When Cecilia DiLello got promoted into a manager role at her digital sales company, it should have been a milestone in her journey up the corporate ladder. Instead, it led to burnout.
“I wanted to be a manager. It was super exciting,” said DiLello. But her vision of mentoring junior colleagues and building an empowered team fizzled as her workload ballooned to include management duties on top of the regular tasks of the job, without proper people-management training. “We move into these roles, but we’re not really given the tools to navigate some of these situations,” she said. “People get burnt out because they’re trying to navigate their role, help their team, make a difference — but they’re banging their heads against the wall.”
In 2022, after eight years managing a team, DiLello quit her job and became a popular TikTok creator known as Corporate Dropout Mom. Now in her early forties and based in Pennsylvania, she spends her time parodying the corporate world she left behind.
Among younger professionals, the once-coveted manager title has become so unappealing that deliberately swerving it has spawned a buzzword: “Conscious unbossing.” In a 2024 poll of Canadian Gen Zs, 60 per cent said they would rather advance as an individual contributor than as a manager of a team. Two-thirds of them said it was because it seemed high stress, low reward.
The trending term borrows from two Millennial touchstones: Gwyneth Paltrow’s “conscious uncoupling” from ex-husband Chris Martin and the pseudofeminist “girlboss” era. It has been gaining traction since late 2024, emerging as a reaction to the “great unbossing” or “great flattening” of earlier that year, when large companies such as Meta slashed middle management roles in a series of layoffs.
Conscious unbossing, or avoiding management roles, is a type of insurance against such culls. It’s also a rejection of the cult of productivity, similar to the “great resignation” trend of a few years ago but for those who can’t quit outright because they have, say, a mortgage to pay and a kid in daycare.
When Torontonian Jessica Snow was a senior retail executive at major corporations like Walmart and Tim Hortons, she found herself travelling 50 per cent of the time while trying to be a good manager, partner and parent to two small children. The positions that had she had seen as a privilege began to feel like a burden.
“I was coming home drained because I was preoccupied with my team’s needs and emotional concerns. As an introvert, some days I just wanted to be left alone and be that analyst doing a financial model with my headset on,” said the 43-year-old. “When you have a killer team and everything works and you have something out in the market and it’s winning? That’s the biggest high. But with so much going on in the world, the emotional burdens, some of the generational challenges, it stacks up where the risk versus the reward is starting to get completely imbalanced.”
Ultimately, it led Snow to leave the corporate world behind and co-found Be Uninterrupted, a professional support network for women looking to redefine success.
“There are a lot of talented women, and there are so many studies about how we make great leaders. But at what cost? You get too close to the sun and then you fall off a cliff,” she said. “We have women at the SVP level or the C-Suite saying, ‘Great, I checked all the boxes and went all the way up the ladder. Now what?’”
Snow has noticed more “separation of identity” from a person to their role in a company, and a shift away from pursuing career advancement purely because it signals success.
“Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should,” she said. If you’re at a management crossroads, she suggests asking yourself: Is this going to make me happy? What would be the cost? And what does happiness and success look like for me?
Organizational psychologist Dr. Amanda Tobe, whose Toronto practice specializes in career services, has seen a growing number of clients turn down management roles and launch their own “values-driven” businesses, or pause full-time work. “These decisions aren’t always easy, but they often come from a desire to do work that feels authentic,” said Tobe. “Rather than automatically striving for promotions or managerial roles, clients are reflecting deeply on what success means to them, often prioritizing purpose, impact, flexibility and well-being over status or hierarchy.”
Clients often talk about a “misalignment” between personal and corporate values. “They describe frustration, confusion and a growing dissatisfaction with career paths that once felt promising but no longer feel meaningful or sustainable,” said Tobe. “For some, these shifts are sparked by a deeper awareness of what leadership really entails. They’re not shying away from responsibility, but they are increasingly mindful of the demands that come with leading others — the emotional labour, the time pressures, and the wear and tear it can have on their personal lives and well-being.”
It’s not that this generation simply lacks the drive or persistence of their Boomer or Silent Generation forebears. “What we’re hearing isn’t a rejection of ambition, it’s a redefinition,” Tobe said. “Clients are seeking work that not only aligns with who they are, but also allows them to lead in ways that feel healthy.”
For DiLello, the upsides of being a manager — a bit more money, a sense of “progressing” in her life and career — didn’t outweigh the downsides, like high stress and time away from her young family.
“Toxic managers and bad work environments existed in my parents’ day, but maybe the reward and the motivation were different. Now jobs just ask too much of their employees in general, and their managers,” she said. “They just keep piling on numerous roles into one role, and a lot of people come to a breaking point.”
It’s not always smooth sailing doing her own thing after decades in the corporate world. “Some days are better than others, and you’re trying to figure it out. But then I read some people’s comments [on my videos] and I’m like, ‘Oh, God, I’m not healed,’” DiLello said with a laugh.
Hanging up her manager hat has meant working through an identity crisis of sorts, unpacking complicated feelings about self-worth stemming from a culture that tells us what we do is who we are. “I struggled, because you feel very alone in that [feeling of], ‘Is it me? Did I create this? Did I push too hard? Was I the problem?’” said DiLello, who started using TikTok to share those feelings. “Quickly people responded. I didn’t realize how many people had similar experiences. That’s become very comforting, not just for myself but for people in the community.’”
Really, what an idea like conscious unbossing gives us is permission to stop trying to jump through arbitrary hoops we were told constituted success. “Prioritize your well-being and happiness,” DiLello said. “Maybe that’s not being a manager, and that’s totally OK.”
