50 Essential Thought Leaders on Quiet Quitting

Introduction

The term arrived on TikTok in July 2022, delivered in a 17-second video by Zaid Khan, a 24-year-old software engineer in New York. You're still performing your duties, he said, but you're no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life. Within weeks, the hashtag had generated more than 350 million views, and a phenomenon that organisational psychologists had studied for decades suddenly had a name that resonated with millions of workers simultaneously.

Quiet quitting does not mean quitting a job. It means doing exactly what the job description requires and nothing more. No volunteering for extra projects. No staying late to signal commitment. No emotional investment in the company's mission beyond what is contractually necessary. For employees, it is framed as an act of self-preservation against the relentless demands of hustle culture. For employers, it registers as a productivity and engagement crisis. The tension between those two framings is where the most consequential conversations in the modern workplace are happening.

The numbers are sobering. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, with the economic cost of disengagement now sitting at an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity per year. That is not a rounding error. It is a structural failure of how work is being led, designed, and experienced across industries and continents. The decline is not uniform: manager engagement collapsed from 30% to 22% between 2022 and 2025, destroying what had historically been the engagement premium that leaders enjoyed over the teams they managed.

What most commentators miss is that quiet quitting did not originate in 2022. The tang ping, or lying flat, movement in China emerged in 2021 as a protest against the relentless overwork culture crushing young professionals. Researchers had documented the behaviour under labels like work disengagement, presenteeism, and psychological withdrawal for decades. What changed in 2022 was the vocabulary: workers now had a phrase that described exactly how they felt, and organisations had a problem with a name they could no longer pretend was not happening.

The 50 thinkers on this list are doing the most rigorous, honest, and practically useful work on understanding why quiet quitting happens and what leaders can do about it. They come from research, practice, coaching, journalism, consulting, and lived experience. They do not all agree with each other, which is part of what makes them worth following. Jonno White works with leadership teams to build the conditions that genuine engagement requires. A Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, Jonno facilitates the difficult conversations and cultural practices that organisations experiencing quiet quitting most urgently need.

Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss what that looks like for your team.

Why Quiet Quitting Still Matters in 2026

If quiet quitting were merely a social media moment, the world would have moved on by 2023. It did not. The data from 2025 and 2026 shows engagement continuing to fall, with quiet cracking now describing a pattern where employees are not passively setting limits but are internally collapsing under persistent pressure, job insecurity, and the absence of meaningful purpose. A 2026 Robert Walters study found that 68% of workers globally are career cushioning, maintaining quiet exit strategies even while appearing committed, suggesting that the conditions producing quiet quitting are accelerating, not resolving.

The voices who can help leaders understand and respond to this are not always the loudest ones in the room. Many of the most valuable thinkers on quiet quitting are researchers publishing in journals that never trend, practitioners working with teams in unglamorous industries, and advocates naming structural failures that organisations would prefer not to hear. This list exists to find those voices and bring them into one place.

Jonno White facilitates leadership workshops that help organisations understand why their people are disengaging and build the cultural conditions for genuine re-engagement. Whether virtual or face to face, many organisations find that flying Jonno in costs far less than they expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to start the conversation.

How This List Was Compiled

This list was assembled through a systematic review of active thought leadership on quiet quitting, employee disengagement, burnout, psychological safety, and the future of work. Candidates were assessed on the specificity and quality of their contributions to this conversation, not just their general leadership credibility. The quiet quitting conversation originated in a North American context, and the strongest practitioner-academic voices remain concentrated there. This is a documented reality, not an editorial preference, and the list makes deliberate efforts to include voices from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Israel, and beyond. Disciplinary diversity was a priority: the final 50 include researchers, practitioners, coaches, journalists, authors, and HR leaders. This list deliberately surfaces voices that do not appear on the generic roundups of famous leadership thinkers.

Category 1: The Data Scientists (Entries 1-7)

Before you can address quiet quitting, you need to measure it honestly. The researchers in this category have done more than anyone to quantify disengagement, challenge the conventional wisdom about what drives it, and provide the longitudinal data that separates real insight from editorial conjecture. Their work is the foundation on which everything else in this space is built.

1. Jim Harter

As Chief Scientist, Workplace for Gallup, Jim Harter has led more than 1,000 studies of workplace effectiveness that represent the largest ongoing meta-analysis of human potential in history. It was his research team that established the not engaged category now synonymous with quiet quitting, tracking its steady prevalence for more than two decades before the phrase existed.

Harter is the co-author, with Gallup Chairman Jim Clifton, of It's the Manager, which synthesises Gallup's global findings on what drives engagement, and the co-author of Culture Shock (2023), also written with Jim Clifton. His analysis in Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report documents the manager engagement collapse as a direct driver of the current disengagement crisis. His specific finding that only one in three managers are engaged, creating a cascading problem through every team they lead, is among the most practically important data points any leader working on culture can hold.

2. Jon Clifton

Jon Clifton is the Chief Executive Officer of Gallup and the author of Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It. His specific contribution to the quiet quitting conversation is his framing of disengagement not as a business inconvenience but as a global wellbeing crisis that executive teams have systematically failed to see.

Clifton's characterisation of the current moment as an emotional recession at work has influenced how the most senior business and government leaders discuss disengagement. His point, stated forcefully in the 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, that employee engagement is falling at the exact moment that artificial intelligence is remaking every industry, frames quiet quitting not as a temporary cultural trend but as the defining human capital challenge of the decade.

3. Jennifer Moss

Jennifer Moss is the Chief Research and Strategy Officer at the Global Wellbeing Group and the author of The Burnout Epidemic, published by Harvard Business Press, and Why Are We Here? Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants, published in January 2025. She was named to the 2022 Deloitte Thinkers50 Radar List and is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review. Her central argument, that burnout is an organisational problem rather than an individual failure, directly reframes the quiet quitting conversation.

Moss's specific contribution is her evidence-based argument that self-care solutions fundamentally misdiagnose the quiet quitting problem. Her research showing that 89% of employees reported their work life was getting worse during the pandemic, combined with her documentation of how organisations continued to respond with wellness apps rather than structural change, provides the most rigorous available critique of why most engagement interventions fail.

4. Anthony Klotz

Anthony Klotz is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour at UCL School of Management in London and the academic who coined the Great Resignation in May 2021, predicting the wave of employee exits that followed the pandemic. His research on resignation decisions and the psychological contract between employees and organisations provides the theoretical backbone for understanding quiet quitting as a rational response to perceived contract breach.

His 2025 book Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters makes the research-backed case that careers are shaped by specific disruptive events that cause employees to rethink their relationship to work, providing one of the most complete explanations available for the psychological mechanism behind quiet quitting. His framing of the Great Resignation and quiet quitting as twin expressions of the same underlying reassessment of work gives leaders a coherent narrative for what their organisations are experiencing.

5. Marcel Schwantes

Marcel Schwantes is an executive coach, speaker, author, and contributing editor at Inc. Magazine. His book Humane Leadership: Lead with Radical Love, Be a Kick-Ass Boss offers one of the most practically accessible reframings of what leadership looks like when it actively prevents quiet quitting. He wrote for Inc. as recently as October 2025, drawing on Culture Amp data to argue that disengaged employees are not quiet quitting so much as silently asking their leaders to listen.

Schwantes translates research into specific leader behaviours: asking are you thriving rather than assuming, approaching disengagement with curiosity rather than suspicion, and creating the psychological safety that allows employees to say what is actually going on before withdrawal becomes their only option. His consistent integration of servant leadership philosophy with actionable management practice makes his content some of the most shared in leadership circles addressing the engagement crisis.

6. Nirit Cohen

Nirit Cohen is a Future of Work strategist and a weekly Forbes columnist who spent 30 years in senior HR and mergers-and-acquisitions roles at Intel before becoming an advisor and speaker on workforce transformation. Her specific contribution is to argue that the quiet trends, including quiet quitting, quiet vacationing, and quiet cracking, are not management problems to be solved but systemic signals to be read and responded to with structural change.

Cohen's book on career management in a changing world, combined with her decade-long analysis of the relationship between workforce behaviour and technology policy, gives her a distinctive perspective that most purely psychological framings of quiet quitting lack. Her 2025 and 2026 Forbes columns are among the most widely circulated writing on what organisations that want to prevent disengagement actually need to do differently at the policy and design level.

7. Ryan Pendell

Ryan Pendell is a Senior Workplace Science Editor at Gallup who has been a primary author behind much of the organisation's most-read reporting on quiet quitting and engagement. His specific contribution is translating Gallup's complex longitudinal datasets into accessible, actionable analysis that HR leaders and line managers can actually use, and his persistent challenge to the media tendency to frame quiet quitting as something new rather than an ancient problem finally named.

Pendell co-authored Gallup's foundational Is Quiet Quitting Real? analysis and has continued updating its conclusions through 2025 and 2026. His writing on the relationship between meaningful weekly check-ins, strengths-based conversations, and engagement outcomes provides some of the most specific and evidence-backed guidance on what organisations can practically do to address disengagement at the team level.

Category 2: The Burnout and Wellbeing Researchers (Entries 8-14)

Quiet quitting almost always follows burnout. It is not the beginning of disengagement; it is a late stage in a process that begins with overwork, eroded boundaries, and the slow collapse of the conditions that make work sustainable. The researchers and practitioners here have done the most serious work on understanding burnout as a structural, organisational phenomenon, and their insights are essential context for any leader trying to understand what their disengaged employees are actually experiencing.

8. Emma Seppala

Emma Seppala is a Faculty Director at Yale School of Management and the Science Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. She is the author of The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success. Her research on the relationship between employee wellbeing and sustainable high performance provides one of the most rigorous scientific challenges to the hustle culture assumption that exhaustion is simply the price of excellence.

Seppala's specific contribution is her evidence-based argument that the psychological states organisations incentivise, including constant activation, continuous performance pressure, and social comparison, are precisely the states most likely to produce burnout and withdrawal. Her research on compassion-based leadership as a measurable performance driver has helped leaders understand that the conditions producing quiet quitting are often deliberately created by the very cultures experiencing it.

9. Rasmus Hougaard

Rasmus Hougaard is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Potential Project, a global leadership development firm operating in more than 28 countries, and the author of Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way, co-authored with Jacqueline Carter. His research draws on data from more than 35,000 leaders across 250 organisations in 108 countries, making it one of the most globally comprehensive studies of the leadership conditions that prevent disengagement.

Hougaard's specific finding is that employees are not disengaging because their work is intrinsically uninteresting, but because the leadership conditions surrounding that work are depleting rather than sustaining them. His research on how a shift from achievement-focused to people-focused management priorities predicts team engagement provides a practical lever that many organisations overlook in favour of surveys, perks, and recognition programs that address symptoms rather than causes.

10. Morra Aarons-Mele

Morra Aarons-Mele is the author of The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears into Your Leadership Superpower and the host of The Anxious Achiever podcast, produced by Harvard Business Review. Her work on anxiety and ambition in professional life provides an underexplored lens on quiet quitting: the psychological experience of employees whose engagement is being actively destroyed by the mismatch between what professional success requires and what human beings can sustainably provide.

Aarons-Mele names the anxiety loop that drives many employees from overachieving to disengaging and back, not as a philosophical stance but as a survival response. Her HBR-affiliated platform reaches the HR practitioners and senior leaders who need this framing most, translating psychological complexity into the organisational language that drives change. Her 2025 writing on how hyperachieving cultures produce exactly the burnout that precedes quiet quitting has been widely referenced in HR strategy discussions.

11. Naz Beheshti

Naz Beheshti is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Prananaz, a leadership and wellbeing consultancy, and the author of Pause. Breathe. Choose: Become the CEO of Your Well-Being. A regular Forbes contributor, Beheshti has built a body of work specifically focused on the intersection of executive performance and employee wellbeing, arguing that the leadership relationship a leader has with their own exhaustion cascades directly into team disengagement.

Her specific contribution is her work on how leaders model psychological safety, or fail to, through their own relationship to overwork and recovery. In organisations where senior leaders visibly overwork and treat burnout as a badge of honour, teams receive an unmistakable signal about what commitment looks like. Beheshti's coaching frameworks for helping executives develop a healthier relationship with pressure, without sacrificing performance, address one of the root conditions for quiet quitting at the level where it is most often ignored.

12. Jacqueline Carter

Jacqueline Carter is a Partner and North American Director at Potential Project and the co-author of Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way, co-authored with Rasmus Hougaard. Her research provides the practical application layer, translating the evidence for compassion as a performance strategy into specific leader behaviours that teams experience as genuine care rather than managed empathy.

Carter's specific contribution is her evidence that the most effective leaders at preventing quiet quitting are those who can hold high performance expectations and genuine care for individuals simultaneously, a combination she calls the hard and human duality. Her finding that leaders who score low on compassion see significantly higher rates of team disengagement, even when they score high on technical competence, directly challenges the assumption that engagement is a separate concern from performance management.

13. Christine Porath

Christine Porath is a Professor of Management at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business and the author of Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace and Mastering Community: The Surprising Ways Coming Together Moves Us from Surviving to Thriving (2022). Her research on workplace incivility, spanning studies of more than 20,000 employees globally, surfaces a specific and frequently overlooked driver of quiet quitting: the chronic low-level rudeness and disrespect that erodes commitment without ever rising to the level of formal misconduct.

Porath's data shows that 98% of workers have experienced workplace incivility, and that the costs in lost performance, creativity, and engagement are substantially higher than most organisations measure. Her finding that employees who experience incivility from managers are significantly more likely to disengage, and to perform below their potential even while still present, provides a directly actionable framework for leaders who are baffled by disengagement in cultures that appear, on the surface, to be functional.

14. Jon Jachimowicz

Jon Jachimowicz is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School whose research focuses on the psychology of passion at work. His specific contribution to the quiet quitting conversation is a series of studies showing that organisations which tell employees to follow their passion without addressing the structural conditions that sustain passion over time are actively accelerating disengagement rather than preventing it.

Jachimowicz's most counterintuitive finding is that when work demands chronically exceed employee resources, passion becomes a liability rather than a fuel, producing exactly the burnout-to-withdrawal cycle that quiet quitting describes. His work provides the psychological mechanism that connects Gallup's macro engagement data with the lived experience of the individual who arrived motivated and is now doing the bare minimum as a form of emotional self-defence.

Category 3: The Manager Quality Champions (Entries 15-21)

Every major data source reaches the same conclusion: quiet quitting is a management problem. Employees do not disengage from organisations. They disengage from their managers. The voices in this category have made the granular, specific, evidence-backed case for what manager quality actually means, and why most organisations are developing the wrong things in the wrong people.

15. Jack Zenger

Jack Zenger is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Zenger Folkman and the co-author, with Joe Folkman, of the landmark Harvard Business Review article Quiet Quitting Is About Bad Bosses, Not Bad Employees. His Zenger Folkman data showed that the least effective managers had quiet quitting rates three to four times higher than the most effective ones, with only 3% quiet quitting for managers rated highest at balancing results with relationships.

Zenger's broader research on extraordinary leadership provides the positive case alongside this diagnostic. His work on the specific behaviours that distinguish high-engagement managers, including a genuine combination of results orientation and relationship investment, creates a measurable framework for the kind of leadership development that most organisations have not yet implemented seriously. Following his work provides both the evidence base and the practical architecture for addressing quiet quitting at its source.

16. Joe Mull

Joe Mull is the founder of BossHero Academy and the author of Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work. His framework for what he calls The Ideal Job Formula defines the specific conditions under which employees not only stay engaged but become genuinely committed. His distinction between compliant employees who do the minimum to avoid consequence and committed employees who choose to bring discretionary effort directly maps to the quiet quitting conversation.

Mull's most useful insight for practising managers is his argument that employee loyalty must be earned through specific leadership behaviours rather than assumed as a default. His research into what drives the decision to commit rather than merely comply gives line managers a practical set of levers that is more actionable than most abstract engagement frameworks. His LinkedIn content and podcast consistently translate his research findings into the daily management realities that cause or prevent quiet quitting.

17. Jessica Kriegel

Jessica Kriegel is the Chief Scientist of Workplace Culture at Culture Partners and the author of Unfair Advantage: The Power of Unintended Cultural Bias in the Workplace. Her research links culture practices directly to business outcomes, making the economic case for engagement in language that executive teams respond to. Her specific focus is on culture defined not as values statements and employer branding but as the lived experience of organisational behaviour at the team level.

Kriegel's most significant contribution is her insistence that culture is not what organisations say they value but what behaviours they actually reward and tolerate. Her application of attribution science to workplace culture shows that the explanations managers give for employee behaviour determine whether organisations address quiet quitting at the surface or the root. Her LinkedIn content in 2025 and 2026 has been among the most widely shared in the culture strategy space.

18. Karin Hurt

Karin Hurt is the Chief Executive Officer of Let's Grow Leaders and the co-author of Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates, co-authored with David Dye. Her research on psychological safety directly addresses the silence that precedes quiet quitting: she argues that many employees disengage not because they stop caring, but because they stop believing that speaking up will change anything.

Hurt's specific contribution is her FOFO framework, Fear of Fixing Others, which names the dynamic where both managers and team members avoid the honest conversations that could resolve disengagement before it becomes entrenched. Her practical approach to building cultures where disagreement and concern can be expressed safely, and her regular LinkedIn content on what courageous leadership looks like in practice, make her one of the more practically useful voices for managers navigating disengaged teams.

19. David Dye

David Dye is the co-founder of Let's Grow Leaders and the co-author of Courageous Cultures and Winning Well: A Manager's Guide to Getting Results Without Losing Your Soul, both co-authored with Karin Hurt. His specific focus on winning without losing your soul addresses the cultural conditions that produce manager burnout and, through it, team disengagement. Dye's contribution is his insistence that the performance expectations organisations place on managers are frequently structured in ways that make genuine engagement impossible for both the manager and the people they lead.

His practical guides to specific management conversations, from addressing declining performance without triggering defensiveness to rebuilding trust after cultural failure, give line managers the skills to turn quiet quitters back into contributors. His ongoing work on what he calls responsible reengagement is among the more nuanced practitioner contributions to a field that defaults too quickly to oversimplified solutions.

20. Julie Winkle Giulioni

Julie Winkle Giulioni is a co-founder of DesignArounds and the co-author of Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want, co-authored with Beverly Kaye. Her research on career development as an engagement driver addresses one of the most consistently underestimated contributors to quiet quitting: the perception that there is no meaningful path forward within the current organisation.

Giulioni's specific contribution is her framework for multidirectional growth, including lateral moves, skill deepening, project-based learning, and the enrichment of expertise within a current role, as an alternative to promotion as the only form of meaningful advancement. In an environment where many organisations cannot offer the upward mobility that employees expect, her practical guidance on how managers can facilitate meaningful development within existing constraints is among the most practically valuable available for reducing quiet quitting.

21. Whitney Johnson

Whitney Johnson is the Chief Executive Officer of WLJ Advisors, a Thinkers50 ranked management thinker, and the author of Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company and Disrupt Yourself. Her disruption theory, applied to individual career development, provides a fresh lens on quiet quitting: employees disengage when they have mastered their current role and have no structured path to the next learning curve.

Johnson's S-curve model of learning suggests that leaders who want to prevent disengagement should be deliberately moving their best people toward challenges they have not yet mastered. Her practical framework for assessing where team members sit on their individual learning curves gives managers both a diagnostic tool and a proactive intervention strategy for addressing the disengagement that quiet quitting describes.

Category 4: The Culture Architects (Entries 22-28)

Quiet quitting is not primarily an individual problem. It is a cultural one. The voices in this category have spent their careers understanding how organisational culture is built, broken, and rebuilt, and what that means for the conditions in which employees either bring their full selves to work or quietly withdraw. Their work is essential for leaders who want to address disengagement at the structural level rather than the symptomatic one.

22. Chester Elton

Chester Elton is the co-founder of The Culture Works and the co-author of numerous books on recognition and engagement, including The Carrot Principle, All In, and Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done, co-authored with Adrian Gostick. His decades of research demonstrate that recognition is not a cultural nice-to-have but a measurable driver of retention, performance, and engagement that most organisations dramatically underinvest in.

Elton's most relevant finding for the quiet quitting conversation is his data showing that employees who feel genuinely recognised by their managers are significantly less likely to disengage, and that the most effective recognition is specific, timely, and tied to the values the organisation claims to hold. In an environment where quiet quitting is often a response to feeling invisible, his practical frameworks for building recognition cultures offer leaders an actionable starting point that requires no budget approval.

23. Adrian Gostick

Adrian Gostick is the co-founder of The Culture Works and the co-author of The Carrot Principle, All In, The Best Team Wins, and Anxiety at Work, all co-authored with Chester Elton. His research on the distinguishing features of high-performing, high-engagement cultures provides a data-rich framework for understanding the structural conditions that protect organisations against quiet quitting. His specific focus on the trust-building behaviours of the most effective managers grounds abstract culture conversations in specific, observable actions.

The co-authored Anxiety at Work is particularly relevant because it addresses the anxiety that often precedes disengagement, including the uncertainty, pressure, and fear of making mistakes that drives employees to self-protect by minimising their investment in work. Gostick's cross-sectoral research with global organisations gives his findings genuine validity beyond any single industry or geography.

24. Liane Davey

Liane Davey is the founder of 3COze Inc and the author of The Good Fight: Use Productive Conflict to Get Your Team and Organisation Back on Track. Her specific contribution to the quiet quitting conversation is her research on what she calls conflict debt, the accumulated unaddressed tensions, disagreements, and frustrations that quietly build in teams until they manifest as disengagement, withdrawal, and eventually quiet quitting.

Davey argues that the teams with the highest quiet quitting rates are not the ones with the most conflict, but the ones that avoid conflict most consistently. When difficult conversations are never had, employees lose faith that the organisation is capable of meaningful change and respond by reducing their investment in a future they have stopped believing in. Her frameworks for productive conflict give leaders a practical pathway to the honest conversations that prevent disengagement before it starts.

25. Erica Keswin

Erica Keswin is a workplace strategist and the author of Bring Your Human to Work, Rituals Roadmap: The Human Way to Transform Everyday Routines into Workplace Magic, and Promotions Are So Yesterday: Redefine Career Development. Her specific contribution is her research on the role of workplace rituals and informal human connection in building the sense of belonging that prevents disengagement.

Rituals Roadmap directly addresses a mechanism of quiet quitting that most engagement strategies ignore: the erosion of the informal cultural practices, shared routines, team traditions, and interpersonal moments that signal to employees that they are part of something worth belonging to. Her data shows that organisations investing in intentional rituals see measurable improvements in both engagement and retention, not because rituals are sentimental but because they create the social fabric that makes work meaningful beyond the transactional.

26. Claude Silver

Claude Silver is the Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia, a role that positions employee emotional wellbeing as a central strategic priority. Her specific contribution is to embody and articulate what it means to treat the emotional experience of employees as a legitimate business concern rather than a distraction from performance. Her approach to soulful leadership, combining radical empathy with high standards, is one of the more distinctive practitioner voices in the quiet quitting conversation.

Silver's background as a certified master practitioner of neurolinguistic programming grounds her people-first leadership philosophy in psychological depth rather than mere good intentions. Her LinkedIn content on what it means for employees to feel genuinely seen, heard, and valued is among the most practically useful for HR leaders and people managers who understand that quiet quitting is fundamentally a response to feeling unseen in a role that was supposed to matter.

27. Kevin Oakes

Kevin Oakes is the Chief Executive Officer of i4cp (Institute for Corporate Productivity) and the author of Culture Renovation: 18 Leadership Actions to Build an Unshakeable Company. His research distinguishes culture renovation from culture transformation, arguing that successful culture change starts with specific behavioural practices rather than mission statements or leadership retreats. His 18 actionable practices provide a sequenced pathway from cultural diagnosis to lasting change.

Oakes's specific contribution is his research on culture carriers, the informal employees and managers who model the values an organisation claims to hold in daily practice, and their central role in whether culture change actually takes root or quietly collapses. His finding that organisations with strong informal culture carriers see significantly better engagement outcomes than those that depend on formal culture initiatives gives leaders a human-centred approach to disengagement.

28. Stephen Klemich

Stephen Klemich is the founder of Heartstyles and the co-author of Above the Line: Living and Leading with Heart, co-authored with Mara Klemich. Heartstyles is an international leadership and culture development organisation operating across more than 25 countries, with a specific focus on the relationship between leadership character and employee engagement. His framework for above the line leadership provides a challenging but evidence-grounded diagnostic for cultures that have invested in all the right systems and still lost their people.

Klemich's most practically useful contribution is his argument that the missing variable in most engagement failures is not strategy or process but character: the degree to which leaders operate from values, genuine care, and integrity rather than from fear, politics, and self-interest. For organisations that have exhausted the standard engagement toolkit and are still seeing disengagement, his framework offers a different and deeper set of questions to ask about what is actually happening in the relationship between leaders and teams.

Category 5: The Future of Work Visionaries (Entries 29-35)

Quiet quitting does not exist in isolation. It is one manifestation of a broader, structural shift in how work is understood, valued, and organised across economies and generations. The thinkers in this category have mapped that shift most comprehensively, providing the strategic context that helps leaders understand quiet quitting not as a problem to be managed away but as a signal about the future of employment that demands a genuinely different response.

29. Lynda Gratton

Lynda Gratton is a Professor of Management Practice at London Business School and the author of numerous books on the future of work, including The Shift, The 100-Year Life, co-authored with Andrew Scott, and Redesigning Work. Her research on the intersection of longevity, technology, and changing work expectations provides the broadest strategic context for understanding quiet quitting as a symptom of structural misalignment between industrial-era work design and the realities of twenty-first-century human lives.

Gratton's specific contribution is her argument that the conditions of the modern workplace, including long tenures, overwork as a loyalty signal, and linear careers as the only available model, were designed for a world that no longer exists. Her Redesigning Work framework, developed with global organisations, provides a practical architecture for building working environments where sustainable engagement is structurally possible rather than dependent on individual manager heroics.

30. Tsedal Neeley

Tsedal Neeley is the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the author of Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere. Her research on remote and hybrid work provides one of the most empirically grounded analyses of the specific ways that distance has both created and complicated the quiet quitting problem, making manager quality more critical than ever while simultaneously making it harder to sustain.

Neeley's specific contribution is her research demonstrating that the engagement challenges of remote work are not inherent to the format but are products of how remote work is managed. Teams with managers who maintain deliberate connection rhythms, establish clear expectations across distributed contexts, and invest in the informal interactions that physical proximity once provided naturally, have engagement rates comparable to high-performing in-person teams.

31. Ranjay Gulati

Ranjay Gulati is the Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies. His research on purpose-driven organisations directly addresses one of the most persistent drivers of quiet quitting: the mismatch between what organisations say they stand for and how they actually behave under pressure.

Gulati characterises this gap as convenient purpose, and his evidence that employees, particularly younger workers, are acutely sensitive to the difference between stated and enacted purpose provides a specific diagnostic for leadership teams that are confused about why engagement initiatives are not working. His framing of the Great Resignation as the Great Rethink remains one of the most useful reframings of the post-pandemic workplace shift.

32. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a Professor of Business Psychology at Columbia University and University College London, and the Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup. He is the author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? His specific contribution to the quiet quitting conversation is his research on the structural relationship between leader selection failures and engagement crises: organisations that consistently promote the wrong people into management roles create the conditions for disengagement systematically.

His research on what distinguishes effective from ineffective managers provides a direct link between the talent decisions organisations make at the promotion stage and the quiet quitting patterns they observe years later. For organisations wondering why their engagement scores do not improve despite significant investment in culture programs, Chamorro-Premuzic's analysis of the manager selection problem offers a diagnosis that most culture consultants avoid.

33. Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel is the Managing Partner of Workplace Intelligence and the bestselling author of Back to Human: How Great Leaders Create Connection in the Age of Isolation and Me 2.0. His research on intergenerational workplace dynamics and the role of human connection in sustaining engagement over time provides one of the most practically applicable analyses of what younger workers are actually seeking when they set the boundaries that quiet quitting describes.

Schawbel's specific insight is that the technology-mediated workplace has created a measurable human connection deficit that translates directly into lower engagement. His data showing that employees who feel genuine connection to coworkers and managers are significantly less likely to disengage gives leaders a specific, low-cost intervention point that is more powerful than most formal programs.

34. Alex Edmans

Alex Edmans is a Professor of Finance at London Business School and the author of Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit. His specific contribution to the quiet quitting conversation is his financial research demonstrating that employee wellbeing and engagement are not soft social goods but measurable drivers of long-term business performance. His analysis of companies in the 100 Best Companies to Work For list showing they outperformed their peers by 2-3% per year provides the financial language that many executive teams need before they will take employee engagement seriously.

Edmans's work sits at the intersection of finance, organisational behaviour, and ethics, making it particularly useful for leaders who face scepticism from boards or shareholders about the ROI of investing in the conditions that prevent disengagement. His argument that treating employees as stakeholders rather than costs is not just morally correct but financially superior provides the business case that culture conversations often lack.

35. Heather Younger

Heather Younger is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Employee Fanatix and the author of The Art of Caring Leadership: How Leading with Heart Uplifts Teams and Organisations and The Art of Active Listening: How People at Work Feel Heard, Valued, and Understood. Her research on employee listening as a leadership practice provides one of the most specific and actionable frameworks for addressing quiet quitting at its earliest stage, before disengagement becomes entrenched.

Younger's specific contribution is her Closing the Loop methodology, which provides a structure for how leaders can move from hearing employee concerns to visibly acting on them in ways that rebuild trust. Her data shows that the gap between employees feeling heard and believing that anything will change is the most common driver of the cynicism that precedes quiet quitting.

Jonno White facilitates executive offsites and leadership workshops that translate thinking like this into specific organisational decisions and cultural practices. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your team's specific situation.

Category 6: The Practitioners and Coaches (Entries 36-43)

Thought leadership without practical application is commentary. The voices in this category are the coaches, consultants, and practitioner-researchers who are working directly with leaders and organisations, translating what the research says into the daily, specific, often uncomfortable work of creating cultures where people choose to stay engaged.

36. Liz Ryan

Liz Ryan is the founder of Human Workplace and a widely read Forbes columnist who has written for decades about what she calls bringing humanity back to work. Her specific contribution to the quiet quitting conversation is her consistent advocacy for employee voice, autonomy, and dignity as prerequisites for engagement rather than perks to be earned through performance. Her work explicitly challenges the framing that employees who set work boundaries are the problem.

Ryan's most useful insight is her argument that quiet quitting is frequently a rational and healthy response to organisations that treat employees as interchangeable resources rather than whole people. Her practical guides to what human-centred management looks like in daily practice give managers a grounded alternative to the disengagement-as-personal-failure narrative that dominates most corporate engagement discourse.

37. Zach Mercurio

Zach Mercurio is the founder of the Meaningful Work Institute and the author of The Invisible Leader: Transform Your Life, Work, and Organization with the Power of Authentic Purpose. His research on mattering at work, specifically the experience of feeling that one's contributions are noticed and that they make a difference, provides one of the most psychologically precise frameworks for understanding what quiet quitting is a response to.

Mercurio's specific contribution is his evidence that the single most powerful antidote to disengagement is not compensation, benefits, or flexibility but the experience of mattering: knowing that your absence would be noticed, that your work has impact, and that someone in your organisation genuinely cares whether you are doing well. His research showing that employees who feel they matter are dramatically less likely to disengage gives leaders a specific, relationship-level target that most engagement programs completely miss.

38. Tanveer Naseer

Tanveer Naseer is a leadership coach, speaker, and author of Leadership Vertigo: Why Even the Best Leaders Go Off Course and How They Can Get Back on Track. He is a consistent voice in the Canadian and global leadership community, writing and speaking regularly on what he calls leadership blind spots, the patterns of leader behaviour that drive disengagement precisely because the leader cannot see them.

Naseer's most useful insight is his argument that most leaders who are experiencing quiet quitting in their teams are not acting maliciously but are operating with an incomplete picture of how their behaviour lands on the people around them. His practical frameworks for developing self-awareness as a leadership competency give leaders a pathway to discovering the blind spots that are silently driving their best people toward withdrawal.

39. Aaron De Smet

Aaron De Smet is a Senior Partner at McKinsey and Company and one of the lead researchers behind McKinsey's landmark Great Attrition/Great Attraction research, which provided the most comprehensive corporate-sector analysis of why employees were leaving or quietly withdrawing from their roles in the wake of the pandemic. His research identified five specific employee archetypes defined by their relationship to work and belonging, including the quiet quitters who remained in their roles but were emotionally disengaged.

De Smet's contribution is the specificity of his diagnosis: his research found that quiet quitting was not primarily driven by pay but by factors including not feeling valued by managers, lacking a sense of belonging, not being able to be authentic at work, and not having caring and trusting teammates. This finding provides a targeted diagnostic for organisations that have been raising pay without addressing the actual drivers of disengagement.

40. Ron Friedman

Ron Friedman is the founder of ignite80 and the author of The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace. His research on the science of workplace performance, drawing on decades of psychological research on human motivation, wellbeing, and achievement, provides the evidence base for designing work environments where quiet quitting is structurally unlikely.

Friedman's specific contribution is his translation of academic motivation research, including decades of work on autonomy, mastery, purpose, and social belonging, into practical organisational design principles. His evidence that the conditions supporting intrinsic motivation, when present, make disengagement almost structurally impossible gives organisations a design framework rather than a remediation framework.

41. David Rock

David Rock is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of the NeuroLeadership Institute and the creator of the SCARF model (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness), which provides one of the most widely applied neuroscience-based frameworks for understanding the conditions that produce either engagement or disengagement at work. His specific contribution is his evidence that the five SCARF dimensions, when threatened, produce a threat response that is neurologically incompatible with the creativity, discretionary effort, and commitment that engagement requires.

Rock's most useful insight for leaders is his argument that disengagement is often not a choice employees consciously make but a neurological response to an environment that has triggered their threat detection systems. When status is threatened by dismissive management, when certainty collapses under constant change, when fairness is violated by inconsistent treatment, the brain's protective response is to conserve energy and withdraw, which is precisely what quiet quitting looks like from the outside.

42. Sally Helgesen

Sally Helgesen is the author of How Women Rise, co-authored with Marshall Goldsmith, The Web of Inclusion, and The Female Advantage. Her specific contribution to the quiet quitting conversation is her research on the specific ways that women's engagement at work is affected by cultures that fail to value collaborative, relational, and network-based contributions as highly as they value individual heroism and competitive performance.

Helgesen's finding that women are disproportionately likely to quietly disengage from cultures that reward the wrong things, and that this disengagement represents a measurable loss of organisational capability that most leaders fail to see, connects quiet quitting to the broader equity failure that her work addresses. Her practical guidance on what cultures that sustain women's engagement look like in practice is directly applicable to any organisation that is losing its most careful, relationship-aware contributors.

43. Liz Wiseman

Liz Wiseman is the President of the Wiseman Group and the author of Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter and Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact. Her research on the distinction between Multiplier leaders who amplify the intelligence and capability of everyone around them and Diminisher leaders who inadvertently suppress it provides a direct framework for understanding one of the most common structural drivers of quiet quitting.

Wiseman's specific contribution is her data showing that employees working for Diminisher leaders routinely use only 20-50% of their capability, not because they are disengaged by choice but because their leadership environment actively suppresses their contribution. This finding reframes quiet quitting not as employees doing less than they should, but as employees doing less than they could in an environment that has stopped drawing the best out of them.

Category 7: The Equity, Belonging, and Generation Voices (Entries 44-50)

Quiet quitting is not experienced equally. The conditions that produce disengagement are more likely to exist in some team environments than others, and the employees most likely to face those conditions are often those whose contributions are already least valued. The voices in this category bring the equity, inclusion, generational, and recognition dimensions that are frequently absent from mainstream quiet quitting discussions.

44. Tim Elmore

Tim Elmore is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Growing Leaders and the author of numerous books on generational leadership, including Generation Z Unfiltered: Facing Nine Hidden Challenges of the Most Anxious Population and The Eight Paradoxes of Great Leadership. His specific contribution to the quiet quitting conversation is his research on what younger workers, particularly Gen Z, are actually seeking from work and why the conditions that produce quiet quitting in this generation are structurally different from those that drove disengagement in previous cohorts.

Elmore's most important finding is that Gen Z employees are not quiet quitting because they are lazy or entitled but because they are the first generation to have grown up watching their parents burn out for organisations that subsequently laid them off. Their pragmatic relationship to work, setting clear limits, prioritising mental health, and refusing to overextend, is not a character failure but a rational adaptation to a labour market that has taught them not to over-invest.

45. Amy Lavoie

Amy Lavoie is the Vice President of People Science at Culture Amp, where she leads research into the human dimensions of employee experience, engagement, and wellbeing at scale. Her work draws on Culture Amp's dataset of more than 3.3 million employees globally, making it one of the most current and comprehensive sources of real-time engagement intelligence available. Her October 2025 commentary on Culture Amp's finding that fewer than 2% of employees meet the clinical definition of quiet quitting, while 59% are simply not engaged, provided one of the most important data clarifications in the ongoing public conversation about the phenomenon.

Lavoie's specific contribution is her argument that leaders who approach disengaged employees with suspicion rather than curiosity are systematically making the problem worse. Her research on the compassionate, candid conversation as the highest-leverage intervention for re-engagement gives managers the specific behavioural tools they need rather than abstract strategic advice.

46. John Amaechi

John Amaechi is an organisational psychologist, author, and the Chief Executive Officer of APS Intelligence in the United Kingdom. He is the author of The Promises of Giants and a regular voice on the relationship between belonging, psychological safety, and workplace performance. His specific contribution to the quiet quitting conversation is his research on how exclusion experiences, including the micro-exclusions that most leaders are not aware they are creating, produce the disengagement that gets labelled as quiet quitting.

Amaechi's most useful insight for leaders is his argument that belonging is not about making everyone feel comfortable but about making everyone feel consequential. Employees who do not feel that their presence matters, that their absence would create a gap, that their contributions are noticed and valued, are structurally more likely to disengage regardless of how good their pay, benefits, or flexibility arrangements are.

47. Hamza Khan

Hamza Khan is a Canadian leadership educator, award-winning content creator, and the author of The Burnout Gamble: Achieve More by Beating Burnout and Building Resilience. His specific contribution to the quiet quitting conversation is his synthesis of burnout research with the lived experience of younger knowledge workers navigating careers in an era of constant connectivity, performance surveillance, and AI-driven productivity pressure.

Khan's most distinctive contribution is his accessible, high-engagement communication style: he reaches audiences that academic researchers and corporate consultants rarely penetrate, including early-career professionals, first-generation knowledge workers, and managers in non-Western contexts. His regular LinkedIn content on what psychological safety and burnout prevention look like in daily practice makes him a significant bridge between the research community and the practitioners who need its insights most.

48. Eric Mosley

Eric Mosley is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Workhuman, one of the world's largest employee recognition and wellbeing platforms. His specific contribution to the quiet quitting conversation is his evidence, drawn from Workhuman's research across millions of employees in hundreds of organisations, that recognition is one of the highest-ROI interventions available for preventing disengagement, and that most organisations are dramatically underusing it.

Mosley's co-authored book Making Work Human: How Human-Centred Companies Are Changing the Future of Work and Business, written with Derek Irvine, makes the financial case for recognition-based culture as a retention and performance strategy. His most directly useful finding for practitioners is that the frequency, specificity, and peer-to-peer nature of recognition matter more than its monetary value, and that organisations that shift from top-down reward programs to continuous social recognition see measurable improvements in engagement within months.

49. Meisha-Ann Martin

Meisha-Ann Martin is the Senior Director of People Analytics and Research at Workhuman and one of the most credible practitioner voices on the relationship between recognition, belonging, and the prevention of quiet quitting. Her research at Workhuman, drawing on data from millions of employees, provides empirical grounding for the recognition-as-engagement-driver argument that colleagues like Eric Mosley champion at the strategic level, giving it the academic rigour that makes it persuasive to data-sceptical executives.

Martin's specific contribution is her analysis of how belonging and recognition interact to produce engagement or disengagement. Her finding that employees who receive regular peer recognition are dramatically less likely to exhibit quiet quitting behaviours, even in organisations with below-average pay or flexibility, directly challenges the compensation-centric model of retention and gives HR leaders a set of levers that are often under their direct control regardless of broader budget constraints.

50. Katica Roy

Katica Roy is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pipeline Equity and a leading voice on the intersection of gender equity, economic opportunity, and employee engagement. Her specific contribution to the quiet quitting conversation is her research demonstrating that workplace equity, defined as the structural fairness of how opportunities, recognition, and advancement are distributed, is one of the strongest predictors of engagement across gender, race, and generation.

Roy's most important finding for organisations navigating quiet quitting is her evidence that employees who perceive their workplace as structurally unfair are significantly more likely to disengage, regardless of how much individual-level support, recognition, or wellbeing programming they receive. Her practical framework for measuring and improving equity at the systemic level provides the structural lens that is missing from most engagement strategies. Closing the equity gap, in her research, is one of the most powerful and underutilised tools for preventing quiet quitting.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several people who came very close to making this list deserve recognition for their contributions to the field. Brene Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek would appear on most leadership-adjacent lists, and their work on vulnerability, organisational culture, and influence has shaped how many organisations think about engagement. This list deliberately moved past those household names to surface fresher voices the reader may not yet have encountered.

Other strong candidates include Arianna Huffington of Thrive Global, whose 2022 LinkedIn piece on quiet quitting was one of the more widely read reframings of the phenomenon. Gary Hamel of London Business School, whose work on Humanocracy addresses the management bureaucracy that drives disengagement at a systemic level, was a close consideration. Marcus Buckingham, whose strengths and engagement research at ADP Research Institute provides important data, was also seriously considered.

Common Mistakes When Engaging with Quiet Quitting Thought Leadership

The most common mistake organisations make is treating quiet quitting as an employee attitude problem rather than a leadership systems failure. Every major voice on this list agrees that disengagement is almost always a response to conditions that leadership created or failed to address. Organisations that begin their response by asking what is wrong with our people rather than what are we doing that is driving our people to disengage will spend resources on the wrong interventions and see no sustained improvement.

A second mistake is confusing the absence of complaint with the presence of engagement. Quiet quitting is, by definition, quiet. The team that never voices concerns, never pushes back, and never asks for more is not necessarily high-performing or content. Organisations need active listening structures, not passive ones. The absence of a complaint does not mean the absence of a problem.

A third mistake is treating the cultural data tension as a reason for inaction. The fact that Culture Amp finds only 2% of employees meeting the clinical definition of quiet quitting while Gallup counts 59% as not engaged does not mean the data is wrong. It means the two measures are tracking different things. Both are genuine problems. Both require different responses. Using the discrepancy to dismiss the issue entirely is the single most expensive mistake a leadership team can make.

A fourth mistake is addressing engagement without addressing equity. Katica Roy's research, and John Amaechi's work on belonging, both demonstrate that employees who experience structural unfairness will not engage meaningfully regardless of how good the recognition programmes, wellbeing benefits, or flexibility arrangements are. Equity is not an add-on to an engagement strategy. It is a precondition for one.

A fifth mistake is making quiet quitting a generational conversation. Yes, younger workers are more likely to describe their boundary-setting in quiet quitting language. But the underlying disengagement is not age-specific. Gallup's data shows declining engagement across every demographic category. The most effective response is not a Gen Z-specific retention programme; it is a manager quality improvement programme that benefits every age cohort simultaneously.

Implementation Guide: Following These Voices and Using Their Work

The highest-leverage starting point is following the Gallup data releases as they happen. Jim Harter, Jon Clifton, and Ryan Pendell publish updates to the State of the Global Workplace research through Gallup's website and LinkedIn channels, and these updates provide the best available real-time read on whether engagement is improving or declining in your industry and region.

The next step is identifying which of the seven categories in this list is most urgent for your organisation. If your engagement survey data shows low manager scores, start with the Manager Quality Champions: Jack Zenger, Joe Mull, Jessica Kriegel, and Karin Hurt. If your culture scores are low but your manager scores are average, start with the Culture Architects: Chester Elton, Kevin Oakes, and Liane Davey. If you are facing a generational engagement challenge with younger workers, Tim Elmore and Hamza Khan are the most direct entry points. If equity scores are low, Katica Roy and John Amaechi provide the most structured diagnostic.

Following thought leaders actively, meaning engaging with their content by commenting thoughtfully rather than just scrolling past, has a secondary benefit beyond the information: the most engaged voices on this list respond to genuine interaction, and those responses often contain insights that never make it into books or formal research.

For leadership teams ready to move from reading to action, Jonno White facilitates executive offsites and leadership workshops that translate the thinking of voices like these into specific organisational decisions and cultural practices. Whether your team is grappling with high quiet quitting rates, declining engagement survey scores, or a general sense that your culture has stopped pulling in the same direction, a well-facilitated session can turn months of reading into days of aligned action. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your team's specific situation.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is quiet quitting, and is it the same as disengagement?

Quiet quitting refers specifically to the behaviour of doing exactly what a job description requires and nothing more, without formally resigning. It is closely related to disengagement but not identical: disengagement is a psychological state, while quiet quitting is a behavioural pattern. The Gallup definition of not engaged (approximately 59% of the global workforce) includes employees who are quiet quitting, but also includes people who may simply be in roles that are not challenging them. The Culture Amp definition is stricter, counting only those who lack motivation to go above and beyond while planning to stay. Both measures are real and both matter.

How was this list compiled?

This list was assembled through a systematic review of active global thought leadership on quiet quitting, employee disengagement, burnout, psychological safety, and the future of work. Candidates were assessed on the specific quality and relevance of their contributions to this particular conversation, their geographic and disciplinary diversity, and their genuine contribution to the field rather than their general name recognition in the broader leadership space.

Is quiet quitting still relevant in 2026?

Very much so. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report found global engagement at 20%, its lowest level since 2020, at an estimated cost of $10 trillion in lost productivity per year. The concept has evolved: quiet cracking now describes employees who are not passively setting limits but are internally struggling under persistent pressure without adequate support. The conditions that produce disengagement are not resolving. They are intensifying.

What is the single most important thing leaders can do to prevent quiet quitting?

The research consensus is consistent: invest in manager quality. The variation in quiet quitting rates between highly effective managers and ineffective ones is three to four times, according to Zenger Folkman data. Everything else, recognition programs, flexible work, wellbeing benefits, and culture initiatives, has significantly less impact than the quality of the relationship between an employee and their direct manager. The most effective single intervention is giving every manager the skills, time, and support to have one meaningful, person-focused conversation with each team member every week.

Can I hire someone to facilitate a workshop on quiet quitting and employee engagement for my team?

Jonno White facilitates leadership workshops and executive team sessions specifically designed to help organisations understand and address the conditions driving disengagement. As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, Jonno brings both the research grounding and the practical facilitation skills to turn a day of conversation into a year of more aligned leadership action. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your team's needs.

What is the difference between quiet quitting and quiet cracking?

Quiet quitting is a deliberate decision: an employee chooses to do only what is required and nothing more. Quiet cracking is a less intentional state: employees who are visibly present and apparently functional but are internally struggling with persistent unhappiness, job insecurity, unclear expectations, or stalled growth. Quiet cracking often precedes quiet quitting, and both often precede formal resignation. Organisations that can identify quiet cracking early, through regular, honest conversations rather than annual engagement surveys, have the best chance of intervening before disengagement becomes entrenched.

Final Thoughts

Quiet quitting is one of the most important signals a workforce can send to its leadership. Not because it is dramatic or loud, by definition it is neither, but because it represents a fundamental reassessment of the terms of the employment relationship. When employees stop going above and beyond, they are not being lazy. They are responding rationally to an environment that has stopped making it worthwhile.

The 50 thinkers on this list have collectively produced decades of research, thousands of conversations with leaders, and some of the most important books written about work in the past decade. They do not agree on everything. But they agree on the most important thing: quiet quitting is a leadership problem with a leadership solution, and the solution requires honesty, structural change, and the willingness to make the relationship between managers and their people the actual strategic priority that every engagement survey already suggests it should be.

The first step is finding the voices that challenge your assumptions most productively and following them with genuine curiosity rather than defensive certainty. The 50 people on this list are a good place to start. For leadership teams ready to translate that reading into action, Jonno White helps organisations build the team culture, communication clarity, and leadership accountability that engagement requires.

His book Step Up or Step Out addresses the difficult conversations and leadership challenges that sit at the root of most disengagement.

Step Up or Step Out on Amazon

Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your team's next step.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

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