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It’s Time to Fire Our Bosses
We need to start leading ourselves
The signs of boss-exhaustion are all around us.
I’m not just talking about the obvious example of an election that will seal the fate of our ineffectual Boss-in-Chief (that is, if the virus doesn’t get there first). Earlier this year, the CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman, Bon Appétit Editor-in-Chief Adam Rapoport, and the New York Times Opinion editor James Bennet were all ousted from their positions within the same month. Meanwhile, journalists declared “the end of the girlboss” — a rejection of the careerist “lean in” model of women’s empowerment put forward by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and reinforced by a number of high-profile branding efforts throughout the middle part of the last decade. When a number of young women CEOs hastily departed the companies they’d founded at the height of the girlboss era — including Sophia Amoruso, the founder of Nasty Gal, who trademarked #Girlboss in the first place — the upheaval carried outsize symbolic weight.
Finally, it seems, the jig is up: You cannot hustle your way to empowerment any more than you can bequeath empowerment by extension of your hustle. And nobody has time for a shitty boss, especially not now.
Challenging power feels great. But when you’ve internalized ambition as, essentially, the road to bosshood, it can be overwhelming to navigate goal-setting on its own terms. The trick is to find motivation outside of the managerial construct that’s so deeply embedded into the world we’ve inherited.
Though our cultural conception of ambition is toxic and loaded, the drive to do is far from pointless in and of itself. Even in 2020, a year that feels like an indefinite waiting room until some semblance of “real life” returns, the motivation to keep moving forward is an essential human need. Setting and achieving goals makes us happier and more fulfilled. And, counterintuitively or not, we derive a feeling of purpose from a job well done, even if it’s a job we hate.
We can’t rely on a total economic and political restructuring to deliver us from this bind — at least, not overnight. But it’s well within our reach to reclaim a personal sense of drive that centers on what we want to put out into the world. What we need is a framework that allows us to…
