You get rewarded. It looks, and feels, like loyalty. Just… it isn’t. It’s mutual benefit while it lasted. Two different things.
When the company stops holding up its end, the misreading surfaces. People think their standards were loyalty, so when the relationship deteriorates, the standards feel like they should too. Why would I keep doing this for them?
But the standards were never for them.
You loaned the company the benefit of the doubt. You never handed over your professional identity.
The three feet around you (not six feet under)
I can’t stop caring about my team members and the work. I’ve tested this thoroughly.
There was a period where I took all of it too hard. The articles, the finger-pointing, the “everything is broken” content delivered at LinkedIn scale. At some point I wrote an actual manifesto — gloves off, addressed to leadership, the whole thing. People read it. Nobody commented. I’ve chosen to interpret that as respect, though I suspect the real reason is nobody wanted to commission a sequel, heh. It got things out of my system, and… I moved on.
What actually shifted was perspective. My perspective.
Most organizations are dealing with their own version of the contract breaking right now. Once I stopped treating ours as a specific failure, the noise got quieter. I could chuckle at the memory of writing the manifesto.
Then I read a post about seals. Not the animals, mind you, but the Navy SEAL principle they call the 3-foot world. In high-stress situations, focus entirely on what’s in your immediate space: your actions, your attitude, the person in front of you. Just acknowledge what's outside that radius. You can't control it from here anyway.
Your three feet might be just the PR you’re reviewing, the 1:1 you’re running, the decision you’re documenting. The changing org chart, the LinkedIn discourse, whether the company deserves your best work — in most cases those are outside your three feet. They’re real, but not your circus.
Shifting the audience
When the reviews stop and nobody’s giving feedback on anything, you pick a different audience. Not “posterity” or “intrinsic motivation”. Those are platitudes. A real, specific audience. Your future self, inheriting this codebase in six months. The next person who has to understand this decision. The version of you in an interview, describing what you did during the hard stretch. Those are real audiences. Pick one.
The work doesn’t change much, but the motivation surely does.
The engineer who still gives a fair and constructive code review when nobody's expecting more than a rubber stamp. The manager who still gives honest feedback when the performance review cycle has been on pause for two quarters. A team running proper incident postmortems that nobody above them will read. These people aren't superhuman. They've just shifted who the audience is.
When you’ve already decided what your standards are, keeping them takes less effort. You’re not fighting yourself every time. The decision is already made.
The asymmetry
Doing good work when conditions are good is table stakes. The environment rewards it. You have support, direction, recognition. Of course you hold your bar.
Doing good work when conditions are bad is different.
The most interesting question isn’t what you do when people are watching. It’s what you do when they stop.
The engineer who writes careful, considered code when the product direction is stable and the team is fully staffed is doing what the situation rewards. The engineer who writes the same code when half the team has left and the roadmap is three slides that contradict each other is doing something more interesting.
That difference is character. Not in a moralistic sense, just an observational one. It tells you something about who they are that the first scenario doesn’t.
The same goes for everything else: the documentation you write for a feature that might pivot next month, the feedback you give someone when you know they’re not getting it from anywhere else, the decision you document when nobody’s asking for documentation. These aren’t martyrdom. They’re evidence of who you are professionally.
Professional identity is portable. The company doesn’t get to keep it when you leave. You take it with you.
Meanwhile…
This is not an argument against self-preservation.
You can be updating your resume, building your external reputation, and doing careful work on what’s in front of you at the same time. These aren’t in conflict. The people I’ve seen handle institutional chaos best are usually doing all three simultaneously.
There’s a popular idea that goes: intrinsic motivation good, external validation bad. Do the work for the love of it, not the review. But that’s too simplistic. Recognition and feedback aren’t just ego fuel: they tell you whether your work is actually landing, whether your instincts are right, whether you’re growing. When those signals disappear, you’re not suddenly more authentic. You’re just flying without instruments for a while, until better ones are available. Which they usually are, eventually.
The trap isn’t caring about your career, of course not, you should do this.
The trap is treating your standards as a casualty of institutional struggle, as if lowering your bar is what the situation requires.
In my experience, it’s never what the situation requires. It’s just the path of least resistance, sold to yourself as strategy.
One check I run on myself, the next time I feel the drift: Would I describe this work comfortably in an interview, or does part of me hope they don’t ask? If it’s the second, well, I better do something about it. That tells me where my three feet have slipped.
Who you’ve been doing this for
At some point in a struggling organization, the company stops being the audience.
The recognition loop goes quiet. Leadership is too distracted by survival to notice what you’re doing or not doing. The external feedback that used to tell you your work mattered has gone somewhere else.
And you find out, maybe gradually, maybe all at once, who you’ve been doing this for.
For most people, the honest answer, underneath the strategy and the pragmatism and the reasonable recalibration, is: myself. My integrity. My sense of who I am when I’m working.
Not a bad audience, not bad at all. More reliable than any employer, as it turns out.
The company never owned your standards. You loaned them the benefit of the doubt: the goodwill, the engagement, the effort directed their way.
Withdraw that whenever you need to. The standards go with you.