How can we reinvent workplace transitions to create happier, more engaged teams?
In this compelling episode of the Happier at Work podcast, host Aoife O’Brien sits down with Robert Glazer, serial entrepreneur, leadership expert, and best-selling author, to rethink what it means to leave a job and how workplaces can better support transitions. Drawing from his latest book, “Rethinking Two Weeks Notice,” and years of building award-winning cultures, Robert shares fresh insights on why open conversations, root-cause analysis, and values alignment are vital for creating a people-first workplace.
In This Episode, You’ll Discover:
- The problems with “two weeks notice” and how a sports-contract mindset can foster more honest, supportive transitions.
- Why psychological safety is the foundation of all healthy workplace conversations, and simple ways to test and build it in your team.
- The root causes of underperformance and why addressing them early prevents toxic outcomes.
- Why employees should consider growth, values alignment, and engagement before making career decisions, and how leaders can support that journey.
Related Topics Covered:
Future of Work, Management Decision Making, Psychological Safety
Connect with Aoife O’Brien | Host of Happier at Work®:
Connect with Robert Glazer | Serial entrepreneur, leadership expert, and best-selling author:
Related Episodes You’ll Love:
Episode 185: How to Prioritise Flexible Work to Thrive with Cali Yost
Episode 240: Meaningful Work Through Simplification with Lisa Bodell
About Happier at Work®
Happier at Work® is the podcast for business leaders who want to create meaningful, human-centric workplaces. Hosted by Aoife O’Brien, the show explores leadership, career clarity, imposter syndrome, workplace culture, and employee engagement — helping you and your team thrive.
If you enjoy podcasts like WorkLife with Adam Grant, The Happiness Lab, or Squiggly Careers, you’ll love Happier at Work®.
Join Aoife O’Brien for weekly insights on leadership, workplace culture, career clarity, imposter syndrome, and creating work that works for you.
Website: https://happieratwork.ie LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aoifemobrien/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HappierAtWorkHQ
Mentioned in this episode:
Imposter Identity
Transcript
Aoife O’Brien [00:00:00]:
One of the topics that’s still really taboo in the workplace are workplace transitions, or more specifically when we leave a job. If you’ve ever been in a situation where it’s been a bit hush hush or you’re not allowed to share that you’re leaving or you’re moving on and you don’t really openly talk about these career transitions that we’re going through, then today’s episode is absolutely for you, especially if you want to create an environment where we’re more.
Open about these things. This is The Happier At Work Podcast, the Career and Culture podcast for People First Leaders. I’m your host, Aoife O’Brien. I’m the career and culture strategist for commercial leaders and teams, and my guest today is Robert Glazer. I have the absolute honor of having Robert, Robert share some fantastic insight.
Not only from his amazing career, but also from his new book, rethinking Two Weeks notice. I know you’re gonna enjoy today’s episode and there’s so many takeaways. Uh, there’s one little gem that I definitely took, but I’ll, I’ll leave that up to you to decide. Which one that was. Do enjoy today’s episode.
Don’t forget to get involved in the conversation. I’m most active on LinkedIn, so I would love to see you over there and share this with someone who you think needs to listen to this today. Enjoy today’s episode.
Aoife O’Brien [00:00:02]:
Robert, you’re so welcome to the Happier at Work podcast. I’ve been really excited to have this conversation with you because I’ve been following you for quite some time now. Do you want to let listeners know a little bit about you, your background, and what got you into doing what you’re doing today?
Robert [00:00:17]:
Yeah. Thank you for having me. My background was I founded a few different businesses. I guess I’m part of that disease you call a serial entrepreneur. The largest of which is a company called Acceleration Partners, which I remain executive chair of. I’m not involved in the day to day. And, you know, in the midst of building that company and thinking about what kind of company we wanted to build, we did a lot of things differently. And I started writing about doing things differently in our industry and in our culture.
Robert [00:00:45]:
And we won a bunch of different Best places to work awards. And so as I. As that business continued to grow, I kind of spent more time writing and thinking about challenging some of the conventional work wisdom in businesses and seeing how we could create better leaders and create better organizations. And so that’s where I spend a lot of my time today.
Aoife O’Brien [00:01:05]:
Brilliant. I love that. And I know your most recent book is your author of several books, and it sounds like you love writing and you’re writing’s easy.
Robert [00:01:14]:
Launching the books is a lot harder. So I’m on the next one now that’s coming out in October, and it takes. It’s a lot of time.
Aoife O’Brien [00:01:22]:
Yeah, this is it. I think this is what I’ve heard. I’m in the process of writing a book myself. And what I understand is the writing is actually the easy part. Like you feel like you finished something and you’re like, oh, it’s done now. And actually the really hard part is just about to begin. Is like getting it out.
Robert [00:01:37]:
Yes. You’ll write me in a year and be like, yeah, the writing was the easy part.
Aoife O’Brien [00:01:42]:
Yeah, you were so right. So talk to me first about your most recent book and then maybe we can touch on the one that you’re writing as well at the moment.
Robert [00:01:52]:
Yeah. So my latest book was Rethinking Two Weeks Notice. It was based on my TED Talk, how to Eliminate Two Weeks Notice. And it sort of came out of a program at our company that at the time was called Mindful Transition and eventually was called the Career Engagement Program. But sort of as we were building that company and culture and trying to really be different, the one area where I realized we were the same was how people left our organization. And if people are listening globally, I Know there’s different policies all around the world. The problem’s the same irrespective of the policies. In the us it’s employment at will.
Robert [00:02:28]:
So people give two weeks notice. They don’t even have to give that, but that’s sort of considered kind of standard. Similarly, companies kind of fire people and give them two week severance. And when people leave our organization, we had that same sort of two weeks notice out of nowhere. And it just seemed to go against a lot of our culture. And I looked at it and said, look, we haven’t. Companies have changed. It’s not lifetime employment.
Robert [00:02:48]:
They’re not going to be here forever. We’re treating this, we’re still treating this like marriage rather than like a sports contract. And like we should change this. And so we had an opportunity to test it out. It went great. I shouldn’t say went great. It went better than expected. We learned some stuff from it and we continued to sort of launch that program.
Aoife O’Brien [00:03:10]:
Brilliant. I love it. I mean the whole concept, you’re so right. I think the perception maybe from outside of the US is two weeks notice. It seems quite harsh and it seems like the employment laws are rather different and I know it varies state by state as well. If I think back to my own career history and oftentimes I had to give three months notice, which is fairly standard the more senior you get in an organization. And if I can share a couple of personal things, maybe before we explore this in more detail. So there were two scenarios where I left organisations and kind of, in not so great terms said, so I left one organization and I wouldn’t have left only for personal reasons.
Aoife O’Brien [00:03:52]:
I really wanted to travel and explore the world, otherwise I would probably still be working there because I loved it so much. I love the people, I love the culture, I love the opportunities that I had to grow. But then I went on to work in two other organizations and both of them I left because, just for various different reasons. And I suppose for me, you know, it may have come out of nowhere for my boss to learn that I wanted to leave. And I’d love to explore some of the reasons.
Robert [00:04:19]:
I was just gonna say that to you.
Aoife O’Brien [00:04:20]:
Why do people, yeah, even if you.
Robert [00:04:22]:
Had three months, you know, or had to stay three months, it still was a surprise, you know, when you did it. And it comes from that paradigm of like, we don’t talk about this, you don’t talk about it. And look, Europeans are even more passive aggressive, you know, know about this stuff. I remember being at a conference and all These competitors were saying, hugging and hello and kissing each other. And I was like, oh, that’s so nice. And the person’s like, we don’t like each other at all. We just like that, you know, so there’s a lot of, like, we don’t, yeah, they’re being polite. We, like, we don’t talk about it.
Robert [00:04:54]:
This is not, but look, this is just. We don’t talk about it. We. This assumption that people are going to work there forever. I like, hey, like versus think about sports. You’re coming up at the end of the contract. I could give you some signals we’re going to go in a different direction. We’re going to sign a younger player.
Robert [00:05:08]:
Like, you know, you’re, you’re due for a big new contract or look, a lot of people are, haven’t lived up to their current contract. Right. And maybe there’s some, some path to renegotiation, but it’s just this, I don’t know, a lot of ego, a lot of psychology. If you look at the data, people aren’t going to, aren’t going to, aren’t going to work there forever. So, so why don’t we just more like sports, think about transitions as kind of part of the business and learn how to manage them in a better way that creates better outcomes.
Aoife O’Brien [00:05:40]:
Yeah, just get it out in the open. It’s kind of the elephant in the room, isn’t it? I think these days the average tenure is maybe two or three years or it seems to be typical. People think, oh, I should stay for two or three years in this role because otherwise on my cv, on my resume, it’s not going to look so good. And I heard you talking on another podcast episode about, like, if you work somewhere for six months, do you even include it into your resume or do you just leave it off completely because, you know, you didn’t.
Robert [00:06:09]:
I think having that option is great. I think a six month again, it seems, it seems almost not nice. But if I knew someone, I think most people, this is kind of a separate but tangential. I think most people, I have. This is not empirical, but I’ve asked most people know with 90% certainty after two weeks whether someone’s going to work, work out. I think that that is sort of a Malcolm Gladwell blink. Like they have 30 years of this to know that, like, this is just way too hard from the beginning. And now people don’t trust these people.
Robert [00:06:40]:
It’s not going to work out. And it seems crazy after three or four weeks to say, why don’t we just like pretend this never happened? So you invest, you try. It’s really hard to dig out of a trust deficit because now people are more focused on what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. But again, the honest discussion there could have, you know, it’s much easier to pretend that job didn’t exist then no matter what you say, when you see a four or six month stint, someone’s going to be like. And you can only blame the company so many times, right. And that before people are like, huh, like what’s going on here?
Aoife O’Brien [00:07:12]:
You’ve had a series of these four month jobs. What’s actually happening?
Robert [00:07:16]:
Right? This is even think about this. You hire someone resume to work at your company because you’re desperate. Their last seven jobs have been 18 months. Like, what makes you think that you’re, they’re staying at your company for a lifetime? Like, it’s just a, it’s just a super. I don’t know, it’s, it’s just, it’s just cognitive dissonance, I guess.
Aoife O’Brien [00:07:35]:
Yeah, absolutely. Can we take a step back and explore? What do you think? How can we get this stuff right? So how can we make sure that we’re hiring the right people who are going to stay a little bit longer in our organizations, assuming that we’re giving them the right conditions to succeed?
Robert [00:07:53]:
Yeah, I mean, way too much. I’ve worked a lot with Jeff Smart, who’s one of the best interview consultants in the world. Way too much of interviewing is hypothetical. And Jeff says, you know, ask hypothetical questions, get hypothetical answers. I was just on a call with a company that we’re helping to redo their core values and we were talking about interviews. You can’t say, like what do you think of our core value of own it? They’re going to be like, it’s great, I love it, I’m own it. You know, what you have to say is tell me about a time when you were given responsibility for something and you blew it and what happened or tell me about a time. So to us, a great interview is behavioral based questions focused on the values and then some sort of assessment or test or real world work that represents the job people are going to have to do.
Robert [00:08:37]:
We used to hire a lot of account managers and they had to send a lot of reports and be careful and be thoughtful. And so we would, we would give a report for them with a bunch of errors in it. Both, both in the Excel spreadsheet and things you should never say to a client in an Email. And the people who got it, like, totally wrong would try to make all kinds of excuses. Well, I was rushed for time, and I was this and I was that. I was like, like, this is the work.
Aoife O’Brien [00:08:57]:
Yeah.
Robert [00:08:58]:
If you don’t like it or if it’s not intuitive to you or you don’t know that, like, we’ll do better next month, like, or, you know, or some stupid. We said some inflammatory thing again, you wouldn’t say, like. Like, you know, the sales were way off. But no worries. I’m sure it’ll get better. Right. Like, if you don’t know that, you don’t say that to a client. Like, it might not be the right job for you.
Aoife O’Brien [00:09:18]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Robert [00:09:20]:
Just now, this is. This is a more experienced person. If you’re training a younger person from. From the start, that might be a little different. But we always focused kind of half. Half on aptitude and half on values.
Aoife O’Brien [00:09:32]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. I mean, I’ve. I’ve heard you talk about that before, the importance of values, and how do you bring more of that into the hiring process and then I suppose, into the onboarding and. And setting people up for success.
Robert [00:09:48]:
Yeah, well, so. So, yeah, you’ve got to build a process. You got to screen for the core values. You got to make sure people understand it. You got to make sure they can do the work, and then you need to kind of hold them accountable. And you also have to understand that you make mistakes. Right. It could be the right person in the wrong job.
Robert [00:10:04]:
Situations could have changed. This is where something changes, and there’s some showing of dissatisfaction and performance, and we just don’t dig into the root cause. And I talk about this a lot in the book. There are root causes that are fixable or not fixable. So, you know, you’re coming to work a little late, and you seem a little, you know, not paying attention to detail. So rather than just saying, wow, your performance is not good and marking you, I have a discussion. I’m like, hey, what’s. What’s going on? Right.
Robert [00:10:33]:
And you could say a couple of things. You could say, you know what? I lost my childcare. And, you know, so the hours have been really tough, and I’ve just been distracted and. Okay, so that’s something that you have to fix. Right. I can support you. I can help in the hours, but that’s something you have to change. That should bring your performance back.
Robert [00:10:49]:
Second, you might say, you know what? I left sales last year for marketing, and I really liked. I don’t Love marketing. I miss sales. I miss the quota. I like that better. And so we realize that you’re in the wrong job, and so you’re just not doing what you want to do. And, you know, that’s. That’s performance.
Robert [00:11:05]:
The third and. But. Or you didn’t get a raise and you really were doing and you’re upset about it. So I can decide whether we want to fix that or not fix that. Right. The third thing, you might be like, look like you guys are work from home, and I really miss the office, and it’s just not working for me. And, you know, so are we going to get offices? And you’re like, no, we’re not going to do that. So what’s interesting is, like, if you go into a doctor and you have a headache, they can give you a Tylenol.
Robert [00:11:33]:
And that’s what a performance improvement plan is. It’s a Tylenol. But a functional doctor would be like, let’s figure out whether you’re lack, you know, whether you’re glucose intolerant, whether you’re dehydrated. You might have a headache because you have a brain tumor. Right. So the source of these things is different things in these. Sort of where the employee problem starts, we don’t jump in and look to that route and say, can we fix this? Do they want to fix it? Who has to fix it? We wait until things get really bad, and then they’re kind of unrecoverable. And when you dive into those routes, I think you can stop things from getting bad.
Robert [00:12:07]:
You stop things from getting toxic. And some of those things would be like, hey, look, we’re not going to get offices, so if that’s really important to you, why don’t you start looking for a new job and we’ll start looking for a replacement and let’s see if we can, you know, figure out a good outcome for this.
Aoife O’Brien [00:12:20]:
Yeah, I’d love to come back to that point in a minute, but I think it’s really important, this idea just to stress that oftentimes when we notice these things at the start, I think you alluded to it earlier, like this idea that the trust is kind of broken. Like that person is underperforming and the blame is squarely placed on them. We don’t have the conversation. We don’t address the elephant in the room. Maybe we let things fester.
Robert [00:12:43]:
We.
Aoife O’Brien [00:12:44]:
Until it just builds up and builds up and it just gets worse because we haven’t actually addressed it. I think any, any thoughts around that and why that might happen.
Robert [00:12:53]:
Well, I told my son this recently because he had to make a bunch of difficult phone calls to tell people some news that was great for him, but, but tough for some of his friends. And I was like, look, bud, the difficult conversation never gets better by delaying it. In fact, it only gets worse because now people start to hear and you haven’t told them. So I think we fear these difficult conversations. So assume that we not don’t have them. It will go away. I know someone who had one yesterday. That was one of the.
Robert [00:13:23]:
It should have had it two months ago. Waited and waited. And what happens in our relationships when we don’t do this, right? What happens is inevitably when we have the conversation, all the crap from the last three to six months comes up, right? Like it’s, you know what, and you did this a month ago and you did this two months ago and you pissed me off six months ago. You’re like, what? And, and so, like, it just, it’s always worse because you didn’t, you didn’t address it head on. I really believe there are far better outcomes if you just start saying it’s okay to talk about that you’re not happy or it’s not working, or if it’s okay for me to be like, this isn’t working. You’re, if you have the right system, you should know that, hey, you’re at 50% of quota for three quarters in a row. Like, obviously that’s not working. So, like, what are we going to do about it? Do you want to be in sales? Do you want to do this job? And the only way to have that honest conversation is not to feel like you’re going to be walked out the door tomorrow, right? You, there are these statutory periods in other countries and you might know you have that three months of protection, but in the US there isn’t.
Robert [00:14:24]:
And so the fear level is higher, but it’s still a cultural thing. It’s still, we just have to go back to. People aren’t working there for life, right? They’re, they’re, they’re joining your team for a season and you should have a conversation at the end of the season and, and see if, you know, this all still makes sense.
Aoife O’Brien [00:14:41]:
Yeah, I mean, to me that makes an awful lot of sense. And if I could share my perspective, this, let’s talk about three months now is because that is, I think, you know, that’s, that’s become fairly standard when you get to more senior positions, especially in Europe. So from a recipient perspective. So if someone handed Their notice in for me, to me. And it was unexpected because I wasn’t, you know, having those conversations. I wasn’t noticing what was going on. We weren’t having an open conversation about what their plans were, that they wanted to travel, et cetera, et cetera. Excuse me.
Aoife O’Brien [00:15:16]:
And so it came as a total surprise to me. Like I, as the manager, I’m going to be really pissed off because it’s going to be, I’m going to have to find someone else and everyone else is on three months notice at that level. So I’m going to have a gap in my team. I’m going to have to pick up slack or some of the other team are going to have to pick up slack and it’s going to lower the morale, basically. So it causes this issue, I think. Just, you know. Exactly. Yeah.
Aoife O’Brien [00:15:44]:
But then from an individual’s perspective, we’re so afraid of handing in our notice, having those open conversations and saying, this is not working out for me. I was brave enough in one of those organizations that I mentioned to have that conversation with my manager. And I said, not really loving the role that I’m in. I had switched roles and we had a brief conversation about finding a different global role and it could still be based in the same location, which sounded interesting, but he never really followed it up. And I continued just to not enjoy the role I was in till I got to a stage where I was like, I’m, I’m just doing here and, and probably came as a surprise to him. I, you know, I brought my, my typed up letter, I handed it to him and that was it. You know, I was on my three months notice.
Robert [00:16:31]:
Yeah. And, and, and look, it’s not really on the employee to do this. It’s on, well, it’s on the employee to do this, but it’s on the employer to be very clear that there’s a culture environment where that is okay.
Aoife O’Brien [00:16:43]:
Right.
Robert [00:16:43]:
Why would an employee run into a buzzsaw where they know it’s just going to hurt them? Right. They have to. That has to be kind of set as the operating system. I. So people wrongly assume in this book, I’m encouraging everyone to just go run and tell everyone. They’re like, no, don’t do this in a company where there’s no psychological safety or they’ll fire you that day. Like, that’s not going to work. Like, leaders have to believe that this is better for their business and set up the policy that way and then ask employees to sort of, you know, come, come together with It, Yeah, I.
Aoife O’Brien [00:17:15]:
Think for me, it’s such a nice approach, and it’s very different to anything I’ve ever seen or heard people doing. Uh, one of my friends recently resigned from her role. Her teammates were understandably quite upset, and her boss’s reaction was, okay, when’s your last day? And that was kind of it, you know, and there was no, like, could we have done something better? How can we improve things? There was, there was no sort of approach like that whatsoever.
Robert [00:17:42]:
Yeah, I think there’s, like I said, there’s so many opportunities for better outcomes if we will have these conversations.
Aoife O’Brien [00:17:51]:
Yeah. And how do you think we start? Like, say I’m a leader in an organization and we’re not really doing this stuff right now, whether it’s on where, you know, we’re regularly just using the two weeks notice or we have the three months notice, whatever it might be. How do I start thinking about bringing this approach into the culture?
Robert [00:18:13]:
It’s not a pitch for the book, but so many people ask me that. The book, you can read half of it for free. I think it’s like $3 otherwise. But I, I, people ask me for the Playbook. So I wrote up the playbook and I shared it, which goes from first addressing the aspects of your culture, how to have the conversations, the communications, how to train people, what the components of a program look like. But it starts with the culture. It starts with, you can’t have any of this stuff without psychological safety and the willingness to have these discussions and talk about these things. That is the underpinning of everything.
Aoife O’Brien [00:18:48]:
Yeah, we, we talk about psychological safety quite a lot on the, on the podcast. And like, for me, it, it’s the foundation of my framework, the Happier at work framework. I’d love to explore with you this concept. And I’m thinking about it from a few different perspectives. So let’s assume that we are a leader and we think we have psychological safety, but actually we don’t. What are some of the steps that we can take to see whether we have a psychologically safe environment and some steps to take to, to build that, because I know it’s not something that we can just switch on and build overnight. What are some of the steps you see in building real psychological safety at work?
Robert [00:19:27]:
Yeah, I think there are cultures that have a lot of feedback and upward feedback, and people take it and they listen to it and notice in meetings whether people say things and what the reaction is or otherwise. If you want a great test, though, for this on your team and see psychological tell your team to do something that’s totally impossible based on a time budget or what. Like, it’s really absolutely impossible. And see who says something like in the room. Or see if they all go, yep, we got that, boss. And then what happens is they go out of the room and you’re like, she’s crazy. And like, blah, blah, blah. Like, the difference is in psychological safety, they’ll tell it to your face and ask questions.
Robert [00:20:06]:
And if you don’t have it, they will all go reconvene in a room afterward and be like, this guy’s out of his mind. Right? Like, and look, something you want people that are overcome. But let’s just say I went to my EA and I said, go find me a business class ticket to London from tomorrow for under $200. Like you want someone who’s like, that’s not happening and I’m not wasting my time on it, right? Like, yeah, like, rather than okay, you know, and then spending 12 hours trying to do something you know you can’t do and then, and then trying to just like. It’s so funny. It’s such a simple test, but it’s interesting.
Aoife O’Brien [00:20:40]:
Yeah. And I’ve never heard someone share that before, but it is so true. And I think the difficulty is with this that as a leader, again, we’re not deliberately sharing things that are really hard to do, but we don’t know that actually they are really hard to do because we’re not the ones who are doing it. But we’ll ask people to do it. They’ll say yes, they won’t speak up, they’ll just convene themselves and try and try and figure out what’s going on. So this is a test whether you have psychological safety. What are some of the things that you can do to build it?
Robert [00:21:14]:
Look, you, I think you normalize feedback. You have to have these conversations. You need to collect stuff, you need to report back to people need to see that feedback is going to management and it’s okay and they’re responding. So we would always collect a lot of feedback. And then at the same time, we would kind of go back to people and say, here’s what we can do, here’s what we can’t do. We heard you. You know, you’re kind of reporting back and you’re making open door. There’s also like just watching meetings on whether you invite questioning whether you.
Robert [00:21:50]:
I mean, I facilitated an off site for a leadership team from a fabulous company and they won 10 best places to work awards. And just when they did their. Actually, I was speaking at their office. I didn’t facilitate it, but they let me kind of be in the room, and they were doing their opening thing. They had a thing on, you know, what’s been good in my life, what’s been bad in my life, what am I excited about today? And what’s the elephant in the room? And just by the stuff that people said the elephant in the room was, I could tell you that this was an incredibly psychological, safe team. And when they got to discussions later about roles and talking about, I don’t want to be working for more than five more years, like, they had no problem staying that stuff. And I could tell because they were just willing to have these discussions that people were willing to call out the CEO or say stuff or otherwise.
Aoife O’Brien [00:22:37]:
Yeah, I love that. And I think, if you think about it, who doesn’t want to work in an environment that is like that? And I think as individual leaders, it’s up to us to challenge how things are done. I think, you know, again, I’ve had several conversations about psychological safety. Some people say it has to come from the top. Other people say, as individual leaders, we can be the role models for psychological safety. Obviously, if it’s not reciprocated, it becomes a bit of an uphill battle. Any. Any thoughts around that?
Robert [00:23:07]:
Yeah, it’s got to be reciprocated. Yeah. Like, again, people need to see this. They need. They will notice in a meeting where they ask a question and the leader says, thanks for asking that and answers it honestly, or they shut them down and kind of say, you shouldn’t have embarrassed me, and you have no right to ask that. I used to pay people in our town halls with Starbucks gift cards to ask, like, the most difficult, uncomfortable question, and someone’s like, are you gonna sell the company? And, like, leave us all hanging. Otherwise, I’m like, awesome. Because I’m sure everyone’s thinking that.
Robert [00:23:36]:
So you said it. So here’s $20 to Starbucks.
Aoife O’Brien [00:23:39]:
Nice. I love that. If we, from an individual perspective, we’re not feeling the best. We’re not feeling that rep. Reciprocated psychological safety. When do you think is the time to leave? So you mentioned earlier that we can tell within a couple of weeks if maybe someone is not right in the role. From the individual’s perspective, how quickly do you think you can tell it’s not the right place for me. And how do we know it’s time to leave?
Robert [00:24:12]:
I think you leave when? Well, a. You leave if. If. And obviously there’s conditions that to everyone. So you leave when. First of all, you leave if you feel like it doesn’t align with your values. Right. Those are unreconcilable.
Robert [00:24:26]:
And I think you leave if you don’t believe in the mission or the vision or you don’t like the work you’re doing. You’re not engaged in it. Because I think then it’s just like a clock. Like, am I going to tell them or are they going to tell me? Right. So we’ve seen the people that you’ve had to let go who are doing a horrible job. There’s almost a sense of relief when you tell them. Right. They knew they were doing a horrible job, they didn’t want to do a horrible job, they’re in the wrong job.
Robert [00:24:53]:
And like they needed someone to put them out of their misery. Right. So I would say if, look, I could, I can’t, I can’t tell these stories because they’re personal. But I can tell you some people that stayed in jobs that I know where, where the money was good but the values were misaligned and they resulted in disastrous outcomes for, for them.
Aoife O’Brien [00:25:18]:
You can’t, you can’t.
Robert [00:25:20]:
I can’t share the details, but, but I, but I know it. But I know a few of them so I’ll figure out how to anonymize it one day.
Aoife O’Brien [00:25:27]:
But yeah, definitely. I, I would love to know. And I’m kind of giving myself away slightly here. I’m a big fan of the show Below Deck. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched it.
Robert [00:25:37]:
I’ve seen it. Yeah.
Aoife O’Brien [00:25:38]:
Yeah.
Robert [00:25:38]:
I don’t know if I’m supposed to admit to that, but my kids love it. Yeah, I’ll go with that as an excuse. Yeah.
Aoife O’Brien [00:25:43]:
I’m not sure I’m supposed to admit to that either, but I do quite enjoy it. There’s a lot of drama, but in one of the recent episodes that I saw one of the employees and her dealing with the leader, she just had no idea that she was underperforming. She really had no idea the leader was getting increasingly pissed off with her. Every time she communicated with her, she’s like, oh, I’m going to improve, I’m going to improve. And eventually she was fired. But I’d love to explore that in a little bit of detail where someone just has no idea that they’re underperforming. And so it comes as this massive surprise.
Robert [00:26:19]:
Yeah. That’s a failure in either leadership. I do think there should be check ins. I think check ins because People forget stuff. They should be a regurgitation of what you’ve heard along the way. So it’s either failure of managers to let people know where they stand, which is bad leadership. And I think leaders should be managed on how well they lead, not how well they do, but it’s also a failure of the data or the KPI or the systems that would let you know that you’re not doing a good job. Right.
Robert [00:26:51]:
It’s a famous story. My podcast, Alan Mulally talks about when he came into ford as the CEO of Ford and they were losing like $14 billion a year, and he came into the meeting and everyone’s lights on their green light, red light thing were all green. And this was psychological safety problem. He’s like, guys, unless we’re trying to lose the most money in history, what the hell is going on here? I want the actual numbers and results. And so a lot of this is solved with data and dashboards and accountability. There should be some objective measures of are you doing a good job or not.
Aoife O’Brien [00:27:27]:
Yeah. So that we can reflect back to. And this should be shared. Yeah, yeah. Back to the.
Robert [00:27:33]:
By the way, it makes it a lot easier to manage. Again, we expect our sales performers to be at at least 80% of quota every quarter, and being below that is a problem, and that triggers a satisfactory performance. So if I’m at 50% of quota for two months or three months in a row, I’m always surprised. There was another Friday Ford I did called surprise. It’s surprised. I’m surprised when salespeople who understand the objectivity of the role and who are way missing their numbers and then come into a discussion where they’re losing their job are surprised by that. Right. Like, it just.
Robert [00:28:11]:
If you know your job and you understand that shouldn’t be a surprise, your lying to yourself. You know, somehow in that. In that context.
Aoife O’Brien [00:28:20]:
Yeah. And for whatever reason that, you know, going back to what you said earlier, Robert, that either it’s not a good fit for you in terms of the role, or something else is going on that you haven’t actually brought to the surface to say. And this is, you know, how can we work together to actually fix what’s going on here?
Robert [00:28:35]:
And I think you might be thinking, oh, they really like me. And it’s like, they really like you, but your job is selling and you’re not selling. Right. So you, You’ve. I’m. I’m particularly surprised in those situations like where, like, you’ve got to be aware of that. Like, that is just that shouldn’t be a surprise.
Aoife O’Brien [00:28:54]:
It’s separating the person from the performance, really, isn’t it? So the person nice and, you know, we can go out and have a beer after work or whatever it might be. We get along as a people. But actually, when it comes to the performance, it’s having those conversations which are sometimes difficult, and bringing that to the surface as well. Something else that I talk about, and it might be related to why people leave organizations. So if we’re not having conversations about our careers and what those next steps look like, what are some of the reasons that you see that people do opt to leave and if they’re not getting that kind of support from their leaders?
Robert [00:29:34]:
Yeah. Well, I want to make sure I go back to something you said before, because it’s important. But I think you leave when you stop learning and your growth curve plateaus. Right. Other than comp issues or otherwise like. But people want to grow. They want to learn. They want meaningful work.
Robert [00:29:47]:
And when that plateaus, when they reach the top of a mastery curve, it’s sort of most dangerous. But I do want to go back. There is a psychological phenomenon that is a derivative cognitive dissonance that I have not trademarked yet. But I think that goes on and it happens. So, you know, I have Sarah on my team, and I really like Sarah, and Sarah’s great. We’ll go back to sales because it’s so easy. But Sarah sucks at sales. She’s not selling well.
Robert [00:30:12]:
She’s not good at it, really, like Sarah. So what happens? Most things. Look, cognitive dissonance. The mind can’t handle these two things that, like, I’m gonna have to lay off Sarah, but I really like Sarah, so it has to fix that. So how does it fix that? It starts not liking Sarah, and it’s like, oh, Sarah’s late. Sarah’s lazy. Sarah is this. Sarah’s that, like.
Robert [00:30:34]:
And it just. It brings that all into coherence so that when I finally get rid of Sarah, I’m annoyed at Sarah, and I’m mad. Time for you to go. Otherwise.
Aoife O’Brien [00:30:42]:
And it makes me feel better about myself.
Robert [00:30:43]:
It makes you feel better about yourself because you’ve removed the dissonance. You’ve put it all on this side, which Sarah deserved this. She had it coming. She’s lazy. She’s this whatever, you know, she’s stupid. Like, all the things you come up with to feel better. So you are doing what needed to be done. There’s a different option, which is to lean into the relationship and say, sarah, I love you, you’re awesome, you’re great.
Robert [00:31:08]:
Sales is not for you. This is not working. We can’t let this go on. How can I help you? Do you want to talk to different departments? Do you want time to start looking for a new job? Obviously, like this can’t go on. So there’s a way to lean into that relationship and bring the coherence this way rather than that way. I think 99% of people go that way.
Aoife O’Brien [00:31:30]:
Yeah, I would definitely agree. And that makes sense what you’re saying that we, we want to be the heroes. We want to be.
Robert [00:31:37]:
We want to be the bad guy.
Aoife O’Brien [00:31:39]:
We don’t want to be the bad guy. Exactly. And I, you know, I’m not the bad guy if I fire someone who actually really annoys me or who I don’t like anymore, even though I started as a nice person, let’s face it. And we’ve covered lots of different aspects from the book. Robert, is there anything else that you want to share before you can, before we talk about the new one?
Robert [00:32:01]:
No. And again, if you go in my substack, if you go to Friday forward substack, there’s a little tab and you can get half the book and read most of it for free if you want to check out the playbook there.
Aoife O’Brien [00:32:11]:
Brilliant. Love it. And so talk to us about the new book. Do you have a working title?
Robert [00:32:16]:
Yeah, I have a prototype. Comes out in October. It’s called the Compass Within. So this double clicks. A lot of my books and work have talked about this concept of personal core values and the importance of it. And a lot of people are like, that’s great. I’m all in on it. How do I figure out mine? And I was like, well, it’s complicated.
Robert [00:32:34]:
I have a course that I did. I have a program that I did with leaders. It’s not like a. Let me give you the answer. There’s real work to do. So I turned that process into a parable, into a story of someone going through a core value sort of crisis season in their life. What I would call the big three, which is your vocation or your company, your community and your partner. And they meet a mentor and that mentor helps them figure out their core values and walks them through a process to do that.
Robert [00:33:03]:
And so you get to kind of watch it. And then at the end, like a parable in tioni book says, here’s what you saw and here’s how you can do this work yourself.
Aoife O’Brien [00:33:09]:
Yeah, I love parable based books. And I think, you know, if I If I share my own experience of core values, my experiences, I knew that my company had them because they were pasted on the wall and they were in our email signatures that were on our website. But I never knew that I, as an individual also had core values until I started coaching and learning about this stuff in my masters. Like, that’s when it all became apparent to me. It all kind of fell into place. Like, okay, that’s what’s been going on. That there’s been a misalignment between my values and the behaviors that I’m witnessing in the workplaces that I work in. Do you have any kind of similar stories of your own and how you figured out what your own core values were?
Robert [00:33:54]:
Yeah, and I won’t give it all away because the story’s in this book. You can go to compass-within.com if you’re interested and order it today. But yeah, I went to a leadership program that became really clear to me that core values were super important, but it didn’t tell you how to find them. And so I spent like three or six months going through that process. Then I built a process to start training our team members on it. And that’s basically the process that that is sort of incorporated into this book.
Aoife O’Brien [00:34:23]:
Yeah, I love it and I love that it’s come from that place that, yeah, they said how important it was, but they never actually showed you how to do it. And I think that that was crucial for me. When I first started doing this, I think I, I picked out words or I thought of things that, that were important to me and I had something like 35 and I was like, oh, I’m so great because I have 35 words.
Robert [00:34:44]:
It’s got to be three or four. I’d be curious if you go through. Big thing I focus on is actionable and wording them in a way that you know that if you did it or you didn’t do it and there’s a specific process and a thing called the validator on, on core values that are validated or not validated because you gotta know whether you did it and you gotta be able to say I did a good job at this or I did it. It’s a decision making rubric. So it’d be, I’d be interested for you to, to, to check it out and see and see if it helps you sort of polish those up a little bit.
Aoife O’Brien [00:35:14]:
I definitely would love. Now I have moved on from the 35. I did narrow it down to 5 and I kind of grouped some things together and things that were sort of interrelated. But I love the idea of having a rubric because it is, it’s like for me it’s important because your values are how you make decisions. And you know, I see words sometimes and I’m like, but is that like, how, how can that be a core value? I don’t really understand how, how that is a core value. So I love that idea. I’ll definitely be checking that out. How to do that.
Aoife O’Brien [00:35:45]:
Robert, the question I ask everyone who comes on the podcast, what does being happier at work mean to you?
Robert [00:35:51]:
I think it just means being engaged. It means showing up, being engaged. You’re not watching the clock, you’re enjoying your work. We all know what that flow looks like. And to our last, the last point we were just talking about, I think that happens when you’re aligned with your values and doing things that are aligned with your values. It’s just pretty natural.
Aoife O’Brien [00:36:09]:
Totally, totally. And if people want to reach out, if they want to connect, if they want to get their hands on your two weeks notice book and your compass book. What’s it.
Robert [00:36:18]:
Yeah, you can go to robertglaser.com and you can see everything there, Compass within. Also, anyone who pre orders the book before October, I’m giving anyone the course too, which is normally $100. The course that goes with the book. That’ll walk you through the entire process if you kind of need help with it. So my bhag is to help a million people figure out their core values over the next five years. And so I’m excited to spend some time on that.
Aoife O’Brien [00:36:44]:
Yeah, brilliant. Love that. And such a noble cause as well, especially when it comes to happiness at work, I think. So. Really, really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for such an important discussion.
Robert [00:36:56]:
Thank you for having me.
Aoife O’Brien [00:36:59]:
That was Robert Glazer sharing insights from his new book, Rethinking Two Weeks Notice. I really hope you enjoyed today’s episode, and I’d love to know what changes are you gonna make as a result of listening today. If there’s someone in your network who you think could benefit from listening to this, absolutely share that with them, and I would be so grateful if you could leave a rating or a review or get involved in the conversation on your favourite podcast platform.
