#432 Entitlement in the World of New Work: Leadership Between Evidence and Arbitrariness - Article written by Niels Brabandt
Entitlement in the World of New Work: Leadership Between Evidence and Arbitrariness
Article by Niels Brabandt
Niels Brabandt’s thesis: Entitlement is not a generational problem. It is a leadership problem on both sides of the table. Leaders who still rely on gut feeling and nostalgia lose talent, productivity, and credibility.
What “Entitlement” Really Means
Entitlement is the mindset of “I deserve this” – without evidence of performance or contribution. We see it in job applications, salary negotiations, and promotion requests. But we also see entitlement in organisations that assume privileges or demand office presence without offering justification.
The Corporate Blind Spot
The sharper issue today is not excessive demands from candidates but the entitlement of organisations themselves. Statements such as “remote work questions are annoying” or “everyone must be in the office” are not grounded in strategy but in arbitrariness. This attitude ignores data, employee needs, and market realities – making it one of the costliest approaches to people management, as it drives attrition and undermines employer branding.
Experience ≠ Self-Referential Leadership
As Niels Brabandt stresses, experience is valuable only when it is reflected upon frequently. Self-referential leadership (“I did it this way, so it must be right”) blocks progress – especially in modern work models. Defending manual spreadsheets against AI is not proof of quality but a symptom of resistance. Effective leadership demands evidence, not anecdotes.
Remote Work: Evidence, Not Nostalgia
There is robust research on how to lead successfully at a distance. Leaders who impose office mandates without clear, verifiable reasons act arbitrarily – signalling that internal opinions outweigh external evidence. The result? Top talent chooses employers who design flexibility in a justified and structured way.
Common pitfall: “Remote is allowed only with manager approval, maximum two days per week.” Translation: remote work is socially penalised. Let’s be honest: either you want hybrid work, or you do not. Half-hearted approaches are spotted instantly and punished in the market.
Cost Fairness Over Perks
“Great cafeteria,” “modern campus” – these are nice-to-haves. What truly matters is fairness in time and costs. If leaders demand daily commutes of two hours, they must offset that burden financially and organisationally. Otherwise, high performers will walk away.
Competition: Your Rival is Any Firm with Internet Access
In today’s market, you no longer compete only locally. Remote-ready companies recruit globally, meet occasionally in person, deliver consistently, and grow. Organisations ignoring this reality will lose to competitors who master hybrid and remote operations.
Salary & Career: From Demands to Solutions
Yes, unrealistic salary expectations exist. Professional leadership channels them effectively:
Define clear development paths, certifications with market value, and structured routes to responsibility – and then assign pay ranges.
Avoid vague promises (“less at the start, more later”). Instead, provide milestones tied to measurable achievements.
This approach transforms entitlement into commitment.
Niels Brabandt’s Five Leadership Principles Against Entitlement
1. Evidence before assertion. Any rule – whether office quotas or fixed hours – must be justified by provable requirements. Otherwise, it is arbitrary.
2. Hybrid with structure, not slogans. Teams must define upfront which tasks truly require co-presence and which are handled more effectively remotely.
3. Include time and cost fairness. Commuting costs and hours must be factored into remuneration.
4. Train for distance leadership. Leading remotely requires a skillset which includes expectation management, outcome-based steering, communication routines, tool competence, and creating psychological safety.
5. Make careers transparent. Role profiles, skill matrices, certifications, and peer reviews turn vague demands into structured, evidence-based career progression.
A Quick Leadership Check for Office Mandates
· Which client, quality, or security requirement truly necessitates physical presence?
· Which work steps demonstrably benefit from co-location?
· Which alternatives have been tested?
· How are time and cost burdens being offset?
If you cannot answer these questions with evidence, an office mandate is unjustified – and the market will punish the inconsistency.
Culture Without Empty Words
Respect and appreciation are not slogans for office walls. Organisations that ignore evidence and act arbitrarily lose the right to include such terms in their employer branding. Culture is demonstrated through decisions, not through taglines.
Conclusion by Niels Brabandt
Entitlement will not disappear through appeals. It vanishes through architecture: clear rules backed by evidence, genuine hybrid models, fairness in time and costs, qualified distance leadership, and transparent career paths. This approach is how organisations achieve the balance promised by New Work, and how they stay competitive in a global talent market.
About the Author
Niels Brabandt is the Owner and Founder of NB Networks. An internationally recognised keynote speaker, advisor, and leadership expert, he supports organisations ranging from SMEs to multinationals. He publishes regularly on leadership, New Work, and organisational transformation, including contributions in Forbes, Newsweek, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Handelsblatt and through his Leadership Podcast and Blog.
Niels Brabandt
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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
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Niels Brabandt is an expert in sustainable leadership with more than 20 years of experience in practice and science.
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Podcast Transcript
Niels Brabandt
Entitlement thinking. And you probably now already have in your mind someone where you say, I know one of these people and we're going to talk about entitlement thinking in a slightly different way today. Of course, you know people who are, who think, just to give you a definition, entitlement thinking means someone thinks they deserve something without having it earned. And of course, especially in today's working world, many people say, certain people, certain generations, certain groups, certain attitude towards work has changed in a way that I consider entitlement thinking. And the question is, is that really the case? Is that the case that we can say in a sustainably, scientifically proven way, is entitlement thinking growing or is the problem maybe a bit more complex than we thought in the beginning? So when you now think of your working world, the place where you work or the business you run, what do you think about entitlement thinking?
And is it really an issue? So welcome to this week's episode. When we talk about entitlement thinking, we're going to talk about it from a scient point of view. So it means we're not going to deal with only opinions. Because one of the reasons why we have this episode today is we had a massive discussion last week where someone says, someone posted, someone in recruiting posted, the question about remote work alone is annoying. And then there was a whole discussion about is remote work feasible? Yes. No. What do people think about that?
What do employers think about that? And we have to, we have to get to the bottom of this. And the bottom of this is, do people practise entitlement thinking or is there another issue which we need to address? Because otherwise, simply telling people you're an entitlement thinker probably is not going to move them towards working for us. Entitlement and new work. So first, of course, are there real world cases? Yes, there are many real world cases out there.
And of course, one of the very earliest you probably think of is now generations that you say the young people want to have it all without wanting to work. So maybe you saw the New York Times article where they looked up when for the first time, did someone say, no one wants to work anymore? And that goes back as far as 1711. So roughly for 315 years, no one wants to work anymore. Looking outside, I think it went pretty well for no one working for more than 300 years so far. That's, of course, an ongoing issue where many people say, when no one wants to work anymore, we can't keep up the level of economy that we have. And of course, often included in that is that people say, look, you just came out of vocational training, you just came out of university, and what is the salary you want to have?
When I started, I got. And then you start your story. This is. The payment issue often is considered an entitlement. The payment issue often is a significant one. And just to give you a reference that you can relate to, do you remember when your parents told you about their way to school, how they had to get to school? And usually start with, when I would, when I was young, it was snowing every day of the year, 365 days a year.
And basically the story they tell you is that their way to school, just the path they had to follow, was slightly more difficult than Reinhold Messner getting on Mount Everest. And of course you roll your eyes. And that's, by the way, the same that people do. There's a difference between reflecting experiences and self referential leadership. Self referential leadership is bad while reflecting experiences is good. I give you the two examples here. When you, for example, say, hey, in my opinion, when, when we deal with the clients that we have, I'm doing this for more than 15 years now.
This is what probably works based on all the proposals that we want. And that's probably something that does not work based on the proposals we lost. That is something people appreciate because you made mistakes that they do not need to make again. However, when you do self referential leadership, it says, this is the way it needs to be done. It's the only way how it can be done. My way is right. Your way is wrong.
Your way is wrong because my way is right. Look at me. I am the rock star and you are here to learn.
So kneel down. You have an audience here to serve. And that is one of the worst moments in leadership. And by the way, these are the people who still manually compare Microsoft Excel list because they say, oh, this modern Excel thing, you know, you don't know if AI. No one knows what AI does. Yeah. So no one knows if it works.
So let's just do manual checks. Because all this Excel thing can also be wrong.
Excel is AI, isn't it? Oh, it's not, but it has AI. I don't get that. So it's all bad, I think. And that, of course, is part of the issue. Payment is part of huge discussions and very quickly people get thrown to the term. You're an entitlement thinker.
And the third aspect often is flexibility. When do people work? What are the working hours? And especially from where do they work, work from home, work from anywhere, work from the office, work wherever else? So you see that often the term entitlement thinking is very, very quickly used in today's working world. And what we need to do here is we need to check the reality. And of course there are people who are entitlement thinkers.
I just give you a couple of examples. When people just come out of their vocational training or their university, any kind of education, they immediately want to have a career, which cannot be substantiated neither by experience nor by knowledge, because it's all theory and even theoretical, it can be of value. But often between theory and real world practise, there's a significant difference. I give you a very simple example here. When you have your vocational training in construction, it's a massive difference. If you're able to buy a house, sorry, able to build a house, or if you're able to build a house and deal with all the stakeholders, the investors, the people owning it, the family, putting the money on the table. This communication part is quite difficult.
And people with more experience are better at it, which is why they often have more of a career in addition to that. Often people say, yeah, anyone wants to have a career, but no one wants to have the accountability. We struggle more and more that people take accountability. They want the payment and the career, but they do not want to have the accountability. And in some fields that is absolutely omnipresent, ubiquitous. Anywhere you see that, for example, in consultancy or in my job as well, less and less people are joining my industry in the freelance sector for a very simple reason. Because often you have people who either end up becoming self employed because no one wants to employ them anymore, or you have people who simply say, I need to have days where I don't be that, where I'm not going to be that present.
I just give you a very simple example. You can have very present days in the office where you are very engaged, communicate a lot, and sometimes you have more relaxed days where you do a bit of office work, bit of screen time and you do a bit of here, a bit of that, but you don't really do that much because you needed that day with less stress. And when you, for example, work when I have interim mandates, hardly ever this day exists because then they wouldn't get an interim candidate, an external person out there. And also, or in there, to be precise. And also when you work as a trainer in front of a group, you do not have a single day off. As soon as you stand in front of a Group, you can have days off in the office, but then you don't get paid. When you say you want to do something in front of people, you cannot ever say, hey, look, I have a bit of a slow day in the office, so this is going to be pretty boring here.
I'm just reading off the slides. So you're not in the mood for interaction anymore, just not working. So accountability is an issue. Many people want to have the career and the pay, but not the accountability. And in addition to that, you have results versus time, the instant reward generation that many people claim are entitlement thinkers. We never can generalise. However, some people simply want to have a career way too quickly.
The question now is, is that the whole story? And to be fair, it's not as someone and of course we have to Full disclosure of my biases here. I am a liberal, I am politically liberal from a European Swiss point of view and I am an employer. So of course I look at many things from a bias of an employer. Still, when I see the discussion we had last week on LinkedIn, that was the definition of corporate entitlement thinking, we have many aspects of where people say, you have to do this, anything else is wrong. And I give you examples here. When organisations say something like, and that by the way, was stated by a recruiting professional.
And the recruiting professional said, and I quote word by word, yeah, remote work is possible, but only when you talk to your leader first and maximum one or two days a week. Never fully remote, not possible. How does that sound to you? When you apply to multiple organisations, some of them say, hey, you have three days or two days remote, the rest is on site. And some say, yeah, you have to talk to the lead of. Many people know what that means? It usually means it gets socially punished when you dare to work from home.
And of course you might now say, maybe there are good reasons. And someone in this discussion asks, what are the aspects that you offer to make things attractive? And the answer was, and I quote word by word, yeah, there isn't really anything that we do to make it more attractive because, you know, before COVID they also all were in the office. So we don't see why we should make it more attractive. And by the way, in future, because of course that answer didn't go down too well. And afterwards that recruiting professional said, we have a great campus, meaning the area where the company is located and we have a great canteen. Nice compass news here.
People usually have it quite nice at home because when they want to work from home, they do it because they have it quite nice at home. Good canteen people have nice food at home. Why don't you add something like free coffee and free water? Another of the pseudo benefits. When I hear these kind of statements in recruiting, I know why so many organisations are struggling. But the worst, the worst of it all was when suddenly the statement came up and says, it is not appreciation towards our production staff when you can go and work from home, but they don't. That is, to be absolutely precise, one of the worst piles of nonsense I have heard in the last 12 months.
You cannot simply compare different jobs because people decide for different jobs due to different motivations. When you say we all need to have the same, you cannot follow this up because I can simply say, look, your CEO probably has a company car. Would be really unfair if not everyone has a company car. So do, do, do interns get a free company car as well? No, that's not fair, is it?
Or hey, the CEO has higher salaries, right? Anyone should have really high salaries. And then immediately someone will say, well, there are different jobs with different consequences. Exactly. That's exactly my point, not yours. People say, I'm going through vocational training or university degrees, including all the efforts, time and costs. Because they say maybe after that I can have a job where I can work from home two days, three days, four days, five days a week, and if it's one day, but there must be remote work in most situations.
And as soon as you have a proper, valid reason for remote work or against remote work, then people will understand when you say, hey, we have clients coming in, we meet them on site, we can't send them home to you. And we have clients coming in every single day and you have to see them every single day. Because many clients show up spontaneously. Anyone will understand that's our business, that's how we make money. And that's why I can't work from home. And by the way, there are many jobs now that have remote work, because sometimes people say things where you think maybe you didn't think your life decisions through. So for example, once just a couple of weeks ago, I talked to a receptionist who said, anyone can have work from home, just not me.
Well, receptionist jobs pretty much are on site. However many people, probably you have seen it as well on Instagram where a hotel was shown where they outsourced the reception, there was someone sitting in front of a camera from home and they did the whole check in procedure only by the, by the screen, the hotel card fell down there and then you could take it out of A slot and then you had your hotel card, everything. There was a human being, not an AI human being sitting there. However, of course that human being did not come from. That human being did not come from the uk. It came from a country where salaries and payment is way lower. And there's a service provider offering these services of virtualized receptionists for middle class hotels.
So when you see remote work and career, that is where often corporations, organisations, employer, come up with the most random reasons why you need to be on site. And especially when people say, oh, we have such a great, we have such a great culture, I immediately asked the same question. Great, amazing to have such a great culture. So you have really modern workplaces, collaboration, corporation areas. You had workplace consulting, everything was refurbished probably during the pandemic. So you do not have these long alleyways, hallways, where you just have offices left and right with like a name on the door, like you're in a public office somewhere. Silence. Immediately silence as the result.
Because what people mean with great culture is we want to control you, that you sit there and work. And by the way, when you think that people can show up to work and not work, when you think people are lazy at home, you should consider what some people do in the office. When you don't want to work, you can spend your day, especially in larger organisations. You do a bit of chit chat here, go to the water dispenser, go to the cafeteria, you do a bit of Amazon. No one can look on your screen anyway, so you do whatever you want to do there. And when you think that control is the key to better work results, you really missed out on 101 leadership sessions. And yes, there are some people who are difficult to handle and you need a bit of more control.
However, just adding more and more control raises the bar of the cost significantly and the profit margin you have on the product you sell will most likely diminish or be non existent in the very, very near, future. So organisations often, when it comes to remote work, the career, the communication around, all of that, saying, oh yeah, you have to talk to your leader in only one or two days and that basically means we don't want remote work. And also payment. When people, how do you dare to ask for so much payment? You work for less. People worked for less before the pandemic. Here are the news.
It's after the pandemic, maybe you missed that, didn't get the memo, who knows? But it's after the pandemic, things have changed. You cannot say, oh, things were always better back in the days, because we aren't back in the days, we aren't right now. You have to see that you need to adapt to modern circumstances and to find the right balance between the two is challenging. It's not easy. And that is why many companies professionally trained their leaders on remote work. I have professional education.
By the way, when you now say remote work is not for you, here the news from a scientific point of view. I did my training with professor at Siedel Neely Harvard University scientific evidence also published in a more understandable way. When you don't want to read through 4,000 pages of published studies, you can read the book Remote Work Revolution by Professor Siedel Neely. And when you then say there's an error in there, science has peer reviewed, you can comment on that, you can say there were errors in data handling, there were errors in interviewing, you can comment on all of that on a scientific level. But unfortunately what we usually have is that some sort of patriarchal structure, someone on the top of that, or some owner who has no contact to working people anymore and usually lives somewhere near the business they built up and they say I don't like it, I don't like remote work. Work is on site, right? Show up, I pay you for that, I pay you for that.
And then people come and say oh great. Because the other company just around the corner, they offer me remote work on a 40 hour a week contract. So I drive an hour and back to you. So that's five hours a day one direction and five hours the other direction, 10 hours a week. So you pay me for these 10 hours and you cover the cost at face value. No, so that about payment here. So another lie.
So here you see, you need to find the balance. We have people without any doubt and believe me, as someone who is a liberal and an employer, I am in favour of anything that is related to merit based achievements and rewards. However, often people are called entitlement thinkers when they simply say there is a reasonable modernization taking place in the workplace and you simply have to adapt to that. And that is more than reasonable. And nothing is wrong with that. My company did remodel from the very beginning, back in the days due to a different approach. We simply couldn't afford an office as a startup.
And back in the days end of the 90s, no one gave you any kind of office rental contract when you didn't have any kind of money on the account and startup centres didn't exist back in the day. So we did it by coincidence. But we quickly Find out how attractive this made us as an employer and that's what we actively used in recruiting. The question now is, how do you get all of that implemented in your organisation? So, first, of course, you always have to be aware, follow science and research your personal opinion. When you say you have an opinion on remote leadership, I can tell you talents on the market will have an opinion on your approach. Anyone has an opinion today and anyone is not shy about telling you what their opinion is, even if you didn't even ask about that.
Science and research leads the way, no exception. If you have an opinion which diverges from science, you can either deliver the proof or. Or you better change your mind because otherwise you're making a fool out of yourself and probably you do not want to do that. The next aspect of that is you need to get an awareness and that always means you need to professionally train and coach your people. And again, I keep saying that the $49, the 49 Euro, the 49 pound online class which people should watch during their lunch break, isn't making the cut. It's not going to change anything. People click on play, it plays in the background and they open Excel and they just keep on working.
So you need to professionally train people on remote leadership. I learned it so you can learn it. It's a learnable skill and it doesn't even take much time, one or two days. You have the principles, you apply them, it's all good.
Nothing changes from there. And as soon as you have a real reason against remote work, people will always understand that. But your personal opinion is not a proper reasoning. Be aware that as soon as you want to have talents, you are in competition with absolutely anyone. When you say, oh, we know our competition, they are down the road. No, no, no, not that competition. You are not in competition, especially when remote work is an option.
You are not in competition with the companies down the road, you're not in competition with the companies in your city, you're not even in competition with the companies in your region or your state or your country. When you have a job where remote work is theoretically possible, you are in competition with any organisation globally, on this planet, absolutely any organisation that has access to Internet. And that is something which you need to be aware of because aggressively companies are recruiting from companies where they have better offers, more flexible staff, good qualification. And that is not even an unknown thing. You know, that we have outsourcing and suddenly we're outsourcing qualified jobs. And not just something where you think, in that country we can do it. A bit cheaper.
So be sure that you modernise your approach. Entitlement thinkers exist, I give you that and I fully support that. And they make me angry as much as they make you angry. However, we especially at the moment have too much entitlement thinking from the employer side and too much entitlement thinking from the organisation side. And from a sustainable leadership point of view, as soon as we get to the right attitude, the right mindset and especially the right factual understanding, the right skill, then the working world will become a better one for all of us. And I wish you all the best implementing that in your organisation. And when you now say, well, we might be on the right, or maybe not the so much right end of that, I'd like to discuss something.
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The reason is very simple. You will only see positive change when you apply what you heard here. I fully understand that entitlement thinkers can drive you up the wall and by the way, they do the same with me. However, we cannot just stand there and say this is our set of thinking and you have to adapt to that. That is simply not modern leadership. So be aware that we have to modernise as well. So apply what you heard.
By the way, when you send me any kind of message, because you have any kind of question, no worries, I'm always answering within 24 hours or less. So I'm looking forward to hearing from you there. Apply what you heard and then everything will get better from there. At the end of this video cast, as well as the end of this podcast, there's only one thing left for me to say. Thank you very much for your time.