Jolts That Leave You Wanting to Quit with Anthony Klotz

One day, something happens and you snap. Maybe you loved your work yesterday, but today you are ready to just walk away. Maybe it’s a new manager you are not happy with, maybe it’s some other change, maybe your colleagues are leaving. 

Everyone is one jolt away from quitting their job. What are those jolts? How common are they? What should you do if you are experiencing a jolt? And the ultimate question, do you quit or do you stay?

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💡 About the show:
There is no growth in comfort and no comfort in growth. Business today typically values and promotes leaders for their subject expertise. Leaders who have command of the details and execute based on knowledge and experience are highly respected. However, to grow as a leader you have to get out of your comfort zone – that means learning to lead without just being the expert. Learn to gain the trust and respect of a team that might know more than you do. Get comfortable with ambiguity and with not having all the information. Develop the skills and confidence to lead in a different way.

For female leaders, subject expertise is usually the source of their confidence. Learning to lead outside your comfort zone is one step for breaking through the glass ceiling. The show’s purpose is to give you tips on how can you develop the capability to lead – to get out of your comfort zone.

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Transcript

Wanda Wallace (00:01.228)
Welcome to the conversation. Okay, today we're gonna talk about quitting. Well, hopefully not quitting, but understanding the forces that drive quitting. And if any of you follow me on Instagram, you'll know that one of my highest hit things on Instagram is a comment I made about should you stick with a job that you hate or not? I'll leave you to go figure out what I said with it. But you know the phenomenon.

One day you're actually having a fabulous time at work, well not fabulous, you're enjoying what you're doing, everything is sort of okay, and then something happens and snap, like that, you're ready to quit. Maybe you do walk away, maybe you don't walk away, maybe it's a manager you don't love, maybe it's a colleague, maybe it's some other change, maybe your colleagues are all leaving. It could be any number of things, and I'm betting that, and my guest today is going to say for sure,

that everyone is one jolt away from quitting your job. So what we wanna talk about is what are those jolts? How common are they? What should you do if you're experiencing a jolt as in do you quit immediately or not? And the ultimate question is do you quit or do you stay? And by the way, we'll ask what do you do as a manager to kind of keep from losing some of your best employees along the way. So my guest is Dr. Anthony Klotz.

He's currently a professor of organizational behavior at the University College of London School of Management here in London, and where he studies employee performance, work design, and the dynamics of quitting. Now, Anthony is known for predicting the global pandemic labor shift and dubbing it the great resignation. So you want to know where that came from? Look at Anthony.

He is an expert on employee relationships with work and forces that cause these relationships to change, whether it's abruptly or slowly. An award-winning teacher, he's published in lots of the popular business press journals like Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, and he's been interviewed on just about every media outlet anybody would want to be on. I'll let you fill in the imagination. There's not many that's missing in there. The book we're talking about today, brand new, called Jolted. Why We Quit.

Wanda Wallace (02:10.251)
when to stay and why it matters. Anthony, welcome to the conversation.

Anthony (02:14.79)
Thank you so much for having me, Wanda.

Wanda Wallace (02:16.777)
I'm delighted. I'm delighted. So I have to ask you, what got you started in this interest in jolts?

Anthony (02:23.388)
Yeah, so before I went back and got my PhD, I worked in industry, both in manufacturing plants for a big Fortune 500 company and then in an entrepreneurial venture. And then I shifted and went back to school to get my PhD in organizational psychology. And I took a class on HR and one week is dedicated to turnover. Why do people quit their jobs? And I had a couple of aha moments during that week of learning.

all the knowledge that has been accumulated to date on why people quit their jobs. And the first had to do with jolts that there's this, you know, about 40 years worth of research that now shows that about half the time people quit in a fairly logical, rational way. But the other half of the time you trace it back to this single event. And that was a bit of an aha for me as I thought back to the times that I had recently quit or I had had employees who quit on me.

I thought, yeah, there were these events and if I would have noticed them sooner, I could have done a much better job of managing that process for myself, of detecting when my employees were thinking about quitting. So it was one of those moments where, you know, often the academic literature trails, you know, what's going on in the real world. But this is a moment where I felt like really our understanding of turnover in the real world as managers is lagging behind the academic literature.

So I shifted my focus to study resignations and my twist on it was not just why people quit their jobs, but also when it comes time to quit, how do people quit their jobs? And that's led me down a path of the last 15 years or so studying those processes, both Jolt's and how people quit their jobs.

Wanda Wallace (04:05.901)
People quit. Okay, there's a lot to talk about there. Let me just make sure we're all clear on terminology. What do you mean by JOLTS?

Anthony (04:12.848)
Yeah, what I mean by Jolt is, is an event. So this event can be big or quite subtle and small. It can happen in our professional life, or it can happen on the home front as well. But the hallmark of Jolt's is that these events make us stop and rethink our relationship with work or put it under the microphone. So you can think about a lot of the time as workers, we're going about our day-to-day basis, trying to do a good job at work and really managing life.

and we're on a bit of autopilot. So jolts are those moments where an event happens and you snap out of that autopilot and think, am I happy here? Am I on the right trajectory? Do I need to do some rethinking of my relationship with work and my job?

Wanda Wallace (04:54.709)
Reminds me of a senior executive I have known throughout my career, a number of years of my career, who used to say that he regularly stopped and looked at the train that he was on and said, am I happy with where I am? Yes, no, no, I get off.

And he really thought about it as a train metaphor, this notion of periodically taking stock. Is this happy for me? Is it what I want for me? And for him, it was for his family as well. Okay, so events happen that cause us to pause and evaluate our stance with work. That could be the kind of work I'm doing, the kind of company I'm in, the purpose that I have. I'm assuming a whole range of things about our relationship with work.

Anthony (05:43.797)
Yeah, for better and worse, our relationship with work is quite multifaceted. It ranges everything from am I happy on a day-to-day basis to am I doing meaningful work to what are my relationships like with my colleagues, with my boss, and am I happy with the pay and perks? So it really is a constellation of factors. And so that's why this can be quite tricky.

is often these jolts point to a problem somewhere in your relationship with work, but it doesn't mean the whole thing is spoiled. There could be, you know, 80 % of our job that we really like, but this 20 % the jolt has revealed is really problematic. And that's where it gets somewhat tricky is what do we do in those situations. So yeah, many, many pieces here.

Wanda Wallace (06:31.623)
many pieces and I think I at least I'm hearing and the folks that I'm talking to at the moment if people are re-evaluating they're re-evaluating the pressures the time allocation and the trade-off of that time allocation to work versus other things that are important in their lives and I just think we are not at the end of that questioning but that's my opinion and you're the expert so let's go on. So these jolts are they usually single events? Is it an accumulation? Is it kind of a

critical breakpoint event or just a random routine event.

Anthony (07:07.3)
Yes, so the answer is unfortunately all of the above. And so I think it can be an event that is that straw that breaks the camel's back, where we may not realize that we're edging toward a breaking point until an event opens our eyes to it. And so I've talked to a number of employees who said I didn't realize how burnt out I was until this one rude comment by my

in a morning meeting and I just snapped and I said I can't take this anymore. Now obviously that rude comment wasn't in isolation, it was this buildup that was happening behind the scenes. But it can also be out of the blue, one off events that happen and this is often as you just mentioned, events that cause us to take a step back and think about the exchange we have with our work. How much time and energy am I putting into it and what am I getting back out of it?

I think this is part of why, you know, the great resignation was, was coming on the back of the pandemic is the pandemic was a time when a lot of us saw this existential health threat. And it made us think these big thoughts about, is this what I want to be doing with my life? Is my train, you know, to the CEO's metaphor headed in the right direction? And so they can be, what some people have called nuclear events, or they can just be a small everyday occurrence that catches you the wrong way.

Wanda Wallace (08:33.537)
That rings true with what I hear from people who are ready to quit. That it's often a series of accumulation that you just took in stride until there's one event that is the breaking point. And in my clients, that breaking point is no different than 50 things that happened before. But it just, you know, it's like that's it. I sometimes see, you know, the belief I'm not going to get a promotion or I didn't get a promotion, somebody else got a promotion that can become a jolt too.

But let me not get ahead of myself. You've identified six kinds of jolts. Tell me about those and I kind of want to know where some of them more impactful than others or more common than others along the way.

Anthony (09:15.258)
Yeah, so there's six types of jolts and just as a heads up, the first five are all negative events. And that's not because I'm an overly negative person, I promise. It's because of human psychology. You know, we tend to pay more attention to negative events and negative events signal to us something needs to change as opposed to positive events, which can, as I'll talk about, can spur, can be jolts and spur this change, but it's less likely. So the first type of jolts are direct jolts and these are probably the most common.

So these are negative events that happen directly to us at work. And you just mentioned one, it could be getting passed over for promotion. It could be some other form of failure, some other form of mistreatment we experience. And again, these are sometimes big failures or big incidents of mistreatment, but increasingly we're finding these small events being treated rudely or realizing that you're being ostracized. So I talked to one person who realized that

there was a group chat in their team and they were left off of it. And it just made them realize, wait a second, I don't know if I'm as much of a member of this team as I thought I was and made them reevaluate. So direct Jules.

Wanda Wallace (10:24.749)
Before you go forward on that one, I just want to add, because we've talked about this in the last few episodes on the podcast, that sometimes it's your interpretation of events. So for example, I have been coaching a woman who has interpreted an event as a slight. I think in truth, it isn't intended as a slight. We have a senior leader under enormous stress and some issues that were more legal issues.

that were difficult to tell everybody she feels left out. So, caution that you be careful about your own interpretation of this. I just want to add that in because it's consistent with other things we've talked about.

Anthony (11:06.734)
I think that's spot on. This is all perception driven, how we are perceiving it. And this is what can make rudeness and ostracism so tricky is we don't know if the person intended it or not. And so that makes it especially likely for us to ruminate on it. Was that person, did they mean to be rude to me or am I just overinterpreting it? And so I think that's absolutely right.

The next form of jolts are collateral jolts. So these are events that happen around us to other people at work that reverberate and cause us to stop and say, what's going on here? And this can be just witnessing negative events in the workplace. So seeing your boss choose somebody else out can make you think, even though my boss likes me, is this the place I want to be? But perhaps the quintessential form of collateral jolt is when you have a colleague who quits or when your boss quits.

That of course, you know, changes your work day. You know, most of us harbor some positive feelings for our coworkers and when one of them leaves, our work days become a little less bright. And we have to take on some of the work that they were doing until a replacement is found. And of course we wonder, where are they going? Should I go too? Should I look as well? So turnover contagion is very real in a form of collateral jolt. And then, you

Wanda Wallace (12:22.785)
I see that, so we've done again a podcast with Mercer talking about the recent data global trend that younger employees are paying much more attention to their sense of fairness in the workplace. And it's not just whether I believe I'm being treated fairly, but whether I believe everybody is being treated fairly. And if I think not, then there's your collateral jolt.

Anthony (12:47.556)
Yeah, that's exactly right. And you have this thought where even though that incident of unfairness didn't affect me, it will eventually. And I don't know if I want to work in a place where this sort of fairness isn't valued. So yes, as human beings and especially younger generations are very sensitive to picking up on incidents of unfairness. So the third type of jolts.

are probably my favorite because I didn't know about them until I got into the literature and it's sort of counterintuitive, but it has to do with the most common year for quitting across all jobs and all employees, and that's year one. So somewhat counterintuitively, honeymoon jolts strike during your year one sort of onboarding period.

And the main reason that they appear is because when we enter a new job, we have a set of expectations in our mind for what this job is going to be like, sort of the psychological contract that we signed up for. And sometime in that first year, the company is almost certainly going to let us down and our expectations won't meet reality. And when that happens, it often results in a honeymoon jolt where you think I took this new job and I thought it was going to be everything I wanted.

and there are some ways that it's not what I wanted. Should I have even taken this job to begin with? so honeymoon jolts are something that workers don't want, leaders don't want, recruiters don't want, and yet they're very common. Moving outside the workplace, crossover jolts are events that happen in our personal life that make us stop and rethink our relationship with work. And of course, you can imagine...

personal health scare or health scare to a loved one would certainly have this effect and put life in perspective. But it also again can be these smaller events of perhaps you've worked late all week and you thought my partner and kids don't even notice. And then you get one small comment from your child about how you haven't been around for dinner. And it makes you think, what am I doing? You know, why am I prioritizing work so much? So those can cross over and make us rethink.

Anthony (14:53.658)
work along those lines. Increasingly, we're seeing evidence of what I call remote jolts, which is when we're seeing a lot of this in the world today, a negative event on the other side of the country, on the other side of the world that doesn't affect you directly nonetheless makes you take a step back and think, am I doing what I want to be doing with my professional life? And we're finding that these remote jolts are especially likely to happen when you somehow identify with

the group that this negative event is happening to. And so you could just imagine a natural disaster somewhere in South America that you happen to have visited a few years ago and spent a month there and fell in love with the place and the people. That's going to be much more likely to jolt you and to make you think like, boy, I should be doing more with my life than this job. Then if you've never visited the place before, of course, and don't really have an identity attached to it.

Wanda Wallace (15:23.565)
Mm-hmm.

Wanda Wallace (15:53.07)
I see this happening in combination with either a direct or a collateral. Okay, so imagine I'm just going to give a scenario to make it context. I have, let's say, an Asian American. There's a lot of, or currently we're seeing a lot of Jewish, there's a crime somewhere in the world that's anti my group, even though it has nothing to do with me personally, but I identify with that heritage.

And then the direct component, so I'm upset about that and worried about my family and extended friends and all of those things. But then the additional part is my manager doesn't appreciate or my company doesn't appreciate how much that's affecting me. And then you get the direct piece, which is what am I doing here?

Anthony (16:42.776)
Yes, that is exactly right. And you perfectly described this stream of literature that's emerging on what's called mega threats. And what that research shows is that when one of these events happens to a group with which we identify, we want someone to notice and provide support and be able to talk about that. And if we if we're at work for our eight to 10 hours a day and nobody even acknowledges this potential connection and we don't feel like we can talk about it,

it's much more likely to lead to withdrawal than if we're in a workplace where it's psychologically safe to speak up or our boss notices and she stops by and says, hey, I know this happened. If you need any support, let me know. The effects are pretty striking in terms of employee withdrawal.

Wanda Wallace (17:30.901)
interesting. So are jolts more common today? Are we seeing an uptick in this or has it just been along all along and we haven't paid attention to it?

Anthony (17:42.045)
So we don't have great, it's not like we've been tracking jolts in this long panel data set, we can't really see, but there's a number of different signs that would suggest that jolts are reaching us at work and around work much more than they have in the past. And so the comedian Chris Rock has a joke about how his dad would go to work in the morning and no matter what happened in the world on the home front, the kids could have died, like who knows?

He wouldn't know about it until he got home at the end of the day. And so there were these really clear, strong boundaries for many workers not long ago between personal life and professional life. And so I mentioned that autopilot earlier. I think we stayed in autopilot for a longer time. Contrast that with today where because of technology, we are finding out about almost every potentially jolting event going on in the world and our personal life in real time.

while the boundaries between work and life are merged. And so there's much more potential. And honestly, there's a higher expectation than ever that leaders and companies are sensitive to these events that happen and acknowledge them in some way than there was in the past. So I don't think the world, I don't really subscribe to like across the world that more jolts are.

going on, more jolting events are going on, but they reach us more. And so the source rate may be the same, but the effects that they have are much higher, if that makes sense.

Wanda Wallace (19:18.733)
What I'm going to say is obvious, but it just struck me in this conversation is that in Chris Rock's father's story, in an era we used to have a bigger compartmentalization. There was work. I go to work. I do what I do at work. I close the door. I come home. I don't pick it up again. So that there was a way of separating work and your non-work life. That boundary doesn't exist.

work bleeds into home and home bleeds into work. And I don't know that we're ever going to put that genie back in the bottle in any capacity. So I think we're now going to see the impact of jolts in a bigger way because there is no compartmentalization.

Anthony (19:54.268)
Thanks.

Anthony (20:01.582)
Yeah, it used to be that we talk about segmenters, people who like to keep work and life separate, and then integrators, those who like to bring them together. I mean, we all need to be integrators now, whether we like it or not, because yeah, these boundaries are really gone.

Wanda Wallace (20:13.762)
Yeah.

Wanda Wallace (20:18.517)
Okay, all right, so let me ask the question, suppose I've experienced a jolt and I'm now frustrated and ready to just quit and walk out the door, what's your advice about what I do first? Second, third.

Anthony (20:33.434)
Yeah, so my first advice, I'm just gonna warn you, it's not very glamorous. It's to keep calm and not really do anything. These jolts often cause emotional reactions in us and...

thinking clearly alongside those emotions and everything that's going on in your day to day life can be pretty challenging. And so unless it's one of these egregious jolts where you're in the situation that you need to get out of, and I've talked to some workers who have had that experience, why do people impulsively quit? Sometimes it's a really egregious jolt. Most of the time, that's not the case. And so it makes more sense to give it some time and see if a few days later you still feel the same way about

it. Again, going back to changes in the workplace over the last several decades, used to be a jolt would happen, let's say on a Tuesday, Tuesday morning, you know, our boss says something or we have a big failure and we think, I don't know if I'm cut out for this or I need to find another job.

To go find another job, you would need to wait, go update your resume, look for other jobs, hire a recruiter. It takes some time and some effort. So often you get to the weekend and you're like, you know, the jolt has sort of dissipated and you think, that was a rough Tuesday, but Wednesday there was a nice bounce back. Nowadays, you know, some people have termed it rage applying that you experience this unfairness at work. And after you get out of that meeting, you apply, you go on LinkedIn or whatever your favorite website.

website is and you apply for 100 jobs. Like it's fairly easy to do. And so, so I encourage people, you know, step one, do nothing or, or even, you know, I tend to do this every six months or so, usually at the start of the year. And then, uh, in June, I'll sit down and reflect on the last six months and the jolts that I've had and say, what does this mean for my relationship with works? You can kind of batch them together and say, I'll deal with them at a future date.

Anthony (22:29.66)
Now, you may find that when you revisit them on the weekend or at this check-in that you have with your relationship with work, there's a problem here. Something is sticking with. And so, the next, we're still not ready to quit. That's not the next step. The next step is, of course, to speak up and see if you can make the change. And I think, especially for workers early in their career, but also throughout our careers, we sometimes jump to the assumption that our...

our company won't make changes to fix whatever problem we have with work. It could be a scheduling issue where we want every other Friday off or every other Friday afternoon off. we think.

There's no way my company will let me do it. It's critical to test that assumption to actually speak up likely to your boss or whoever the relevant person is and say, Hey, can I change this? Here's the problem that I'm having. And I think we need to be careful about how we speak up in order to make it increase its odds of success. But that's really step two is can we solve this problem as is.

Wanda Wallace (23:37.559)
Okay, I love that one. All right, now how do you know when you should quit? What's your advice on when you should walk away?

Anthony (23:44.573)
So when you should walk away is you've spoken up and that's not worked. And so this problem with your relationship with work is still there. And then it's time to look for how do I fix that? you've taken time and you've probably leaned a little bit back in your current job and spent time searching for whatever that next chapter would be. And do a really

thorough job of making sure that that next chapter not only solves the problem that you currently have but doesn't introduce new problems and and if you get to that stage where you've tried doing nothing you've tried speaking up you've tried withdrawing a little bit from work sort of dialing it back quiet quitting if you will and none of those have solved the issue then quitting is absolutely on the table now for some people quitting

is really never an option because they're geographically constrained. They're professionally constrained, whatever it may be. So obviously, for some people this is off the table, but if there is another alternative, another option for you, then it's by all means time to pursue that.

Wanda Wallace (24:54.751)
Yeah, I think we shouldn't. Well, I think we have to think carefully about what our plan is if we're quitting. But I also think if you're in a job that you can't fix and you've given it a fair shot, sticking around just means your performance is going to go further south and that's not good for you or for anything.

Anthony (25:15.26)
Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point. I think it's important to realize that in our careers for days, weeks, months, and sometimes years, we're gonna be on a bit of a plateau where we're looking for the next thing. And being on that plateau is very normal and looking for what that next thing is and still performing well, hopefully in the core of your job while you're looking for that other thing. But a lot of times we get...

me included, when we're on that plateau, we get antsy. We want to make a move and that's where mistakes can be made of quitting too soon. So just realize that when you're in that holding pattern, when you're in that job search and right now in the economy, there are a lot of people in the situation. It's really natural and normal and it's typically worth waiting until you find that right next thing.

Wanda Wallace (26:07.053)
I think mid-career, that's why I'm so passionate about helping people in mid-careers, is the most difficult place of all. For one, your family life is the most demanding it's going to be, likely young children, maybe other people in your life that are demanding or needing your time and attention. And the career is at that plateau. It is not obvious what the next step is.

There isn't the learning growth that you had in the first chapter or two or three of your life, of your career. And so it just feels a little flat and you kind of can get overloaded with all of it. And I think that's the moment, A, I think we do the least effective job of helping those people understand how to lead, let alone manage their own lives and their work and their pacing and their teams. But it's also, think, when people are most susceptible to saying, why am I doing this? What's the point?

Anthony (27:01.262)
Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think we could do a better job, you know, as leaders and academics of, of, of really talking about these career plateaus and make and normalizing them a bit more. And you're exactly right at this mid career stage, these demands outside of work are at their peak in it. We have this expectation that we need to continue on this same growth trajectory that we need to be outstanding outside of work and manage everything perfectly. Whereas

And there are some people who can do that and good for them. But for most of us, know, being staying at an excellent level of a plateau for a while, but maybe not necessarily that steep growth that we had earlier in our career. And then pick it up when we have the more of the bandwidth and energy to do it a few years later makes makes a lot of sense. So we know these careers aren't linear. And so sometimes when they they hit these small plateaus, that's very OK and normal and healthy.

Wanda Wallace (28:00.193)
Not to worry about it, it's okay. right, all right, fine. Now let's flip the coin. Instead of talking about the employee and the employees dealing with it all, let's talk about the manager. Because I think the worst possible scenario is as a manager, I'm sitting there, we've got a major deadline, a big project. I need everybody on the team 150 % engaged in order to deliver against this. It's a big thing for everyone. And somebody quits.

particularly somebody in my top 20%, 30 % of my performers quits. What do I do to make sure that doesn't happen? How do I keep people from leaving?

Anthony (28:43.312)
Yeah, I always felt back as a manager when I was in that situation, it felt like a complete gut punch when you lost a top performer at a key moment in time. And thankfully there are things leaders can do to not completely prevent this, but reduce the odds that it will happen. And one of them is being able to, it's getting better at being able to predict.

jolts to see when they're coming. And part of this has to do with understanding the members of your team and what the experience is jolts and realizing that, that as a leader, you know, you and the organization are the main source of jolts for employees at work. And so even small organizational changes, small interactions, as we've talked about can be jolting. so

Whenever an organizational change is made, spending a few extra minutes to think through who on my team is potentially going to experience this as a joke. This is going to make them step back for a second and then going and spending some extra time with them to help them think through the process and see if they need any adjustments made for it. The second.

element is really listening to employees and hearing them when they say, I've got a problem with work. I can think back earlier in my career when I had an employee, top performer at a key moment who had told me unexpectedly they were expecting their fourth child and that they needed to find a way to make more money. And I heard them and I, but I thought there's no easy way for me to do that right now. And I was very upfront with them about it.

Wanda Wallace (29:57.227)
Mm-hmm.

Anthony (30:21.626)
And then a month later, they said, sorry, I love my job. love working for you, but this money thing is really a big deal. And I've accepted this other job. I just realized I hadn't, they told me they had had this jolting experience and I hadn't listened well.

Wanda Wallace (30:29.847)
Yeah.

Wanda Wallace (30:37.523)
I see that, like I think about one example I know, I'll call the character in the center of the story Annette, who has a manager that is, you know, a big sponsor of hers and really exciting and doing a lot of great things and she just feels growing and career is fabulous and she's getting lots of opportunities to speak to senior executives. I mean, it's just great moment in her career. Inevitably, that manager goes off to someplace else, new manager comes in, new manager doesn't have the relationship.

trying to establish himself a bit more than anybody's giving credit for and so he doesn't allow Annette to have the visibility at the higher levels that she has had before. She is more upset than you can imagine. She expresses that to a manager. She tells that to her former manager and nobody hears it. Nobody hears it.

Anthony (31:33.008)
Yep.

Wanda Wallace (31:33.611)
It's kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, these things happen. It's okay. Don't worry about it. You're fine. You're doing great. You know, you got great work, et cetera, et cetera. She walks out for another job.

Anthony (31:44.637)
And it's easy to sit here, you it's easy to say managers, you know, like I often say, these are moments where you really need to listen and then help employees craft their jobs. But the reality is, is the average leader, the average manager is being pulled in a million different directions right now. And in the day to day, that can be hard to pick up on, but.

making time to make sure your high performers, especially everyone, but especially your high performers, aren't going through this questioning too often. And if they are, that you intervene and allow them to make a change is critical. And it can sometimes be uncomfortable because what this person needs is some sort of special treatment, what we call an idiosyncratic deal. And you might think, should I give this person special treatment?

Yeah, increasingly we're seeing that jobs are more flexible and can be made more bespoke than they ever have been in the past. And so I think we are entering into the era where to retain high performers, the answer has to be yes, I can do that or I can find a way to make this happen, at least if you want to retain them.

Wanda Wallace (32:54.387)
I find some components of that or something that will appease. I guess I would also give one piece of advice to managers, which is for you, this is a logical decision as the manager. But for the person coming to you, it is not logical at that moment in time. It's highly emotional. So don't think you can just logically talk them off the ledge. You have got to listen to the emotion, deal with the emotion.

Anthony (32:57.284)
Absolutely.

Wanda Wallace (33:22.177)
kind of create some space between that emotional conversation and your logical, here's what we can do.

Anthony (33:27.536)
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And a lot of leaders love this phrase, you know, don't bring me problems, bring me solutions. And I think this is an example of where that phrase needs to be set to the side. Because if that's your philosophy, your employees are in this situation where they've experienced a jolt, there's a problem with their relationship with work. They may not have the solution, but you want them to come to you and talk through it with the messy emotions that you just talked about, Wanda. And so

You have to be less, this isn't a product problem, this is a person problem. And so you are the person who has to probably come up with the solution as the leader or help them get to that solution. And it's just critical to have that open-mindedness and create that good old psychological safety so that they can talk about.

Wanda Wallace (34:14.869)
Yes, and I will just give a shout out for particularly mid-career managers where you're overloaded with everything going on. I know that what we're asking is a lot. At the same time, you want to keep some of your best performers. This is what is going to be needed. All right.

What if I happen to cause the jolt? Okay, so if I've got a temper problem and I know that I can rant and go, you know, kind of shout at people or something, I know I need to come back around them and apologize, but what if it's not that my intention wasn't to create a jolt? I don't have a behavior issue. How can I know if I caused a jolt and what do I do about it?

Anthony (34:54.746)
Yes. So detecting when someone is in the space of questioning their relationship with work is difficult. And there's been some really fun research that's looked at pre quitting behaviors and some of my own as well, which is like what people start doing as they start to think about quitting. And these are some of the things you could probably come up with on a napkin if you had to write them down. So you might check your 401k or your retirement pension balance. You might update your LinkedIn profile, you know, these, these sorts of things.

But when we really have looked into it, those don't necessarily predict quitting very well. What does predict quitting is one of the hardest things to detect. And that's silence. That's becoming a little bit quieter. And so if you are someone, if you think you may have dealt out a jolt to someone, then you...

pay attention to them over the next days and weeks and see if you can pick up any signs of withdrawing a bit. So in the next team meeting, are they speaking up as much as they normally do? And if you see them, they're engaged, they're speaking up, you know, they're interacting with you in the same way as ever, then it probably went in one ear and out the other. They didn't experience that. But what you have to get good at detecting is a week or two goes by and the person is just a little bit or a lot quieter.

than they normally are, that means they've perhaps withdrawn their energy a bit, they've withdrawn their engagement a bit, and they're using that sort of thinking elsewhere. Or they're even, worst case, thinking, I don't know if I need to participate in these meetings as much because I don't know if I'm going to be here in the future. And so we've already said mid-career managers, very busy. It's not easy to pick up on the sound of silence, but that's what is one of the keys here.

Wanda Wallace (36:45.389)
Yeah, and I can imagine there's all sorts of other subtle cues that are around it. So you may have a performer that was willing to work all hours, suddenly not willing to work all hours, suddenly leaving on time or slightly earlier than you would have expected them to. One day, that's not a pattern. Three, four days in a row. Okay, maybe we need to pay attention to what that person might be experiencing.

And I wanna come back to what you said at the beginning, Anthony, some of these jolts come from inside the workplace, some of them come from outside, some of them are from colleagues leaving, so there's collateral damage. So you have to pay attention to what that person is experiencing, not what you think you have done or not done.

Anthony (37:30.024)
Yeah, in some ways, we're all really familiar with safety procedures in the workplace, keeping the workplace safe. And if you see something, you take action, you say something, and this is fairly similar. If you see someone who's withdrawn a bit, who maybe is quiet, quitting, leaning back, you might think, I'll give it some time, I'll give them space to deal with it. But really, I think what most humans want is if they've experienced this.

you know, a health scare outside of work or if they have a, they're a caregiver and they're struggling a bit. Wouldn't it be nice if our boss noticed that or our colleague noticed that and asked if we were okay, if there's anything they can do to provide support. So I think the message for leaders is to err on the side of care, of intervention, as you would if it was a physical safety incident. This is a psychological safety incident, if you will. And

And you won't cause any harm by erring on the side of asking, everything okay? I've just noticed perhaps a change in your behavior, but maybe I'm misreading it. I just want to make sure everything's okay with you. Not everything's okay with your performance, just you. And I think that's a great way to try to see if this person is experiencing a jolt.

Wanda Wallace (38:47.563)
Yeah. Now, sometimes people are hesitant to tell their manager what they're really going through or what they're really experiencing. Maybe I don't like you anymore as a manager or I'm upset with you as a manager or I'm not really prepared to say I'm looking for another job or I'm bored or any number of things that may have consequences. How do you advise managers to cope with somebody who's been reticent to open up?

Anthony (39:12.496)
This is a really tough situation and what you're sharing aligns with some research that I've collected that when people trust their manager, they're more likely to talk to them even when they first consider thinking about leaving. They tell their manager more signs. So if trust is low or for any other number of reasons, they just may be extremely introverted or private, that's going to be harder to pick up on. And so...

For leaders, again, if you're managing a group of 10 or 15 people, you can pick up on those who maybe you don't have the closest relationship with, maybe who are a bit more introverted. And then you're probably going to need to put in a more formal process where you check in with them on a regular basis and somehow try to elicit how they're feeling. And these may be cases where it's just, there's not a whole lot you can do, but.

What I've found is for these types of individuals, it's easy for managers to skip over them or to let a week go by where they're kind of private anyway or we're not on the same page anyway, we're very different people. But finding ways to connect and holding yourself accountable to that will pay off in terms of retention and engagement.

Wanda Wallace (40:28.813)
What do you think of the idea of getting somebody else to check in with that person? it might be HR that has a good relationship with them or it might be somebody else on the team. Is that a good strategy or a bad strategy?

Anthony (40:41.436)
So I don't have any research to back this up. I think it's a perfectly fine strategy as long as it's a general check-in. I think when it becomes there's a specific maybe personal incident or you're noticing like this person has withdrawn a little bit and I want to ask them exactly what's going on. Outsourcing that to HR, if you have a good HR partner, I think that makes sense to another supervisor.

I know in one of my very earliest roles, I was partnered with a team leader who was a veteran team leader and he had risen up through the ranks of the manufacturing plants. I was a fresh college grad who got dropped in. like I could definitely rely on him to get more information. People trusted, everybody trusted him more than they trusted me. So in that case, that made a really strong partnership, but eventually I need to build those relationships.

Wanda Wallace (41:34.497)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, right, right. You can't outsource the care of people that work for you, not long term, like in short term. I've got to go back around and say I care or else we're stuffed on everything. Okay, I have this distinct feeling, Anthony, that we could keep talking about this one. So Anthony Klotz is my guest today. The book we've been talking about is Jolted, Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters.

Love, I mean, I don't often love typology or categorizations, but in this particular case, I really love the notion that there are these events that happen in our lives that cause us to question our relationship with work. That some of them can be direct experiences at work, some of them can be collateral damage because I see something happening to my colleagues or see my colleagues leaving or seeing colleagues not getting what I think. The honeymoon effect where

I thought it was going to be A and it turns out being Z. Oh dear, that's a real lost tragedy because that's a lot of money and a lot of time going to right out the door. The crossover or the remote effects, the crossover is something that happens in my personal life that causes me to rethink what is going on at work or remote, something happens somewhere else in the world that causes me to rethink how I'm being treated at work.

and positive. We didn't actually speak about the positive events, but it's possible the jolt could actually have a positive effect of, I'm really glad I'm here. This is the place I want to be. So thank you very much, Anthony. Where can people find you if they want to have a longer conversation with you?

Anthony (43:11.098)
Longer conversation, you can look, I'm pretty email-based, so you can find me at UCL School of Management, find my email and send me a note, and of course, LinkedIn as well, reach out.

Wanda Wallace (43:20.887)
Okay, great. It's been fabulous. Thanks for joining me. What a great conversation. What an important conversation for all of us continuing. This problem is not going to go away. Join us next week for another episode in getting out of your comfort zone. Check out our YouTube channel, Out of the Comfort Pod. Send us a comment at outofthecomfortzone.com and otherwise just be in touch. We love to hear from you. See you next week.