Your standards aren't theirs to take
Why doing good work in bad times is the most revealing thing about you
Every few months, LinkedIn rediscovers that middle management is apparently the root cause of modern suffering. Unnecessary layer. Bottleneck. Useless layer.
Just like Moriarty in Sherlock:
”Did you miss me?”
Not really.
The posts spread fast because they offer something emotionally satisfying: a villain with calendar access. Mwahaha.
I’ve watched managers nod along to these posts about managers while sitting inside meetings held together entirely by managers, which is… fascinating.
The hundredth time I caught myself reading one of those posts and feeling that quiet why do I even care resignation, I realized it was worth paying attention to.
It isn’t quite burnout, nor quite cynicism, but lives right next door to both and meets for the afternoon tea.
When organizations stop believing themselves
You can usually tell when an organization stops believing in its own future.
The roadmap becomes quarterly improv and leadership changes direction faster than teams can execute the previous direction. Then performance reviews quietly move from “delayed” to “we’ll see.” and the worst of all, nobody wants to make irreversible decisions anymore, so everything becomes provisional, vague, endlessly revisitable.
People start saying things like “let’s stay flexible” with the emotional tone of someone trying to land a plane on a highway.
At some point, everyone feels it: the contract is weakening.
Of course I’m not talking about the employment contract, but the psychological one. The belief that if you do thoughtful work, the system around you will at least attempt to support it with direction, feedback, recognition, growth, or some version of forward motion.
Once people stop believing that part, they begin pulling back on their side too.
This is rational. The company isn’t delivering so why would you hold yourself to a standard they’re no longer holding for themselves?
Usually this happens slowly. For a while, people keep operating normally. They still leave thoughtful review comments. They still prep for 1:1s. Someone still updates the runbook after the incident even though nobody asked.
Then the drift starts.
A PR description gets shorter than it used to be. A decision goes undocumented because who’s reading this anyway. A manager runs out of meaningful feedback halfway through the 1:1 and both people pretend not to notice. Every individual choice makes sense on its own. Together, they change the culture of the place.
And the internal story people tell themselves usually sounds reasonable enough:
I’m being strategic. Preserving energy for the next place.
Maybe. Sometimes that’s true.
But I think there’s another thing happening underneath it.
The loyalty confusion
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.
Then the company stumbles.
Strategy starts thrashing, then recognition disappears, teams shrink and (like it or not) trust erodes. Suddenly people find themselves asking:
Why would I keep doing this for them?
But your standards were never supposed to belong to them.
You loaned the company your effort, your optimism, your willingness to care. You never handed over your professional identity.
The three feet around you (not six feet under)
There was a stretch where I took all of this far too personally. The endless discourse, the finger-pointing and my favorite the industrial-scale LinkedIn content explaining why every organizational problem could apparently be solved by deleting whichever layer of employees the author personally found annoying that quarter.
At one point I wrote an actual manifesto aimed at (us) leadership. Full gloves-off energy, extremely sincere and of course several pages long.
People read it. Nobody commented.
I’ve chosen to interpret that as respect, though statistically I suspect most people simply didn’t want to encourage a sequel. Heh.
I want to say that my manifesto changed things and we lived happily ever after. Maybe in Disney version of the script. What changed eventually wasn’t the organization.
What actually shifted was perspective. My perspective.
Most companies are dealing with some version of this right now. Once I stopped treating our problems like uniquely catastrophic failures of civilization, the emotional volume dropped considerably.
Around that time I came across the Navy SEAL concept of the “3-foot world.” In high-stress situations, focus on what’s directly in front of you: your actions, your attitude, the person beside you. Acknowledge everything outside that radius, but don’t mentally live there.
I liked the idea and it stuck with me because my three feet are surprisingly small.
Coaching the engineer quietly losing confidence or the onboarding doc nobody updated because three reorganizations happened since the screenshots were taken, maybe the incident postmortem you’re facilitating while everyone pretends the root cause wasn’t predictable three quarters ago.
That’s the work to focus on.
The org chart is probably outside your three feet. The LinkedIn discourse is also outside your three feet. Whether the company currently deserves your emotional investment is, most days, outside your three feet too.
All these things are real, they’re just not your circus.
But no matter what’s in it, you still have to decide who you are inside the radius you can actually affect.
Shifting the audience
When the reviews stop and nobody’s giving feedback on anything, you need a different audience. Forget “posterity” or “intrinsic motivation”. Those phrases always sound a little too clean for real life.
I mean an actual audience.
Your future self inheriting this system six months from now. The next engineer trying to understand why a decision got made. The person onboarding after half the company memory has quietly left the building. These kind of real audiences.
Interestingly, the work itself barely changes, but the motivation surely does.
The engineer still writing thoughtful review comments when everyone else has shifted into rubber-stamp mode. The manager still giving honest feedback even though the review cycle has been frozen for two quarters. The team still running proper postmortems nobody above them will ever read.
These people aren’t martyrs or blindly loyal. They’ve simply decided their standards belong to them.
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 revealing part (asymmetry)
Doing good work when conditions are good is table stakes. Your environment rewards it. You have support, direction, recognition. Of course you hold your bar.
What’s more revealing is what happens when those conditions disappear.
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.
That’s the part I think people miss when organizations struggle. Professional identity is portable. You carry it with you long after the org chart changes, long after the strategy deck gets rewritten, long after someone announces a “new operating model” using slides suspiciously similar to the previous operating model.
The standards go with you.
Meanwhile…
None of this means you should sacrifice yourself for a struggling company.
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 chaos best are usually doing all three simultaneously.
One thing I disagree with strongly is the idea that external validation shouldn’t matter. Of course it matters.
Recognition, feedback, good leadership, healthy teams: these aren’t ego luxuries. They’re feedback systems. They help you calibrate. They tell you whether your instincts are working, whether your decisions are helping, whether you’re growing.
When those systems disappear, people don’t become more enlightened or intrinsically motivated. They become temporarily uninstrumented.
You can fly like that for a while.
Not forever. But for a while.
The trap isn’t caring about your career. You absolutely should.
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 question I use on myself during those periods is:
Would I want to describe this work confidently in an interview, or am I hoping nobody asks about it?
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 feedback loop goes quiet, the recognition disappears and leadership gets consumed by survival mode.
Eventually you find out, maybe gradually, maybe all at once, who you’ve been doing this for.
For most people, the honest answer is simpler than they expected.
Yourself.
Your integrity. Your sense of what good work looks like when nobody is supervising your relationship with it.
Not a bad audience, not bad at all. More reliable than any employer, as it turns out.
Long after people forget the org chart, you still have to work with the habits you built there. That’s the part people miss. Because…
Your standards were never company property. They are yours.