Leadership is a Relationship

CHAPTER 7Stable Ground (Stability)

If you read enough anxious news headlines, it's easy to start thinking that stability is a relic of the mid-century American boom. From politics to the labor market, there's incessant hand-wringing about how constancy has given way to an always-changing, always-in-turmoil new normal. We all know that the days of employees staying with a firm from their first days out of school until retirement are long gone—at least two generations gone. At the beginning of 2020, the average American worker had been with their current employer for 4.1 years.¹ Contrary to headlines, though, it's not clear that young people are job-hopping all that much more than their parents did. From the 1980s until now, the average American has taken about the same number of jobs between their teenage years and their mid-thirties.²

There's still good reason to suspect that turnover could accelerate, and that's not just because of stereotypes associated with Millennials and Gen Zers. As more of corporate America jettisons the job-for-life model, companies increasingly want “flexible workforces:” full-time employee positions become independent contractor gigs, and workers lose health benefits, retirement funds, and many employment protections. Laws like Proposition 22 in California also ensure that gig economy corporations like Uber, Lyft, and Doordash don't have to classify the vast majority of their workers as employees, which further untethers people from long-term financial ...