Wait, the whole plant had to shut down?

Yes.

So we're talking, uh, tens of thousands of dollars in cost because of my inventory management practices.

I, I mean, the main feeling that I had was embarrassment and shame over, you know, there were a lot of people counting on this plant for livelihood and a lot of people counting on it for their breakfast.

And so it was a pretty big early career failure.

And of course, I worried that it was going to have a permanent impact on my career success.

But then once I moved past those emotions, what really took over was this period of, of questioning.

Uh, what ideas would you have if someone decides they're not gonna quit, they're gonna stay in the job, they're gonna speak up and maybe have a conversation with their boss? How should they go about doing that?

[laughs]

... and the great, or, or, or phrase.

Um, and you know, we had maybe six months or nine months ago, the term job hugging came out and sort of suggesting that people are clinging to their jobs.

Um, y- you know, that term didn't have a lot of data behind it, and now we have a new term, uh, the great hunkering down, which I think speaks to some of the same feeling that in this market right now, you know, we came out of this period of time in 2021, 2022, when employees had a lot of power in the labor market, and work seemed more flexible than it's ever been before, right? Work can fit around my life.

And so many of us as workers got a taste of this like world of work in which we have a lot of power and work is very flexible.

Now, over the past, you know, 24 months that, that has changed quite a bit, and so we're in this period of time where individuals would like to access, you know, you know, the, the best version of work that they possibly can for their life, but it, it's not always there for them.

And with, you know, the, the layoffs that are happening around AI, whether they're, um, the reason really is AI or something else, it's created a, a lot of uncertainty in the labor market.

Yeah

This is a bit of a, maybe not an anomaly, but this is a phenomenon that no one's really exploring.

Yeah, there, there were probably a couple of things and, and one was, you know, you mentioned the great resignation.

I think that term caught on for a number of reasons, you know, partly just good timing, but I think it was in a term that captured how a lot of people were feeling.

but it wasn't being talked about and they didn't really have a word to express the sense of, um, I'm not sure that I want to go back to work the way that it was before the pandemic.

Like maybe there's something else that I want to do.

And that gray resignation tapped into that feeling that people had about work, uh, that I think was right below the surface.

Now, the reason I predicted the great resignation was in part because the pandemic was filled with these jolts of different types.

But what, what, why that transition? Like, what led to that? Do you think?

Chucking your job, trying something new is so tempting, we often need to check ourselves.

Quitting is the star of the show.

It's really empowering for us.

Like, most of the time as employees, relative to the organization that we're working for, we don't have the power.

The company has the power.

The only time we really have power is when we decide I'm moving on.

Because of that, it often leads people to think that quitting isn't as big of a deal as it is.

On your way to making a big jump, he says weigh the hard factors, like salary, and the softer ones, the work friends you're leaving behind, and try to figure out if-

We've been hearing a lot about businesses not being able to find enough workers and people moving away from jobs they find meaningless, giving birth to the term the Great Resignation.

There were a few different forces coming together that led to this prediction.

First, as we all know, during the pandemic, job stress was higher than ever.

People were working in different ways, and it was causing a lot of stress for them.

People were taking a step back and looking at their life and saying, "Am I happy with this? Am I living the life I want to live?" And the phrase pandemic epiphanies came out of that, a lot of individuals deciding to make pivots in their personal or professional lives.

And then finally, there's remote work.

And so the pandemic caused many people to go from in-person work to remote work, and we have different feelings as humans about remote work.

What would be your advice to me for how to get out in the smoothest possible way?

Could you maybe give us the two sentence-ish definition of your six types of jolts with maybe an example so we can get our arms around precisely what is Anthony thinking when he says the word jolt?

Yeah.

So six types of jolts, a- and I'll give you a warning, the first five are negative, and that's because of this positive-negative asymmetry effect we have, where as human beings, we're hardwired to pay much more attention to negative events than positive events, and that's for good reason.

Negative events signal something's wrong and we need to attend to it, whereas positive events are more like, "Keep going.

Uh, things are going well." So the first type of jolts is direct jolts, and these are negative events that happen directly to us at work.

So the most common ones are, of course, failure or experiencing mistreatment or interpersonal strife.

But these jolts can also be really subtle as well.

What are some other top tips?

So what do we do with these seven categories then?

Yeah.

So these seven categories can be used y- during this pre-resignation, this planning period to say, "How do I want to leave this job?" And th- there are times where you may think to yourself, "This job, I will never have connections to any of these individuals again.

Um, and so it's actually fine for me to do a perfunctory style.

I'd rather not share what I'm going to do next, and even though they're gonna react negatively to it, that's okay because I've thought it through." At other times, you know, you're thinking, "I do have the bandwidth," uh, like, like Matt did, "to leave a little bit more notice than necessary, and that notice, extra notice will give me the time to really make sure that I say goodbye to the people who I want to say goodbye to and not rush this departure.

And it will also set me up for having this positive relationship with the company when I'm an alumni of it here shortly." And being a good alumni of a company has a number of advantages.

First, you know, you can use the organization for references, and, uh, you can continue to have connections to the people at that company, but it also opens you up for boomeranging back to that organization.

Can you share it?

Do you wanna quickly go through the personal jolts?

Crossover jolts we've all experienced.

You can probably think of the ones in your own life where just a little, a health scare in your own life or the life of a loved one, or a moment where a loved one brought to your attention that you're investing more of your life in work than they want you to, made you take a step back and say, "I need to rethink things." So it could be an offhand comment [laughs] by a child, you know, th- that missed, you know, you missed their football match.

A- and getting a little bit further away from the personal, there, there are remote jolts, and, and we're just really starting to get our arms around how far-reaching these are.

But remote jolts happen when you hear about an event or you learn of an event somewhere far away from you.

It doesn't impact you or anyone you know directly, but it's a negative event, a tragic event, that makes you take a step back and say, "Wait, life is shorter and more precious than I was giving it credit for." These jolts are much more powerful.

Uh, the, the researchers who discovered these give them the name, uh, mega-threats.And, and the last type of jolts are, are positive jolts.

So you've talked about these various jolt events, but how do you know when to quit then, Anthony?

And a lot of times we sort of think about that as a leader of, oh, how people handle how they depart is related to how, quote unquote, "good or bad a person they are." But it turns out that the more significant factor is what are the events that happened leading up to that as to how someone departs and leaves, and that's much more significant, and it just speaks to this point of how powerful it is of how leaders frame jolts or anything else that happens in the organization.

Ye- yeah.

Some of my research has shown it's not just how you treat employees or their fairness perceptions, how fairly they believe they treat-- they're being treated affects whether they'll stay or go.

It affects how they'll stay or go.

And so looking into individuals who burn bridges or who impulsively quit, right, just walk out the door, I've fallen into this trap in my leadership career as well.

The people who do that are bad employees.

They're individuals who are bad apples, and it's probably best for them to leave anyway.

Like we don't think about bringing other people in and asking for help, and there's a part of that that's just a bit of human nature, and I think like how interesting that as a manager, sometimes we can really help someone to not navigate a jolt alone.

What's happening here?

As you point out, a lot is happening, and even though the Great Resignation is, is well in the rearview mirror and thankfully the pandemic is for the most part, some of the, uh, effects and, and the things that we saw during that time are, are still lingering with us and are still actually relevant for how we deal with whatever is coming our way with AI.

You know, part of the reason that I predicted the Great Resignation had to do with these jolts, these events that sort of change our relationship with work.

And there were a number of those going on during that time, during the pandemic, including a lot of our jobs had become more difficult overnight due to the changes that we had to make in response to the social distancing and so forth.

Uh, our customers were in different places.

Our employees were in different places.

So this big adjustment to how we work.

And in, in these situations in particular, this can be an issue.