Episode 241 Transcript:

0:00:00 Ramona Shaw: In this episode, I’m thrilled to be joined by Robert Glazer, a serial entrepreneur with expensive leadership experience and a number one Wall Street Journal and USA Today best selling author whose work has redefined how we think about leadership, culture and performance. Robert’s new book, Rethinking Two Weeks Changing the Way Employees Leave Companies for the Better, challenges the deeply entrenched norms around employee departures.

0:00:28 Ramona Shaw: Robert proposes a radical yet practical alternative that benefits both employees and organizations. In this conversation, we’ll dive into the big ideas behind the book and what they mean for leaders like you, navigating employee transitions on a regular basis. So let’s welcome Robert Glazer to the show. Here are the two questions this podcast answers. One, how do you successfully transition into your first official leadership role?

0:00:55 Ramona Shaw: And two, how do you keep climbing that leadership ladder and continuously get promoted? Although the competition and the expectations get bigger, this show, The Manager Track podcast, will provide the answers. I’m your host, Ramona Shaw. I’m on a mission to create workplaces where work is seen as a source of contribution, connection and personal fulfillment. And this transition starts with developing a new generation of leaders who know how to lead. So everyone wins and grows.

0:01:24 Ramona Shaw: In the show, you’ll learn how to think, communicate and act as confident and competent leader you know you can be. Robert, welcome to The Manager Track podcast. I’m excited to have you here with us and for us to talk about your book, Rethinking Two Weeks Notice. Can you tell us briefly what the main message is that you are proposing through this book?

0:01:46 Robert Glazer: Sure, and thanks for having me. Yeah, the main message is a lot has changed in the workplace over the last decade or two and I think a lot of companies have put more focus on hiring and building great cultures. And we also know that employment is not, you know, for decades or lifetime. Yet the process of how people leave organizations really hasn’t changed. And really that just seems like a shame for me to me and I think big people don’t know how to change it. So obviously two weeks notice is sort of a, is a US phenomenon. It doesn’t exist necessarily in the rest of the world. There’s more statutory sort of notice periods. But the problem is the same. The problem is we haven’t changed how people like leave organizations and make it okay to leave organizations. You might still be at somewhere in Europe and have to give eight weeks notice, but you’ve already decided you’re leaving, you’re interviewing, you’re having doctor’s appointments.

0:02:40 Robert Glazer: It’s kind of the same. It’s kind of the same problem. So I really think we just, we’re at the point where we know employment is not for life and we can change how people leave organizations and make it better for the employees and for the company.

0:02:55 Ramona Shaw: When you think about this idea of the two weeks notice that has definitely in the US been around for a long time, there are advantages and disadvantages to it. And for me, coming out of Europe and work, very weird at some point, I vividly remember that conversation where someone said, yeah, I could literally resign today and walk out. And yes, I do have a two weeks notice period, but really you can’t hold me back, right?

0:03:25 Robert Glazer: I’ll show up tomorrow.

0:03:26 Ramona Shaw: Yeah, right, yeah. And I remember sitting there so vividly in that boardroom was a boardroom, it’s just like a large conference room and thinking, wow, I kind of knew about this, but it didn’t really hit me until that moment that the fact that this is possible on my team makes me have to rethink how I go about team building and training and cross training and, you know, making sure that important knowledge is institutionalized and how I mitigate the risk of someone walking out and creating sort of a bit of buffer, anticipating or trying to anticipate when someone comes to the end of their employment term with the company and so forth.

0:04:10 Ramona Shaw: And while that seemed really challenging for me and was really prompting me to rethink how I built this team, I also saw the benefits of it. So I’m curious to hear. Obviously this two weeks notice has been institutionalized, but also has been showing up for a long time. Tell us about the pros and cons as you see it.

0:04:32 Robert Glazer: Yeah, I guess. I mean, you almost have to pull out the two weeks notice. There are pros and cons to employment at will, but they still end up with the same issue. This is normally how we find out that someone is ending their employment on our team, right? These are sitting in the office and they say, hey, Ramona, can I talk to you for a second? And they close the door. And every time I say this, someone has a visceral reaction because their heart sinks. They’ve been in one of these conversations or they’ve been laid off in a similar conversation where they close the door and HR is there, right? And say, hey, I’m going to do something else and whether you can force me to stay for eight weeks or whatever, it doesn’t matter, right? You haven’t started hiring and it could be two weeks or a day.

0:05:12 Robert Glazer: You’re surprised. The ending really impacts the whole memory of someone’s performance. You’re like, I mentored this person. I worked with them. What do you even mean? And it’s just because we haven’t changed this paradigm to say, look, we’re not. I think it existed when you assumed that people were staying somewhere for life and that it was weird if they left. But now even you look up all the best places to work, and you’ll find the average tenure is maybe two and a half years. You know, something like that.

0:05:44 Robert Glazer: So if we know these things are going to end, like, how do we create better endings? And turns out, like, we actually have to push back probably six to nine months from that end when something started bubbling up on the employee side or the employer side and figure out how to have an environment of psychological safety, how to have better communication, and sort of a system that says, yeah, it’s okay to leave here. Like, it’s more important how you leave here. We’re not going to assume that you’re going to work here forever.

0:06:15 Ramona Shaw: Okay, tell us more about that, what that would look like. Because when what I can imagine in our audience’s head is happening now is like, what do you mean, nine months in advance, I should tell them it’s okay for them to leave. It isn’t like, no, I don’t.

0:06:31 Robert Glazer: I just mean the problems. So when you get to the point where someone has quit or you have fired them, it is usually the manifestation of problems that. That started to emerge. Let’s. Let’s say, you know, that there were fissures in the foundation six to nine months ago, not cracked. Now, a lot of these things can be cured or fixed if you deal with them at the time. However, if you just wait, it often becomes unrepairable. So I kind of talk in the book around when something is not working, when someone is, you know, unhappy, not saying they’ve had. They have these conversations.

0:07:04 Robert Glazer: And, you know, managers engage and they have real conversation. What’s going on? You’re. You seem to be constantly late, not engaged. You know, tell me, like, I really mean it. And you have trust with your boss. And so you kind of dive in. And I talk about. There’s kind of three roots to most problems. There’s things the employee can fix and has to. There’s things the employer can and want to fix, and then there’s things that won’t change.

0:07:31 Robert Glazer: So, so here’s the thing. If I’m. Let’s just say I’m firing. I’m firing you this week because you’ve had been totally disengaged. And your work has been sloppy and been a mess. Like, if we rewind that tape back nine months and we had a conversation, I might as well found three things. First, maybe you lost your childcare and you’ve been, like, really struggling and working around the hours and didn’t want to tell anyone. Okay, we can sit down and have a conversation and talk about maybe making some changes to the hours. Like, but, hey, look, or you need some training, or here are the things that you need to do.

0:08:02 Robert Glazer: So the manager can be accommodating to this, but this is something the employee is going to have to change and wants to change. Right. And maybe kind of letting that out of the bag was helpful. Well, maybe, like, the reason you’re frustrated whenever is you’re interviewing for jobs, you know, already every day, and you’re kind of, you know, checked out. Well, there’s not a lot I can do. Or you really want to work in an office, and we’re all remote, right? So. So there are some things that, you know, you can. The employee can change, the employer can change or not change. Right. And you may want a raise, and I might think you’re not worth that raise at all. Or actually, like, you know what? We really should have given you a raise.

0:08:43 Robert Glazer: It’s been way too long. So by digging in there, or you came from the sales team and you really are not liking sales and you want to go back to the marketing team, right? So kind of getting in at the first signs of disengagement and unhappiness and figuring out, is this something we can fix? Can we change something? Can you change. Change something? But if I wait six months, you know, to the point where now it’s three quarters and a lot of animosity is built up, and you’re doing really poorly now because you’re doing poorly, I’m all over you. And now all this stuff, like, there’s not a lot of good options at that point. You end up with a sort of typical performance improvement plan, which does nothing because it’s designed to just document the person’s failures, not correct anything early on.

0:09:26 Robert Glazer: And that, I think, is the problem is that most organizations and managers haven’t created the sort of psychological safety in a space to start having these conversations early. We’ve had some incredible stories at our company over the year of people that have taken jobs elsewhere, great jobs, people have switched internally. But all these things happened because we had a conversation and we knew what was going on, and we can kind of look out for those opportunities when they, when they came around.

0:09:54 Ramona Shaw: I had an experience in two different companies. One of them was sort of that mindset of, you will stay here forever. We’re your family. You give us the, you know, 60, 70 hours a week of your life and that’s all you’re going to do. This is the assumption, right? Unless you tell us otherwise. And then I worked with a company that had a very different approach where top down, the communication was. I know this for everyone here, this is including myself as the founder, CEO.

0:10:24 Ramona Shaw: This is a stepping stone to something else. And in fact, I, as a CEO, founder, I actually want to live off the grid. This is a means to that end. This business will help me be able to plant all the trees and everything that I need in order to create that life. And it was such an opening to then be able to share more transparently why am I actually here and what am I looking to get out of it? So we can have this transparent conversation about, you know, roles and responsibilities, growth within the company or outside of the company.

0:11:01 Ramona Shaw: That seemed a lot more natural. But at the same time, when I look at sort of a. Somewhere in between, like most of the companies are not on. Not, not.

0:11:11 Robert Glazer: Yeah, that, that, that second example is more utopian. I mean, it’s what I’m pushing for in this book. But the first one. And look, that first company shouldn’t be surprised when everyone surprises them, right? Because they’ve said like, look, the way we’re going to act is like, you’re never going to leave and it’s a betrayal and you’re leaving the family. And so, yeah, you’re going to wait till the last minute and you’re going to lie to them and then they’re going to be pissed at you. And this is.

0:11:36 Robert Glazer: But to me, this is silly because it doesn’t reflect reality, right? You’re not family, it’s not a family business. You know, they can let you go. It’s employment at will. We need to stop pretending that. And I would rather, I think a lot of us are just assuming that the devil we don’t know is worse than the devil we know. Like, I would rather know about these things that one of the common pushbacks on a program like this is how can you have someone? Because we advocate for sort of transition periods, whether it’s 90 days, where that person can go look for the new job, you can work on finding their replacement. You know, they’re interviewing you, kind of work this out so it works out. People, oh, they’re going to steal stuff, they’re going to behave badly. I’m like, well, you’re helping the person you’re working respectively, and you’re keeping your eyes on them. Like, you don’t have to worry about the person that you know that’s quitting and leaving. You have to worry about the person that quit a year ago and they stayed. That’s the person who started copying files. And you know, because you don’t even know they’re pissed. They’re, they’re quit your company a long time ago. They just haven’t found a new job yet.

0:12:36 Ramona Shaw: Yeah, yeah. And if they want to transfer files, they’re going to do it regardless of when they commit.

0:12:41 Robert Glazer: Well before they give notice. Well before the end. Yeah. And look what happens eventually with these things. When you wait too long and you know, finally, like Ramona leaves and you know, then, and let’s say again, she’s in sales, it’s always worse. But you know, the cleanup, then you get in there, oh, well, she hasn’t updated her pipeline in nine months. And so her book of business is really, has anyone ever finally parted away with someone where they weren’t working out and then found there wasn’t a whole bunch of buried dinosaurs for them? Like, usually it usually gets worse for 90 days as you keep learning about all the work that the person wasn’t doing Right.

0:13:18 Ramona Shaw: Now, if we switch sidestone and we look at it now from the perspective of the employee who would say, I am going to. What you’re suggesting is I should seek that conversation with my manager to say, hey, you know, I’m starting to feel like this is not the right fit for me. I’d like to talk about what’s next for me and figure out a timeline with you. What they may feel is that they’re potentially sacrificing or sabotaging themselves because there’s retribution that they’re facing that may be cut out of relevant work that could help them in future jobs.

0:14:01 Ramona Shaw: They may not be put up for promotions or salary bumps that, that they may would they would get if they were to communicate. And if they don’t yet have a job, they actually don’t know, will I stay here for three months or for nine months.

0:14:16 Robert Glazer: So I want to be 100% clear. I am not advocating that an employee goes and reads this and goes, oh, I’m going to just go be honest with that family business. This is really written for the person. On the flip side, whether it is the manager, the HR director, CEO saying, look, I can get a better outcome by changing how my company handles that. And I need to prove to employees that that is safe and that’s okay. So when we rolled out this program, we said, look, come talk to us about these problems. We promise you will not be walked to the door. We promise. Like, you can out us on this. You can tell everyone else, like if you want to have a discussion, but that has to come from the company side. You should not. Yes. If you have a company that anytime anyone gives two weeks notice, they’re asked to leave that day, and I know one of those companies, you should not go expect that you’re going to tell them, hey, I don’t want to be doing this job tomorrow.

0:15:04 Robert Glazer: And they’re going to be like, okay, let’s figure something out for 90 days. So this needs to come from the managers and the organizations. But look, any leader on any team can actually implement a large part of this without having it need to be the default part of the organization. They can create that psychological trust. They can create psychological safety and trust in their team. Their team can come to them and tell them things honestly. They can kind of orchestrate, you know, better.

0:15:31 Robert Glazer: You know, they can know, they don’t have to tell. Like you might know that the person’s interviewing and say, all right, well, I’m going to give you like 60 days. Go do your interviews. Just tell me what’s going on. By the way, I’m going to reach out to HR and start. Hi. There’s nothing that you couldn’t do within a company’s existing processes. Right. With this. So it’s, it doesn’t have to be the company policy per se.

0:15:52 Ramona Shaw: Okay, thank you for clarifying that because I think that’s, that’s important that this needs to come from the leaders. Also, what you’re proposing is this is something that, you know, HR team teams or companies overall can start to implement, but as leaders, instead of depending on the organization to provide it, what you’re saying is you can actually, you know, implement a large part without, you know, within the bounds of the company’s guidelines and rules. But tell us a little bit more about what that actually looks like. If I was managing a team of 15 people, a couple managers and ICs, and I’ll say, hey, actually, really like that. This seems like more authentic to me. Seems more real.

0:16:33 Ramona Shaw: It also, you know, allows us to have to, for me to mitigate some risk of someone just walking out the door tomorrow. What is my first, what are my first three steps?

0:16:42 Robert Glazer: I mean, your first steps are probably you know, saying to your team, you know, hey, like I want to have open, honest conversations. And when things aren’t going well or you feel frustrated or there and I’m going to do the same thing, I want us to have an honest conversation and we’ll, we’ll figure out a way to figure something out. If ever this isn’t the right job for you, or you think it might that way, or you want to have a discussion around that, like, come and talk to me first. I can, you know, I’ll really feel let down if I find out you’re telling me everything’s great and interviewing behind my back. And that really won’t get you the outcome you’re looking for. I’d rather kind of know that. Work on finding a replacement and you know, helping you find a new job if that’s what you want to do at the end of the day.

0:17:25 Robert Glazer: And then really it’s incumbent upon the manager when they have those check ins to check in to ask, are you happy? Are you present or engaged? Like what’s going on? Everyone knows when there’s a problem, we just, we just avoid it. Right. Someone told me a recent story. He had been problem someone on his team for 90 days and was going hemming and hawing, what do I do with this person? And then was gearing up the courage to have the conversation that, you know, I don’t think this is going to work out. And that person came to them and clicked two days before. Right.

0:17:50 Robert Glazer: So people know when they’re not doing well, their realities get into play. They might be scared, they might be looking to maximize it. But if we just change this, this whole again, you can, I can know you might want to do something else and you can still good work, do work here. Like those don’t have to be mutually, you know, exclusive. I think this is just this, this false paradigm we’ve gotten ourselves into. So I think any manager who knows someone once told me a story, there was a manager at the company and you would think he was like chainsaw how because like he had all this turnover on his team and everyone’s always leaving.

0:18:27 Robert Glazer: This guy just basically went to people and said, hey, look, if you’re not happy, come to me and I’ll figure out something better for you here, I’ll figure out something better for you elsewhere, but I’ll try to take care of you. And so what he had was not a lot of people hanging around who had quit and stayed on his team, which looks better on the numbers, but it doesn’t look as good in the output department.

0:18:48 Ramona Shaw: Yeah, I like what you just said there. It’s sometimes I think the fear. I’m curious to hear your thoughts. The fear that, well, but if I have too much churn on my team and not enough retention is going to look poorly, it’s going to going to provide or create this perception that I’m not a good leader when in, when in fact, qualitatively speaking, the feedback be the reverse. But just looking from a KPI of churn that fear may still get in the way.

0:19:18 Robert Glazer: Yeah, I don’t think that churn is the determinant for any business. I think it’s. Do you have high performing, engaged employees who are delivering on the outcomes? Right. I’ve never looked at, I mean churn is usually emblematic of other problems or cultural problems. Right. I’ve never had someone say, well you’re killing it but your churn’s really high. Right. It’s usually the churn. If your churn’s high, you have a lot of problems in other areas. So there might be some roles like sales where people either work or where they don’t. And so getting the right people out is important and one of the most important things that you can do. So churn to me is one of those sort of under the hood diagnostics where if the car is not working, you sort of pull it over and see what’s going wrong. But it’s not the thing that people look at on a day to day basis. Right. So I’m on my sales team. I want to know if my, if we’re hitting our goals right. And that’s probably by getting more of the right people and moving away from the wrong salespeople.

0:20:22 Ramona Shaw: Okay, so you’re saying like this, the fear may, it may come up in the back of your head, but that’s not a rational fear. That’s something to recognize of like, okay, this may be a little bit of my ego that seems bumped away.

0:20:34 Robert Glazer: You have the wrong person on your team or they’re doing the wrong thing. Keeping them on your team to officially state your churn does not actually do anyone any good.

0:20:44 Ramona Shaw: Right? Right. This actually happens.

0:20:46 Robert Glazer: 40% of the people on your team that want to move on, then there’s a different problem. Right. You’re actually, you’re probably hiring the wrong people or not training them. Well, like I said, it is the turn is the outcome of one of the things someone said to me once, which I thought was great was they said, you know, in this whole like, oh, everyone Steals or everyone leaves our company horribly and you’re like, look, if everyone leaves your company and is stealing stuff and doing stuff, one, you’re either hiring horrible people or two, your culture is doing something to make them want to steal from you.

0:21:19 Robert Glazer: And like that requires a much closer look. Yeah.

0:21:25 Ramona Shaw: And I think oftentimes leaders are worried about the performers on the team or the retention of people on the team. And this comes up quite frequently in coaching conversations where, you know, we talk through what’s actually the perception. Because if you think about senior leaders or even them themselves assessing their direct reports, they much rather see them, you know, retain high performers or keeping that strong culture and delivering on results and see them take action when something isn’t working well. And so their leadership competence isn’t measured on is every one of the team sticking around or are you hiring flawlessly? No, we all are going to hire people at some point that aren’t going to work out or that want to leave at some point.

0:22:11 Ramona Shaw: And then the question is how do you handle that and how quick and how much you’re to see?

0:22:16 Robert Glazer: I think that is a great point. One of the biggest mistakes that I’ve seen a lot of companies make is that they manage or they’re sorry, they evaluate their managers and leaders based on contributing, based on like contributor sort of metrics and statistics rather than how are your leaders and managers managing? That should be the number one thing. Right. The sales leader should be how are they coaching up the A players, including pruning the B players. And so I, I think to what you said, what you’re looking for from an amazing manager is can they hire well, can they great create a great culture in the team and promote and cultivate talent and did they make the hard decisions and prune well, right. That, that is ultimately what they’re looking for in a manager.

0:23:00 Robert Glazer: And a lot of a great culture is pruning well. Right. Because people who are negative culture to the team are bringing it down or everyone, you know, the three salespeople who are filling quota and the fourth has been below for four quarters. Like they don’t, they want those leads that that person’s blowing. So yeah, I think that retention is one of those statistics that is probably not a leading indicator.

0:23:29 Robert Glazer: It’s a lagging indicator of other things that are going wrong and we don’t get it right all the time. But you can double down on your mistake by keeping the wrong person that you hired.

0:23:40 Ramona Shaw: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that then speaks to a different leadership competence that seems to be Lacking. And we might not, we might not realize that. Yeah, yeah.

0:23:51 Robert Glazer: I actually advocate in the book that people, you know, one of the things you can do is like move away quickly from mistakes and say to people, hey, I don’t know, this is working. Do you want to like pretend that this job never existed on your resume after five weeks and kind of go away? Because that seems better than a six month stint. And I would argue that most of us who have seen and in organizations where you have the same training program, it’s a little different if you hire like a one off position, like a cfo, that you don’t hire a lot.

0:24:21 Robert Glazer: But I can count on one hand over 20 years people who have started off horribly and it’s worked out right, you try everything, you double down on the training because what happens is they start off poorly, they’re making a lot of mistakes, they build a trust deficit, People don’t trust them, then they have to work harder. And you wish that this is going to get better. And again, maybe an honest conversation like hey Ramona, maybe we oversold you on something or maybe you oversold us, I don’t know what. But do you think this is working? This doesn’t seem to be working. Again, do you want to just pretend this job never existed?

0:24:56 Robert Glazer: That is better than a six month stint on a resume?

0:24:59 Ramona Shaw: Yeah, 100%. I want to talk about the generational differences. So when you think about newer generations entering the workforce and then a lot of leaders sort of being in a different generation, what kind of gaps or misunderstandings do you pick up as it relates to offboarding?

0:25:21 Robert Glazer: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think the older generation, they sort of know what they know, right. So they’re more inclined to sort of lean into that. I also think the younger generations are more these days a little more conflict avoidant, a little more kind of looking at told what what to be done. I’ve even noticed a lot of Gen Z struggles with unlimited pto. I’ve heard this from a lot of companies. They’re like, well, what does that mean? Like how much can I take? You know, Gen Xers would be like unlimited. All right, well, we’ll figure it out. Like, you know, it’s interesting. So I just think whatever generation you’re in, as long as you’re consistent around. Here is the values, here are the rules, here’s how we operate.

0:26:02 Robert Glazer: I actually think that’s the stuff that brings multiple generations together. When people can say, this is the culture, here’s how we do it and we’re consistent. And we lean into these principles. And I think everyone can appreciate that. And they just want to know, like, not that it’s a game, but what game are we playing and what are the rules?

0:26:24 Ramona Shaw: I appreciate you advocating for principles. It’s something that we do with elitism programs, is to clarify what are. What are your leadership principles and to get really solid on the expectations, the implied expectations and the explicit expectations, and to share that and communicate frequently and honestly about what are the agreements on the team that we all need to know about. And I think on the generational gap, especially where we have assumptions that we think, well, everyone should know that in the workplace, and then we get confronted with situations that surprise us, it’s to build, sort of build. Build that bridge through.

0:27:04 Ramona Shaw: Build that bridge through transparent communication. Yeah.

0:27:07 Robert Glazer: I was going to say one of my favorite quotes from Harry Kramer, who’s a leadership guru, always used to say, like, I’m surprised you’re surprised. Right. We’re trying to eliminate, like, the things that we shouldn’t be surprised. Like, for example, you know, if I incentivize people to give a longer notice, then I would be a little bit surprised if. If they left early. But I think there are a lot of things that, you know, we shouldn’t be surprised if we walk everyone to the door. We shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t tell us things. So I think a lot of these things are predictable based on the things that we’re rewarding explicitly or implicitly.

0:27:43 Robert Glazer: So if you want different behavior values, you need to reward those behaviors. When we were rolling out this program and people still didn’t believe us that we wanted a longer notice and we would let them work, we started saying, look, if you. You tell us you’re leaving and you give us 90 days, I think it was, we’ll give you a $2,000 bonus if you stay 60 days, a thousand if you stay 30 days. They’re like, oh, they’re actually incentivizing me to stay longer.

0:28:05 Robert Glazer: This must be the behavior that they want.

0:28:08 Ramona Shaw: On a very practical question, if a. We talk about the principles and expectations and how we operate as a team, do you recommend for leaders to be very upfront, even with people that they hire and onboard to then once they’re on the team, to say, here’s how we go about work and all that, and then here’s how we go about offboarding or parting ways?

0:28:28 Robert Glazer: Yeah. I suggest people, like, give this book or make it part of their onboarding, because you could actually say, look, if you Pick the wrong company. If this isn’t right, it’s going to end well. Here’s how we do onboarding, here’s how we do operating. Here’s what I expect. I think expectations are. I expect that you’re not going to give me two weeks notice. Like, it’s fine if you want to leave. I’ll give you a great recommendation. But I’m going to be pretty disappointed if after all of this and all these opportunities and every week when I sit down with you and I say, how’s it going? Are you engaged? Are you excited? I’m going to be upset if I find out you were lying and then interviewing. I think that’s, that’s okay. Kind of like, look, if you miss your goals for three quarters in a row, like, we’re going to have an uncomfortable discussion. That’s how it goes here. We’re a performance oriented culture.

0:29:09 Robert Glazer: I think the more everyone can just tell employees who they are and what they value and what they reward, then the employees can make a great decision or better decision around which environment they want to work in. I think a lot of it is like universities, right? There are all kinds of universities that people would consider great. There are large city ones with sports teams. There are small liberal arts ones.

0:29:33 Robert Glazer: What they don’t do is pretend they’re the other one. Right. They have totally different value propositions that appeal to different people. And I think that’s what organizations are like. And I think they’d be better off telling everyone what their value prop is, sticking with that and not trying to be everything to everyone.

0:29:49 Ramona Shaw: As we wrap up, what is something that we haven’t talked about as it relates to the two weeks notice and then the program that you’re advocating for, for companies or for leaders specifically?

0:30:01 Robert Glazer: Yeah, I’ll talk a little bit more about this, the notion of an open transition program, which is that if you have these discussions, you can sit down with people and you can set windows, you know, whether it’s 60 days, 90 days, 120 days, where they can continue to do their work, you will support them. They can interview and look for a new job, you can start looking for their hire. Everyone stays in touch. It has a defined end date. And in the book I talk about the seven steps to a transition program, which includes a written plan and clear communication and timetable and all those things. But it’s this notion that people are in transition programs and that transition can be started by the employee and it could also be started by the employer. And I think it also just, it Also beats the you’re fired, which is, hey, this is, I just don’t think this is going to work and this isn’t going to work. And so I’d like to start you in a transition. We’d like to pull you in our transition program and kind of get you working on what your next thing’s going to be and tell us how we can help. Can we make referrals? Can our interview team look at your resume for you? Like, you know, we want you to go be from here. Like, this is, you know, being an alumni of our organization is something that, that we’re proud about.

0:31:13 Robert Glazer: So this notion of these transition programs, it makes this whole, takes the jagged edges off this, like, I’m quitting or you’re fired into like it’s okay to be kind of going through the process of leaving and kind of like a car crash. We’re not going to litigate whose fault it is. It’s just you’re moving on and people move on and that’s totally fine.

0:31:38 Ramona Shaw: And I can imagine it also entices people to communicate just by having that, that time, that timeline, to communicate way earlier. Because if I think back to, you know, an experience in an organization where at a certain level of management it was a six month notice period. So for someone to get to the point where they quit, which is a pretty big step, it’s very firm and.

0:32:01 Robert Glazer: Then they’re already like, that’s also bad and different. So you want someone hanging around for six months who’s sort of mentally already. Right. That’s got its own problems.

0:32:09 Ramona Shaw: Yeah, right.

0:32:11 Robert Glazer: You can force them to stay, but you can’t force them to be happy.

0:32:14 Ramona Shaw: Yeah, yeah.

0:32:16 Robert Glazer: That’s why you have gardening leaves.

0:32:17 Ramona Shaw: Six months for those people.

0:32:18 Robert Glazer: Yeah, yeah. Well, this concept of gardening leave in Britain, right, where you just send people home to garden and not to work, to keep them from going to work for a competitor.

0:32:27 Ramona Shaw: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then when imagining pulling them into a transition program just leaves so much more room for then even through the six months to decide, you know, when am I going to specifically leave, what are the potential opportunities internally or externally? Yeah, I, I wanted to bring you on because I think a lot of what defines our work culture really is we’re just taking it for granted because we’ve been doing it for so long and it just seems like the norm without rethinking all along or all while we see how the workplace constantly changes and is evolving quite fast with, you know, the pandemic that had a big impact the generations that have a big impact, but yet sort of we were maintaining those frameworks and concepts that are, you know, 40, 50 years old and we don’t really challenge them. So I appreciate the work that you do and what you promote and I encourage all our listeners to really think about how they go about off boarding and the conversations that they’re having. We will include your links to the book as well as your social media pages in our show notes and I encourage people to check it out and to read the book and learn more about the work that you do. So thank you Robert for being on The Manager Track podcast.

0:33:50 Robert Glazer: Thank you for having me. And yeah, you can find out a book and everything @robertglazer.com thank you so.

0:33:56 Ramona Shaw: Much for being on the show.

0:33:58 Robert Glazer: Thanks for having me.

0:33:59 Ramona Shaw: If you enjoyed this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader people love to work with. This includes a free masterclass on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out@archova.org /masterclass. The second resource is my best selling book, the Confident and competent New Manager. How to quickly rise to success in your first leadership role. Check it out@archova.org/

0:34:27 Ramona Shaw: books or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there. You can find all those links in the show notes down below.