Everyone spent this fall arguing about quiet quitting. I run a startup, Kquika, and the conversation felt backwards to me the whole time. The problem was never that people started doing the bare minimum. The problem is that most companies hire for a skill set and then act surprised when they get exactly that and nothing more.
I hire for something else. I hire people who give a fuck.
By that I mean people who treat the company as an extension of themselves. They notice the broken thing at 11 p.m. and fix it, because leaving it broken would bother them personally. You can't train that into someone. You can only find it and protect it.
The numbers back this up
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report came out in June, and the findings are grim. Only 21% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. Sixty percent are emotionally detached, and another 19% are miserable. That's roughly four out of five people showing up to a job they've already checked out of.
Gallup also ran its tenth meta-analysis on this in 2020, covering 112,312 work units and 2.7 million employees. Comparing the top and bottom quartiles on engagement, the top teams showed 23% higher profitability, 18% higher sales productivity, and 41% fewer quality defects.
So this isn't a soft, feel-good preference. The gap between a team that cares and a team that clocks in shows up in the financials.
What you actually get
Someone who gives a fuck is committed to where the company is going, and that commitment spreads. One person staying late on something hard changes what the rest of the team thinks is normal.
They're also more inventive. People who care about the work think about it in the shower and come back with ideas nobody asked for. A startup trying to stand out in a crowded market runs on exactly that.
They're better teammates, too. When you see the company as an extension of yourself, you stop guarding territory and start handing off whatever gets the thing shipped.
And they stay. Startups take punches, and the people who see this as their company absorb the hits instead of updating their resume.
Why this matters more in aviation
Kquika builds for aviation, which changes the stakes. In this industry, an ignored detail doesn't cost you a quarter, it costs something far worse. Safety culture only works when people care enough to flag the small thing that looks slightly off, and nobody flags the small thing when they've mentally quit.
How I find them
I look for people who love learning, and not only about aviation. Curiosity that shows up outside the job description usually shows up inside it too. Someone who taught themselves an instrument or picked apart an engine on a weekend will dig into our problems the same way.
I look for people who'll take a swing. I don't mean recklessness. I mean a willingness to test something new when the old approach has stalled.
I look for what someone did when nobody was watching or paying them. That tells me more than any credential.
Jim Collins made the case for this two decades ago in Good to Great. His advice was to get the right people on the bus first, then decide where to drive it. He argued that with the right people aboard, the problem of how to motivate and manage them largely goes away, because they carry their own drive.
That matches what I've seen. Managing someone who gives a fuck mostly means getting out of their way.
Then you have to keep them
Hiring these people is the easy half. Losing them is embarrassingly simple.
Recognize the effort out loud when it happens. Give people room to grow, because someone who cares this much will leave if the work stops stretching them. Build a place where people cover for each other instead of competing.
Gallup's data makes the same point from the other direction. In the same meta-analysis, the most engaged teams showed 70% more employees thriving in overall wellbeing. Happy teams and productive teams turn out to be the same teams.
The honest caveat
None of this guarantees anything. Plenty of startups die with a team that cared deeply, and passion won't save a product nobody wants.
But every startup I admire had a small group of people who took it personally. That's the bet I'm making at Kquika, and one year in, it's the only hiring decision I'd make the same way again.
Hire people who give a fuck.
