Adam Grant and two Wharton colleagues studied six years of leaders to find what really drives the back-to-office push. It wasn't productivity. It was ego. A LinkedIn thread then sharpened it into a question I haven't been able to put down.
The piece came through my feed the way most of these do — not from the source, but from someone reacting to it. Andre Martin, who wrote Wrong Fit, Right Fit and spends his days thinking about talent, had shared a new New York Times opinion piece with three words on top: Adam Grant mic drop.
The headline was the kind that makes you stop scrolling: The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week. Grant had written it with Marissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott, and the argument was disarmingly plain. A third of U.S. companies have now banned remote and hybrid work entirely. Leaders give the usual reasons — productivity, collaboration, creativity, culture. The data, the authors say, points somewhere less flattering.
Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.
Over the past six years … the only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.
— "The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office," 22 June 2026
They didn't stop at correlation. For Fortune 500 chiefs they measured the things researchers use as proxies for an outsize ego — the size of the pay package, the size of the signature, the size of the photo in the annual report — and the higher a CEO scored, the louder they'd objected to remote work in the pandemic's early years. In one experiment, simply getting leaders to admire the bold, assertive egos of a Steve Jobs or a Larry Ellison made them more likely to oppose working from home afterward. Not a coincidence, the authors argue. A cause.
What lodged for me, though, wasn't the study. It was a line in Andre's own write-up — that the leaders who need to be seen can't stand a screen full of equal squares. That image hasn't left me. A video grid is the most level thing the working world has ever built: the CEO and the new analyst rendered at exactly the same size, in exactly the same frame, no corner office, no longer walk to the better chair. For most of us that's just a meeting. For a certain kind of ego it's a small daily humiliation — and a mandate to return is how you rebuild the altar.
The question underneath the question
I could have closed the tab there, quietly pleased to have a tidy villain. But the comment that actually stopped me wasn't agreeing with Grant or arguing with him. It reframed the whole thing as a question — and aimed it at every leader, not just the narcissists.
The real leadership question underneath all of this is simple but uncomfortable: are we designing work for output, or are we designing it to reassure leadership that work is happening?
Those are very different systems — and they produce very different cultures.
— quoted with thanks; Andre's reply was just "wonderfully said"
That's the sentence I've been carrying around since. Designing for output, or designing to reassure ourselves that work is happening. Because the first framing — it's all ego, it's narcissism, it's them — lets the rest of us off too easily. The narcissist wants to be worshipped. But the far more common impulse, the one I recognise, is gentler and therefore harder to see: the wish to simply feel that the work is underway. To watch the room fill up and read it as proof.
Where it turned personal
So I turned it on myself, because that's usually where these things have something to say. Have I ever wanted people in the room for the work — or for the reassurance? The honest answer is both, and not always in the proportion I'd like to admit. There's a quiet comfort in seeing heads down at desks that has nothing to do with what those heads are producing. It's the comfort of the visible. And the visible is not the same as the valuable.
The screen full of equal squares makes that confusion impossible to hide. It strips away the desk-count, the hover, the performative busyness — all the things Andre called the part of the office nobody ever actually wanted — and leaves you with only the question of whether the work is good. Which is a far more demanding way to lead. It asks you to measure the output, not the attendance. To trust people you cannot see. To replace the reassurance of a full room with the harder discipline of a clear result.
I don't think the answer is everyone home forever; the room earns its keep for the things a grid genuinely can't do — the collisions, the mentoring, the messy problem you solve faster shoulder to shoulder. The answer is to be honest about why you're calling people in. If it's for the work, name the work. If it's for the reassurance, that's worth knowing too — because that one's about you, not them.
The setup I'd actually build
I want to be clear that I'm not anti-room. In-person time is beautiful — it's where human connection gets built, where psychological safety quietly takes root, where the things that never make it onto an agenda get said. I'd never give that up. What I've changed my mind about is the shape of it.
What I believe in now is the intentional co-working session. You bring people together for a specific outcome and you go hard at it — two or three days of real discovery and delivery, in the same room, pointed at something you can actually finish. Not a calendar of standing in-person days. A purpose you assemble around, and then disperse from.
Part of why this works now is that the clock has changed. With AI, the old software development life cycle has collapsed — if you have a brilliant thought in the morning, you can ship a version of it that same hour. So a focused two or three days in a room together no longer produces a backlog to grind through later; it can produce the thing itself, more or less live. The intensity pays off immediately, which is exactly what makes a short, outcome-focused burst worth flying people in for.
So my honest answer is: remote is the way to go. It keeps people closer to their families, closer to a routine, closer to the life that makes the work sustainable. And you punctuate it with intentional co-working — once a month, or two or three times a quarter — that is ruthlessly about an outcome, not attendance. That, to me, is the best setup for both sides: the life at home, the room when the room earns it.
I'm not sure I'd have noticed any of this in the study alone. It took the equal squares to give me the picture, and Tanya's question to turn it into a mirror. The uncomfortable part isn't that some bosses want an altar. It's how easily, on a tired day, I'd settle for a full room and call it a job well run.
Prompted by Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott, "The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week," The New York Times, 22 June 2026 — found via Andre Martin's LinkedIn post, with Tanya Young's comment beneath it. The ego finding is theirs; the equal-squares image is Andre's; the question is Tanya's. The part where it became a mirror is mine.