The Great Abdication in recruitment right now is driven by weak management. Right now, "Treating People Like Adults" Is killing your performance culture.

In this episode, Jeremy Snell confronts one of the most shared, most repeated complaints in modern work: the dislike of being micromanaged. Scroll any feed and the articles are everywhere. Sit in enough interviews and you will hear it again and again, consultants explaining that they are looking for a new role because the last one micromanaged them.

Jeremy gets it. For a genuinely strong performer, micromanagement is suffocating. But he draws a sharp line that most of this conversation misses. When many people say they do not like being micromanaged, what they actually mean is they do not like being managed at all. Those are very different things, and conflating them has consequences across recruitment.

That confusion has rippled into leadership. Managers, terrified of the micromanager label, hold back from the very things that would lift performance. Hesitation breeds tolerance. The moment we tolerate substandard behaviour, activity, or results, we endorse it. Jeremy calls this the great abdication: the quiet letting go of ownership by leaders who can see exactly what their recruitment agency needs, yet watch it slip away.

In this episode, Jeremy explores:

• Why "we treat everyone like adults" often signals an absence of coaching culture, not the presence of maturity
• The critical difference between goals, which we coach to, and standards, which we hold people accountable to
• Why "I know what I'm doing" is frequently a defence mechanism rather than evidence of competence
• What happens to a business when leaders stop holding the line, and the cost of consultants who stay inconsistent
• The simple antidote that turns accountability into something owned by the team, not imposed on it

Listen if you lead a team where: results are inconsistent, standards slip quietly, and "next week will be better" has become the running excuse.

Press play to hear the full method.

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