Nobody Left to Be Loyal To — Issue #13
A young lawyer's parents keep telling him to hang in there. It took me a while to hear what they were actually saying.
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Issue #13 - Nobody Left to Be Loyal To
A young lawyer I coach told me his parents keep giving him the same advice, and he cannot make himself take it.
“Hang in there.”
He is two years out of law school, in a job that pays badly. Everyone a year or two ahead of him leaves around the three-year mark. The partners above them treat that like a character flaw, assuming they are from a generation that won’t commit. And when he told me about it, what worried him most was that he might be proving them right.
I have made five major career transitions of my own, and nobody has ever accused me of failing to commit. (You can read more about them here.) So I went and looked at whether the accusation against his generation holds up.
The data says no. What I found instead was sadder, and it turned out to be about his father.
A Coaching Story
💬 A de-identified composite scenario based on my coaching experiences. This story does not reflect the experience of any particular individual or organization in any way.
He came to our session apologizing, which is its own tell. He said he felt restless, and he was worried that restless was just a nicer word for entitled.
I asked him how “hang in there” was supposed to benefit him.
He started to answer and then stopped. He said his father had given 31 years to one company and retired with a pension. His mother is still at the same hospital system where she started. When they say hang in there, they mean something specific: stay, the staying will be counted, and one day it will be paid back.
Then he said the thing that made this issue worth writing.
“I don’t think anybody is counting how long I’m staying at all, besides me.”
I want you to understand something about him, because it changes what this issue is about. He was sincere. He wants to give a firm 30 years. He would love for someone to want that from him. He simply cannot find the employer his parents keep describing, and he has started to suspect the deal they are pointing at was never available to him.
He is right, and this problem goes deeper than he knows.
The Changing World of Work
📊 A key data point and my insights about what it means to the changing world of work around us.
Start with the accusation, because it collapses on contact.
Young workers are not job-hopping more than their parents did. Today, workers aged 25 to 34 stay in a job a median of 2.7 years. Back in 1983, when that same age bracket was entirely Baby Boomers, it was 3.0 years. Three months of difference across four decades. They are also just as committed as anyone else: among workers in their first year on the job, intent to quit has been falling, from 37% in 2023 to 32% in 2025, closing in on the 30% of people who have been with an organization three years or more.
What the data shows instead is quieter, and it’s worse.
The bottom rung of the ladder is gone. A year after graduating, 52% of the class of 2023 were working in jobs that did not require their degree. Meanwhile the market has frozen shut. Layoffs are running at 1.1%, below where they sat in 2019. Almost nobody is being pushed out, which sounds like good news until you notice the other half of it. Nobody is leaving, so nobody new gets in. The people locked outside are the ones who never got a seat.
And the employer’s half of the bargain has been visibly disappearing. Since 2020, the share of American workers who agree that someone at work cares about them as a person has fallen from 54% to 41%. Having opportunities to learn and grow fell from 48% to 37%. My young lawyer is being lectured about commitment by an institution that is quietly withdrawing its dedication to him.
Then there is the pension, which is where his father comes in.
Defined-benefit pension participation in the private sector peaked in 1984 and has fallen ever since, from roughly 30 million active participants to 11.1 million by 2023. Today, at companies with fewer than 100 employees, only 6% of workers even have access to one. The deal his parents describe was gone before he was born.
But look at how that deal actually worked, because this is the part that undid me. Before 1974, pension plans commonly used what was called cliff vesting: no benefits at all if you left before 10 years of service. Some required you to reach age 40 and 15 years. Some had no vesting whatsoever.
Nine years and eleven months bought you nothing.
That system did not reward loyalty so much as make leaving unaffordable, which is a different strategy wearing the same coat. And it is still how staying works for an enormous number of people: 43% of American workers say they stay mainly because leaving would be too difficult or costly. Of those, 69% cannot afford to lose the pay or benefits.
His father gave 31 years and called it loyalty. His father may have been measuring the price of the exit while believing the promise.
But there is one more turn, and it is the one that changed how I read this whole story. In 15 years of this work, I have noticed that the people who feel this loss most sharply are rarely the young ones. They are the ones who believed the promise. My client’s father was told, in effect, give us your time commitment and we will keep you financially safe. He arranged 31 years around that agreement. My client was never told any such thing. He arrived expecting nothing, so for him, no deal was broken.
That rearranges the whole family narrative.
The wounded one in this story is my client’s father. He believed the promise, gave it 31 years, and has spent the time since living with whatever the answer turned out to be. And when he tells his son to hang in there, he may not be giving advice at all. He may be defending the thing he already paid for. Because the alternative is to look at 31 years and ask what they bought for him and his family. No one should have to do that at 68.
“Hang in there” might be his father’s grief.
This Week’s Resource
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My client asked me the obvious question. If not the firm, then what?
That question deserves a real answer, because loyalty does not evaporate when its target disappears. It sits there, looking for somewhere to go. Most of the committed young people I work with have loyalty to spare — and nowhere to spend it.
So I told him what I have come to believe: loyalty didn’t die, it changed targets. There are four targets for your loyalty, and every one of them belongs to you.
Your craft. You can be loyal to the quality of what you make, whether or not anyone above you notices. Your craft and its quality travel with you. No reorganization touches it.
Your people. The actual humans you have worked beside and learned from, rather than the org chart. Those personal bonds outlast every employer, and they are usually the relationships that get you to whatever comes next.
Your profession. My client is a lawyer, and that is older and bigger than whoever signs his check this year. The profession does not end when the job does.
Your values. What you will and won’t do, no matter who is asking. I call these your bright red lines, and I have written about them here.
All four loyalty targets have something in common, and that is the whole point. Nobody assigned them to you, and nobody can fire you from them. None of them holds you by making leaving expensive. You stay because you want to, which is the only version of loyalty that was ever worth the name.
I want to be honest about one thing, because I think about it every time I offer this concept to a client or a colleague. Choosing where your loyalty goes is easier when you have somewhere else to be. My young lawyer has a license and options, and that is leverage a lot of people his age do not have. If you are reading this from a job you genuinely cannot afford to leave, the four targets are still yours, and I am not going to pretend that naming them pays your rent. Start with the one that costs nothing. The highest-yield, lowest-cost target is the people and relationships you are building with them.
A Powerful Coaching Question
🤔 This week’s high-value coaching question for you to consider in whatever way you like to reflect.
Think about where your loyalty goes by default right now. Are you staying because you want to be there, or because leaving would cost too much? And if you already know the answer, what are you doing with all the loyalty you have left over?
Inspiration for the Week
“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.” — Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
My client’s parents are telling him what to do with his life. They love him, and they are working from the only career roadmap anyone ever handed them, with their own grief folded into it. But listening to them is not the listening Palmer means. That one is his job, and he is young enough that it still costs him almost nothing. It will yield a great deal in satisfaction and self-direction over the years to come.
Before You Go
If you are early in your career and someone has told you that your generation won’t commit, I would genuinely like to hear about it. Write back and tell me what they said, and what you wish you had said back. I am collecting these anecdotes. I’m traveling for the next week or so, and it may take me a few days, but I’ll respond.
And if you are further along and you heard your own voice in my client’s father, I hope this landed gently. You kept your side of an agreement, and you kept it well. Being naive was never the problem here. The person who left the table was never you.
P.S. If you know someone two or three years into a career who has been made to feel like they are the problem, forward this newsletter to them. It may be the first time anyone has shown them the numbers to refute the claim that they won’t commit. And if you know someone who gave a company 30 years, it might be worth asking them what they think they got in return. They may have been waiting a long time for someone to ask.
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Until next week,
Sharon, thank you for this column. It's a great look at how the job market has changed in the last 20+ years. I forget what the statistic is on what percent of workers have what we considered usual benefits from our employer (healthcare, retirement, vacation) - and I believe it is well under 50%. Would love to know the real facts! I really appreciate your framing the 4 loyalties.