Weekend Favs December 28th

John Jantsch (00:00.705)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Robert Glazer. He’s the founder and chairman of the board of Acceleration Partners, a global partner marketing agency and the recipient of numerous industry and company culture awards, including Glassdoor’s Employees Choice Awards two years in a row. He’s the author of the inspirational newsletter, Friday Forward. Everybody should subscribe and the number one Wall Street.

Robert Glazer (00:08.144)

Thank

John Jantsch (00:30.571)

journal USA Today and international bestselling author of five books. We’re going to talk about his latest today, Rethinking Two Weeks Notice, Changing the Way Employees Leave Companies for the Better. So Robert, welcome back to the show.

Robert Glazer (00:31.322)

Bye.

Robert Glazer (00:44.548)

John, thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:46.185)

So, the enemy is two weeks notice the standard practice of, of, Hey, I’m, I got a better offer. I’m giving you my two weeks notice or the other way around. You’re not working out here. You got two weeks notice. So that kind of deal. So, so why is that bad?

Robert Glazer (00:57.54)

Yeah, here’s two weeks severance. Yeah.

Robert Glazer (01:03.824)

There’s two problems that we have. Well, I’m a big fan of psychology and cognitive dissonance. And so the left side of our brains knows that we’re not in lifetime employment situation anymore. We don’t have pensions, people are going to work forever. And yet when people then leave our organization, the right side of the brain, we treat it more like the end of a marriage than the end of a professional sports contract, like this huge betrayal or otherwise. So we’re just not reconciling.

these two things and it produces bad outcomes. You have employees who leave employers and their managers and their mentors with a bad taste in their mouth. what they’re told by their parents, two weeks notice. That’s what you do, it’s respectful. But if you mentored someone for three years, you trusted them, you gave them a lot of rope and they were out a little bit and had doctor’s appointments and now they’re leaving in two weeks.

John Jantsch (01:44.791)

Yeah. Right.

Robert Glazer (01:55.874)

You don’t realize, I mean, I get a lot of back channel references over the years. Everything is layout. You’re going for a job, two jobs from now and someone reaches out and they’re like, yeah, John, like, I just remember how you left, right? And so endings really matter. If you’re planning a conference, your last speaker is really important. It’s sort of, it’s everything that people remember. And then similarly for the company, particularly in a service business, know, clients hate account turnover.

John Jantsch (02:10.486)

Yes.

John Jantsch (02:14.433)

Yeah.

Robert Glazer (02:22.436)

rushing to get a new person, all these things. it just really is suboptimal. It’s just an outdated process. Most people just don’t know what to replace it with.

John Jantsch (02:30.423)

Yeah.

Right. Yeah. It’s funny. I, you know, in marketing circles, I mean, I pay a lot of attention to testimonials and reviews and things like that. And it’s amazing how really the perception that somebody has of the brand is not the brand, but Rusty, you know, the guy that fixed their boiler, you know, or whatever.

Robert Glazer (02:50.832)

Look, anyone listening to this, if you are either personally or professionally, whether it’s accounting firm or your marketing agency, there is nothing that hurts the reputation more of a professional services firm than account turnover. It’s the thing that puts it at risk. If you’ve ever been with a brand and you get three different managers in 12 months, you’re like, I’m out. I don’t want to do this anymore.

John Jantsch (03:03.501)

F

John Jantsch (03:07.777)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was too much work to get in a rhythm. all right. So I’m just going to jump right into your concept of what would replace it. The open transition program OTP. You got to love a framework. So Robert, let’s just go there. We’re going to talk about bits of it, but maybe set the table. What is, what is your, theory about replacing two weeks notice?

Robert Glazer (03:12.89)

Yeah.

Robert Glazer (03:35.408)

Yeah. So, so it’s not just the theory because we practiced it for over 10 years and, and, but it is a theory, but it’s also, and I’ve had a lot of other leaders just with little bits and pieces who wanted to be better reached out. And look, we were building a great culture and just the two week notice thing felt antithetical to that. So we tried this concept of a transition program that said, look, when you’re ready to leave, we’ve created psychological safety, come and have an open, honest conversation with us. We will never walk anyone out the door that day if they come and have it. And likewise,

John Jantsch (03:41.185)

You

Robert Glazer (04:04.336)

our managers are gonna have honest conversations with you. And when we kind of sense that something’s not going right, we’ll see if we can fix it. And most problems, if you actually get to them earlier, they don’t become irrecoverable. If you wait long enough, then everyone’s pissed and they can’t get it. It almost doesn’t even matter what the original problem was. Now you’ve got this whole vicious trust cycle and stuff going on.

John Jantsch (04:21.921)

Yeah. Yeah.

Robert Glazer (04:26.266)

So we said, look, it’s okay, we’ll enter you into a transition program and maybe that’s 90 days, but you’re working here and you’re starting to interview and you’re communicating with your boss about that. And maybe our HR teams helping you with your resume. And we want you to be a productive alumni member. When it’s time to go, we want that to be a good outcome. And we’d rather do that and have less surprises and pay you to work here, understanding we’re gonna get some diminished capacity.

paying you severance or paying you kind of not to work or go away and blowing the thing up at the end.

John Jantsch (05:01.557)

Yeah, there’s a couple things you said there. I want to circle back to that idea that most problems are created by because we just don’t deal with them because we’re like, I, you know, an employee gets fired, but I should have done that three months ago, you know, kind of, kind of thing. And so it just really deteriorates. So, I think that’s, that’s, I think people have to realize that before they can start thinking about the open transition program, right?

Robert Glazer (05:26.768)

Right. is psychological safety is that there’s four components, psychological safety, open communication, mutual respect and commitment to be mutually beneficial outcomes. Psychological safety is the foundation of this. With it, you can have some good outcomes. it’s, we’re recording this in December. John, like if I am firing you this week, cause I am at my wits end where I was going to put you on a pip and you’re with your wits end. What the issue was probably emerged in March and.

John Jantsch (05:31.095)

Yeah.

Robert Glazer (05:55.288)

If I had really, and it emerges some performance problems, but this is the issue. Like this is like Western medicine versus Eastern. If three people have a headache and I give them a Tylenol, it might help the headache, but one is dehydrated, one’s allergic to gluten and one has a brain tumor, right? Tylenol is not a cure for that. So I talk in this book around digging to the root and there’s three common roots. Problems the employee needs to fix, problems the employer can fix and wants to fix, and then problems that.

they’re not gonna fix. So I start noticing you’re a little off in March and instead of saying, John, you gotta do better or whatever, I’m like, John, like what’s going on? And you confide in me, because I’m your manager and you might say one of three totally different things. One, you lost your childcare and so you’re really tired and distracted or you’re going through a separation and so you’re just not there. And so was like, look, John, I can help with this, we can change your hours, but this is on you to fix. And generally, if you repair that problem,

your satisfaction with work and your performance is gonna improve. The second one you say, look, the last three people that we hired were at a higher level me, higher salary, I’m doing the same work, I was promised a raise years ago, like I’m just getting really frustrated, right? And if I look at that and I say, geez, John’s right, like we kind of overlooked him. I might say he’s not and that’s a different discussion, yo