Seven out of 10 workers in the United States would quit a job if they’re forced to work under a bad manager according to the most recent Workforce Confidence survey by LinkedIn.
Broken down by generation, Gen Z and millennials are most likely to leave (75% and 77%, respectively), followed by 68% of Gen X workers and 61% of boomers.
Adds the professional networking site that jumped the shark to Facebook With Business Cards years ago, respondents don’t want the manager gig themselves, they just want out:
What’s more? Those looking to leave their managers aren’t necessarily thinking they could do the job better. Among individual contributors, just one third of workers say they aspire to become people managers themselves, with millennial workers most likely to say they’re eyeing a promotion into people management.
Some workers may just not see the value in pursuing a career in management. According to separate LinkedIn findings, nearly half of U.S. managers report feeling burned out from their jobs — possibly thanks to stress over the threat of middle management layoffs or increasing productivity demands from the top.
In a separate but related survey by CoderPad, 36% of tech workers said they aren’t interested in the manager track. “For [the Gen Z and millennial] cohort, the trade off in extra hours without much more compensation isn’t worth all the extra time, aggravation and stress commensurate with overseeing workers,” wrote Jack Kelly for Forbes.
As public accounting makes a dramatic shift from offshore grunts performing bottom-of-the-barrel busywork to entire teams from senior down staffed by outsourced workers in places like India and the Philippines overseen by onshore managers 9-12 hours behind them, there’s no doubt in our mind that the manager track will be even less appealing to the generations that were already uninterested in the ladder.
Related thread: