People First! with Morag Barrett

Welcome to this week's episode of People First. My guest this week is actually a returnee. So welcome back, Robert. I am excited to reintroduce you to Robert Glazer, who is the founder and chairman of Acceleration Partners, a global leader in partnership marketing. And we're here today to talk about his brand new book, one I recommend that you get your hands on ASAP, which is called Rethinking Two Weeks Notice, Changing the Way Employees Leave Companies for the Better. So welcome back to People First, Robert. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this. And I read the book. This is definitely one that can be read on a short flight. Yeah, I read books that I would like to read, which are shorter and to the point. Yeah, this is definitely what they would describe or I will describe as consumable. But it is. It's challenging our approach to how we come to the end of a professional working relationship. And throughout our careers, we are led to believe that two weeks notice, if you're lucky, is the way to do it on either side. But you are turning that on its head. And we can tell that rethinking two weeks notice is the title. So tell us a little bit about your inspiration and frustration with how professional relationships come to the end at the moment. Yeah. So as I was building my company, Acceleration Partners, I think we were trying to do a lot of things differently. We were trying to build a great culture. We ended up winning thirty best places to work awards. But the one sort of traditional paradigm we hadn't been able to shake was this sort of, oh, well, people gave two weeks notice because that's just what people do. And it just felt sort of incongruous. And so when I looked at this problem, you know, what I saw was, hey, we're all still behaving like it's nineteen ninety. And the expectation is lifetime employment and pension and if I were to look up any of Glassdoor's best places to work awards, I'd probably see that the tenure is two and a half years. And for people under thirty five, maybe even even less than that or under thirty less than that. And so why are we all pretending that that that that this isn't how things go? And then we get to these endings that are messy and short term notice or we tell people to leave or there was I worked for you for years and then I had all these doctor's appointments and then I had blindside. This seems silly. And so we had an employee who was undergoing a performance improvement plan. He had gotten better. He sort of bounced around. And we had an honest conversation with him and we're like, what if we just let you keep working? We were in client service. So in client service, people hate account turnover. It's like the number one risk to the business. what if we just let you keep working and starting to do the thing you need to do, and we start finding a replacement, and we have sort of a transition period, and we tried it, and we made some mistakes, but I go, this is pretty good, and we ended up kind of turning it into a program, and the concept of, we had called it Mindful Transition, now it's called Career Engagement Program, but how do we sort of relabel the ending as a transition program, and understand that there are people who are going to want to opt in and then there are other people that we're going to opt in, but, but it just would have people leave in a different and more respectful way. So I think that's the key thing. It's a different and more respectful way, because in the end, then it's a win-win. Because to your point, it's a fact of life that people are going to transition out of organisations. And wouldn't it be better if we could do it in a way where the story they tell others, other prospective employees, clients, partners, whatever it might be, that it was a good exit versus an ugly exit. So Yeah, that goes both ways, right? So a lot of employees think they're doing the right thing and just giving two weeks notice, but they may have had a mentor put a lot of time into them and they're kind of blindsided and it doesn't end. I study a lot of psychology and one of the things around events or otherwise is people remember the endings impact the entire event disproportionately. So do the beginning. So if you're having an event, put all your budget into the opening speaker and the closing speaker and then everything in the middle, people tend to You're on a vacation, plan one of the best things for the last day. And Daniel Pink talks about this a lot in his book, When, How Much Beginning Ends Matter. The other thing is, I don't think people understand, you know, this is a world of LinkedIn and back channel referencing, if you're smart. So if you leave and someone's really upset about it and destroyed everything that came after, you might know they're upset. You might not get them as a reference, but they might get asked anyway in a few years. Because you both worked at the same company, they know that person, and they're like, yeah. Like she was okay, didn't end very well. Like I might forget everything else. So you might create this a little bit of a visible barrier to your career going forward. Absolutely. And it seems like there's the emotional element underneath. So from the employee's perspective, what I hear from those who are considering a transition is fear, fear of being walked out the door that day. And so they keep it to themselves until it's ta-da, I'm going, or vice versa. So what are those underlying drivers that keep us stuck in this perpetual loop of Yeah. So I'm really clear about the content of this book. You should not read this book and then go walk into your employer who marches everyone out the door when they give notice and say, I want to do a transition because they're also likely to be walked out. So this is, the company needs to make this decision to change the culture and change the operating system and get employees to buy into it and believe it. There is a yet to be named psychological force, I think, that is cousin of cognitive dissonance that I think drives a lot of this. So, well, one, we're not, there are two things we talk about in the book. We're not digging to the root of problems early enough to see if we could fix them or change the outcome. You might be very disengaged. You know, you might be leaving today. Either I'm firing you or you're giving two weeks notice and we're all pissed at each other and it's toxic. And if I had rewound the tape to nine months ago, there was probably some signs of disengagement and you were a high performer. If I dug in, I might've dug in and gotten a few different answers. One is, Hey, I lost my childcare and you know, my schedule is kind of a mess right now. And it's putting a lot of pressure on me. And so I'm messing up at work and like, okay, well here's how we can work with this temporarily. Or, Hey, I regret, I left the sales marketing team to come into sales. I'm regretting sales. I don't think it's for me. I think I'd be better going off back to the, you know, a sales team. Well, or, or, or I, you know what, I know we're hiring people that get paid more than me. I'm really frustrated. I was looked over for a reason. I might say, you know what, Mark, you actually are totally right. And we need to fix this and we don't want to lose you. Or maybe you say, look, I, this is a remote company. I decided I want to go back in the office. So the, the, the, the outcome is disengagement and poor work, but by having the relationship and to dig in each of those requires a different solution. And it might put us back on a great track. The first two, I might be like, well, let's work out the schedule. Person comes back the next month. You know, we figure it out. You do what you need to do. I support you. We have to do it. The second one, we transfer you back to sales. And the third one, we say, we're not going to get offices. So how about I help you do something different now and not wait, you know, six more months. So that's sort of on the root side. The other thing is that I think when employers realize that uh when I in the mind make the decision in my mind that you're not going to work out or this isn't working out uh the way cognitive dissonance works is we can't hold these two opposites in our minds so person doing bad work and good person these are very strenuous for our brain so I have to reconcile it so what do I do I think I tend to make you out as a bad person over the next month or two see she's messing up again she's not coming to work you can't trust her So now I can fire you, which is the opposite, the two-week severance, and I can sort of put all of that together and it just makes sense to me. I actually think we need to do the opposite and say, hey, look, love you, but you've been below quota significantly for four quarters in a row in our sales team and you're objectively the lowest performer. Do you want to be in sales or what's going on or otherwise? So we don't use the opportunity to I don't think leaning into the relationship and holding the performance threshold are mutually exclusive. In fact, I think it's helpful to say, look, I care about you. This is not working. What are some other options, either internally or externally, that we could start a conversation about before this gets too late? All the things I talk about in my book are on the table before it becomes toxic and irredeemable. But it really means moving the timeline back from what people normally Well, in fact, in the book, you make the comment about even on the onboarding is making new hires aware of the open transition program that you have acceleration partners from day one. So they're already thinking about how does the dismount happen? Right. Dismount. That's great. I should have used that. Because a lot of people don't know how to get off the horse, right? And, yeah, look, it sets a couple of things. You're not going to be here forever, and that's fine. Here's how we do it here, and it's different. And also, if you made the wrong choice, there's a way out of here. Like this isn't a mess. A lot of people, probably the employer and employee know, I'm a big believer that I hear a lot of excuses. Well, you might not have trained anyone well or you owe it to them or that. I'm back to that starts well or doesn't start well. I can tell you in our fifteen years of running the business, things that started poorly ended well about one percent of the time. And I'm a big believer in, I don't care, we could have screwed it up, you could have screwed it up, but I think when things happen a lot, you should play the odds. And when something's a ninety percent failure, you should play those odds and not assume it's going to be the exception. You'd be better off taking the same step if something had a ninety percent failure and missing the ten percent exception and getting it right ninety percent of the time. So when something's really a mess after two or three weeks of someone starting, you're already in that tailspin. To know that you could have that discussion and say, hey, do you want to just pretend you never worked here? Because that might be better than us going sick. The worst thing you could have is a six-month stint on your resume. You could be a consultant or just let this. This clearly isn't going well. Maybe we screwed up. Maybe you screwed up. But generally, I don't know. I'd be curious in your experience. I just haven't seen a lot of recovery from these parties. But everyone wants to make it a whole, did you do this right? I'm like, I don't know. We hire a hundred people a year. We hire people in classes of ten. One out of ten is struggling. They're all getting the same training. I tend to think one of us just got something wrong. And we should debrief it, yeah, but we also probably should just not ignore it either. Yeah, I've seen in my experience coaching leaders, even just moving from one team to another or from one role to another with a different mix of responsibilities can allow somebody to shine. Because let's face it, nobody comes to work wanting to do a job, a bad job to annoy their colleagues to just generally create or experience friction. So maybe one in a hundred to annoy their colleagues. But yeah, it's a small number. I'll give you that as a small note. But the rest of us, we're just trying to do our best, which is pay the bills, have a bit of fun, get our stuff done and feel like we belong and are contributing to something bigger than my office bedroom or the camera in front of us. And we lose sight of it. And interesting, as I was reading the book, it caused me to reflect back on my corporate career. And I see this playing out, especially in startup environments where you might have leaders who thrive in the blank sheet of paper. Let's build something. Let's iterate as we go. But as soon as you start to reach a point where you're looking for sustainability, scalability, replicability, i.e. creating standard processes, those leaders stay. and invariably it's the square peg in the round hole. It doesn't suit their needs and it causes all sorts of other issues. And so a way for an elegant dismount in that scenario would have been powerful and reduce a lot of stress and angst, I think, in the organizations that I'm thinking of for those who remain after they've gone. No one wants to do poorly, as you say, and people know when they're not doing well, and then they start getting angry and resentful because back to psychological. So if I'm doing terribly in the organization, I can't blame myself, right? I've designed it. So I'll start acting like the company's out to get me and all of these problems sort of happen. And I just think that a manager's ability early on when you, as I kind of explained the principle before, improvement plans is treating the headache. Well, you might have a headache because you're allergic to gluten, or you might have a headache because you're dehydrated, or you might have a headache because you have brain cancer, right? The Tylenol will kind of cure the headache, but it won't deal with the root. And we're just not having enough managerial discussions, say, like, what's going on here? Or when there's a problem, instead of saying, look, the performance is bad, okay, we know that, but why? Like, you seem disengaged. And people won't be honest with you unless you've developed some psychological safety. But if you have, you have an ability for better outcomes. It says, look, you don't want to do sales or anything. If I know that, we've had multiple employees that we've put in other roles as they came open because there was a conversation where they said, I don't want to be doing this much longer, or maybe like another six months. And if that conversation hadn't happened, we wouldn't have even, we might've lost them, you know, rather than found a different role for So I love what you're saying there because it's one conversation at a time, one relationship at a time. And you talk there about the managerial conversations. So I'm curious, when you introduced this and it started to blossom within Acceleration Partners, how and where do roles and responsibilities for HR change? whoever owns the people strategy, and the line managers start and stop. Because I can see in many of my clients, it's assumed that HR are going to take care of this. And that, in fact, causes the rapid separation versus getting consumed. How did you handle that as you were working out? Well, HR kind of is the marketing piece, right? Here's the option, letting employees know about it and marketing. But the bread and butter comes down to the manager. And I've had people say, well, could I do this, you know, as the default on my team if it's not HR? I'm like, you totally could, because you could just have the agreement with people, you could do stuff, and then you can let HR know when they needed to know, you know, whether it's a month out or whatever way it is. Like, no one's going to tell you you can't kind of do these things unless you have a very strange company that's very unhealthy, you know, telling you don't do healthy things that's creating better outcome for your teams. So HR helps facilitate, they help set up, but this really happens from good conversations with managers and leaders where they're digging into problems, figuring out what's solvable, what's fixable, and what's not. Some things are not solvable, and you should actually start that transition program sooner rather than later. Someone who wants to work in a totally different you know, industry or otherwise, someone who wants an in-person and you're remote, someone who doesn't align with the values, like let's move on these things earlier rather than later. I go back to a story from about a year ago of someone who was sort of entering an employer led, you know, transition at our company. And I think, I think this is always interesting. They'd been doing okay. They'd been sort of happy, you know, for a while, but maybe not as happy. And in that discussion, but I don't think they would have done anything. I don't think they would have started it. But then we said, look, let's help. We can help you. You want to make introductions. What do you want to do? They listed like a different role in different industry. Like when you kind of said, what do you want to do next? It was the opposite of what our company did. So I just thought that was interesting. Like here they are. They like the people they work with, but they're clearly doing work or in a way that they didn't really want to be doing. And that can only go along, only can go on for so long. So I know in your work, you talk about there are four principles, four elements that need to be in place for an effective open transition program. And can you talk a little bit about what those are? Sure. So the first is psychological safety. And I think people reading this book, you shouldn't do anything like this unless you have basic psychological safety in your organization. Um, and this is where people can have one-on-ones, there are feedback loops. They can see that truth to power is, is okay. And I mean, we could do two hour episode on how you develop psychological safety. So I won't go that far into that. Two is kind of open communication, right? These regular check-ins, town halls, um, I call them like collection points. Like how are you collecting all this data? So you know, uh, what's going on and getting kind of transparent conversations going on across the organization. Look, sometimes there's a problem that's affecting multiple employees. Sometimes there's a toxic client. And if you don't know about this, you can't address it. You're going to have five employees that want to quit, right? We've, we've, we've had that problem. The third principle is just mutual respect. Like, look, there are, we, it's fine to say that, you know, you're on the sales team and being a fifty percent quota for four quarters is not sustainable and does not, is not, we can't continue going with that. It doesn't mean you need to be disrespectful to the person. So, you know, we're talking about these things, you know, it's leaning into the relationship, you know, talking about, you know, focusing on behaviors, not character. There's a lot of character assault that goes on that people carry with them for years. And then the output of that is just commitment to be a mutually beneficial outcome. So how can I get a good result here for the company and for the person? So if you have If you have psychological safety in your organization, if you have open conversations, if you have people that are being respectful and committed to that and that they're trying to find mutually beneficial outcomes, you will have a lot better options than if you don't. So when it comes to the program that you have in place, is it... Is it a finite program? I mean, is it sort of two weeks? Are we now just using fancy words and saying it's now a three-month notice period? Is it six months? How does that work? Yeah, it's a little different. I would say on the programs we originally designed, We tried to operate around ninety days. I think we felt that was the right period. And that person might not have a job at ninety days, but I actually think it's important to have a little of the feeling that there's a date and it's not going to go on. And they need a little bit of the motivation to do that as well. I think that was one of the mistakes we made on the first one, you know, where it kind of went too long. Things that are already going a little south, you'd probably want a little shorter. There are some cases even where someone is moving or going back to business school or they're not even taking another job. But you know this far enough in advance that, you know, they tell you in January that they got into business school and they want to leave in June and take the summer off. And you're like, OK, like we can we can work with that. Like, great. You're sort of a high performer. But my experience is ninety days is is sort of a good window both for the company. And that's like the optimal window to start from. See, I'm now thinking about Michael Watkins and his book, The First Ninety Days. And this, when I'm working as an executive coach, and then thinking it's the last ninety days, it's how do you want to leave? You've decided you're done, but now how and who do you need to tell and bring into that process? And what do you want people to say or remember once you've gone versus just ripping the bandaid off and walking out? So we give a lot of where we gave, again, I am not as involved in it now. I'm just on the board of the company. We gave a lot of latitude to people. We said, look, at some point people need to know based on this, but you can control this. And here's the business reasons why people would have to know. You can tell people whatever you want. There was an article about a company last week throwing massive celebrations for people leaving. I don't love that. I think that's a little bit of a confusing message. I think you send everyone off with a nice, respectful message. I, one thing I saw too, is we got bigger. You have to standardize things as a company. So the company, unless it was like a tenured executive team member, the company didn't do things. Cause you're like, what about the lunch or the thing? We let teams do things. We let them deal however they want to want for them. We just, we don't put everyone on the company call unless again, there's a kind of a tenured long-term person that everyone knows. But we wish everyone well, and we announce they're leaving in the same way. And we announce they're departing in a way that you wouldn't know whether it's their call or our call. And what people just see is, hey, this is treated as we wish them well. It's called our alumni program. They're joining our alumni. They go in our newsletter. So we just try to keep that on the level. And so I think you support the concept of people leaving. I find it a little confusing to celebrate people leaving. Yeah. I like the fact that you have that alumni program, that you have returners, that you are thoughtful and deliberate both on the people who may be passing through, but also the fact that they can come back to you with fresh perspectives, broader world experience that can add to the richness within the firm. Yeah, we have some returners. And by the way, even having this program, I think that we would have more and I think companies would have more if people didn't feel badly about how they left. Right. I think more companies are open to it, but I think a lot of people get the sense that they burned a bridge or otherwise they don't even start the discussion. So more reason for me to leave. Well, because look, during the great resignation, I could have predicted what happened. I mean, we had we have great employees, but people were calling them and offering them too much money and too much title. And it didn't make sense. And I followed a lot of those stories and they blew up six to nine months later and know a recruiter is a salesperson they are telling you and when you get out of a relationship you look for the opposite thing that you didn't have but you forget about the things that you like and so like a lot of times if they get there and they're like crap this isn't what you know I thought it was you really want them to pick up the phone and call back and say hey will you have me back yeah so what was most surprising for you and the team as you not rolled it out but as you rolled it out and expanded the program what was most surprising I was surprising how few people believed it. And part of that, I guess, is you believed it or really understood it after I thought we had talked about it at nauseam. And it comes to Patrick Lencioni's sort of seven times rule. So we kept having to have these sessions and eventually we Actually, we thought people were like, yeah, we know you're saying this, but, and so then we came out with an incentive program based on how many weeks notice you, you've actually got a bonus. If you gave us nine days of window, even if we didn't use it. And so we thought, okay, I think, I mean, men will take us seriously, right? Like we're literally paying for it. So I was surprised even for. a company that sort of pioneered this and talked about it, how you always have new people coming in who haven't been through it before. Otherwise it required much more discussion than I expected. It's interesting because it brings together so many different ideas, because I think from memory, it was Zappos that was offering two thousand dollars if you left within the first week. Yeah. Yeah. It turned out it wasn't a good fit. And that seems like a contradiction in terms of common business sense. But to your point, if somebody comes on board and either side has kind of either been overselling or it just doesn't fit. Again, how do we make sure that people can leave with reputations and relationships intact versus just toughen up and work it through? Because then it damages everything. Right. Look, there's so much blame. To me, the best thing you could do is focus on where we are today and what we can do and not get into all the revisionist history of why it happened. When I've talked about it, well, people are like, you should look at your hiring practices. You should look at your training. You should look. Okay, totally valid. and particularly valid if it keeps happening over and over again. But if this is the one out of ten, I'm on again. We are where we are. And so how do we get the best outcome from here on forward? We'll debrief later. Maybe our interviewing missed something. But the time for that is we have a person that and I think the worst thing you can do, and I talked about this in the book, is trained to get to average, right? You should train people that you think that you can be great. And if you're training someone just to get them to what you thought they were on day one, that's a really bad use of resources. Absolutely. So what's one message or insight you hope that listeners and people watching this video are taking away from this conversation? So I've had so many people who saw the TED Talk or read the HBR article before the book, which had all this detail, tell me that they saw something about it. They had one of these things coming up. Without the whole program, They just decided to try the honest conversation part and they were shocked how well it would work. So don't get overwhelmed by all of this, particularly if you're a small company and something's not working. Like, just try the honest conversation. Like, hey, seems like this isn't going well. Like, is this what you want to do? Like, how can I help you? Is there something else? And see where that leads you. And I think you'd be pleasantly surprised. Okay. Where can people go to learn more about you, your work, and this amazing book? They're all in the same place. If you go to Robert Glazer, G-L-A-Z-E-R.com, which is under my name, you'll find my books, podcasts, everything right there. Actually, if you click on the tab that says Friday Forward, it'll take you to my sub stack. And the first three chapters are right in the header. You can read the first three chapters for three on my sub stack, which is probably about thirty percent of the book. You'll either get value from that or you'll be like, you know, this sounds interesting. I want to learn more. And The book's only a couple of dollars anyway, if you're interested. Go for it. I'd strongly recommend it. It is a quick read, but a high impact. And I definitely recommend signing up for Robert's newsletter, Friday Forward, which is full of scintillating and pragmatic tips and perspectives on the world of work. Robert, thank you so much for being with me. I'll make sure all of that information is in our show notes. Wishing you ongoing success. Thanks for having me again.