RTO mandates are caused by middle aged men not liking their wives
Delighted to post this small conversation with Nick Shackleton-Jones. Nick posts brilliantly witty rants on TikTok that are just the best things I hear about work and the futility of bureaucracy.
TikTok is a fame machine and if creators drop a banger they can end up reaching a vast audience. Nick has posted some content about work, neurodiversity and philosophy that has had millions of views.
It was his take on why middle aged men wanted to return to the office that I put in the newsletter last week and made up the reason why we chatted but there’s so much more to this – not least him talking about adaptive behaviours and masking for people on the spectrum.
He says: ‘feeling respected is an important part of why people become leaders’ and this has a bearing on the identity of those leaders.
‘People want to arrange coffee catch-ups with you, they want to be mentored by you, your buddies want to have lunch to discuss big, important topics, people laugh at your jokes in meetings. People look to you to hear what you have to say before anybody else.’ S
hackleton-Jones said many of these signals of identity and status were lost when work went remote, ‘People aren’t scrambling to spend time with you in quite the same way. You’re not quite sure what it is that you’re supposed to be doing. You don’t feel important in quite the same way. Worse than that The kids are screaming while you’re trying to have calls.’
In the old days leaders felt that the office gave them a sense of status, ‘now they’re just another person in a t-shirt on a Zoom call’.
‘It’s like, do people not realise how important I am? You know, I’ve got a job to do. I can’t be loading the dishwasher. I’m not here to take the cat to the vets.
‘And these are people who are desperate to get back to the office because they’re crown is there, their identity. Can’t we just go back to the good old days. where everybody knew I was important and listened to me and I was in charge? And that is a big part of the reason you’re being asked to go back to the office.’
Great listen. If you don’t use TikTok then I’ve given a selection of his best posts below:
Nick on TikTok – this is the good stuff
Best posts to check out:
