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…
