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, you he wants a but he's right. So we give him the promotion he deserves, he gets a new manager and boom, it recovers.

John Jantsch (07:13.099)

Yeah. Right.

Robert Glazer (07:21.616)

The third one, the one not gonna fix, John comes and says, look, I know you told me a remote only company and I thought I wanted that, but I'm just, missing an office. And you know, that leads to a discussion like, hey John, we're not getting offices. Like, so why don't we help you find a better opportunity? So each of those circumstances might've showed up in a performance problem, but they have totally different roots and totally different solutions. And that's why this program can have a good outcome. If I lean in early and we're doing this transition in the third case,

you know, in July, that's different because one of the common objections is like, you can't do this, people are toxic, all this stuff. like, look, John's toxic in December because this has been going on for six months and now I'm pissed at him and he's pissed at me and otherwise. the other objection, well, people will, they'll steal and they'll do this and people when they're leaving all this stuff. And to that, I would say if you have a lot of people that are constantly acting toxic and stealing stuff as they're on the way out of your company,

John Jantsch (08:01.569)

the

John Jantsch (08:10.229)

Yeah.

Robert Glazer (08:21.464)

Either you are really doing a terrible job in hiring or there's something about your culture that's making them that way. And either of those scenarios require a little bit of a deeper look.

John Jantsch (08:27.692)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:33.005)

Yeah, and that's the real common idea behind the practice, right? It's like, well, once we decided to fire this person, we like take away their computer, get them out the door, right? Because they're going to do something bad.

Robert Glazer (08:41.68)

Even before that, I think in the three months when you know you have to fire John and you don't, because John's a super nice and likable guy, but he's just not doing well, you start to distance him and push him away and sort of make him out to be a bad guy so that it makes it easier for you when you fire a bad guy. This would advocate the opposite. Like John, we talked about this John a few months ago, John, come into my office in July. Like John, I love you.

John Jantsch (08:45.195)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:59.467)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Robert Glazer (09:06.81)

but you know that you can't be a 50 % quota on our sales team for four quarters in a row. This isn't working. Do you wanna be in sales? What do you wanna do? Can we help you do something different? You can lean into the relationship while holding the performance component there, but I think it's better to go that way than to, your brain can't, this is cognitive distance 101. It can't handle that John's a good guy and a bad worker, so I have to make him a bad guy so that I feel better.

John Jantsch (09:11.117)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:24.777)

Yeah. Right.

John Jantsch (09:32.653)

Let's use a Susie for our example instead of John. Okay. So, so you have, you have a company that, helps, people create partnerships that are beneficial to their businesses. that's, you've written books about that, which is a very common thing for an author to do, to, and, and.

Robert Glazer (09:36.046)

Yeah, so you know, you're not the first person to say that, but the next example will be Suzy.

John Jantsch (10:00.801)

business owner to do to write a book that supports their, what they do, what their core mission is. You've written a couple, what I would call people ops books, that probably on the S on the very, very surface, you know, don't seem like they would support your business objective. And yet here we are. So why, why, is this topic? So are you so passionate about this topic of people?

Robert Glazer (10:23.28)

It's a great question. I think yeah, we are a marketing agency, but we're also a services firm. And after 20 years of building a services firm, you can be interchangeable with a psychologist, right? It is every issue is a people issue. There's never a broken widget. There's never a broken press or a shipment that's late with FedEx. And so I, you know, as a building organization, you know, we were discovering, I wanted to build this great culture. It required rethinking a lot of the

practices I had seen and as we kind of learned things and tested things, my purpose is to share ideas that help people and organizations grow. So I became kind of passionate about being a little bit of a laboratory and if we found something that worked, try to share it with people or companies. To me, companies and great leadership are the solutions to our problems. If it's not clear to you in 2025 that government is not the solution to your problems these days, then to me that's the biggest impact.

that we can all have is that one great leader and one great organization spawns off a whole legion of great leaders and go off, a horrible leader and a horrible organization spawns off a whole group of traumatized people. So that's sort of the why behind.

John Jantsch (11:38.393)

So as I read the definition of open transition program, OTP, there's a lot of culture in it first. I mean, I don't think you wake up and go, I read Robert's book and now we're going to do this. Right. I mean, there's, there's a, if there's not a culture of trust and there's not a culture of we want you to succeed, you know, but what's best for you. mean, how do you kind of start to change that?

in order to adopt this. Cause I think a lot of companies could not physically adopt this.

Robert Glazer (12:09.872)

No, no, actually thank you for saying that because there's two disclaimers that I forgot to make. One is, do not read this book as an employee and go into a company with a horrible culture and say, hey, I'm thinking about leaving or whatever when they walk everyone to the door in hoods because this is not a bottoms up thing. This is a tops up thing. And as you said, if you have a, and I say it in the book, if you have a crappy culture and you have poor psychological safety, this probably isn't going to work.

John Jantsch (12:19.159)

Yeah

John Jantsch (12:22.926)

Hehehehehe

Yeah.

Robert Glazer (12:37.136)

So it needs to be built on a foundation of that. I mean, the quickest way in an organization to really try to improve psychological safety, which is not easy, is vulnerability and feedback, right? Leaders are sharing more, they're vulnerable, they're real, and people see that feedback is welcome and taken and acted on, right? Those tend to be two of the main doors that open that up. But yeah, this is not...

This is actually a program for good companies and good leaders. And I'm not saying like myself, but like myself, we're frustrated that the two week thing just doesn't feel compatible with what they're trying to do, but no one knows any other way. So I've had people ask, like, look, if my company doesn't operate this, can I do this as my team leader? And I was like, look, there's nothing that would preclude you from having open and honest conversations, encouraging people to come, you know, if you got to give HR

John Jantsch (13:14.583)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:20.033)

Yeah.

Robert Glazer (13:34.434)

notice you can wait till four weeks and let them know.

John Jantsch (13:38.443)

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting. While this is sort of a prescription for the end game, it's actually a bit of a roadmap for how to not have as many end games, isn't it?

Robert Glazer (13:51.536)

Yeah, you don't, look, we even talk to people about this when they join, you know, so they feel like if I happen to make a mistake, it's not going to be a disaster. People are going to leave, right? So the question, and it could be two years and it could be great or it could be four years. The key is just how do they not leave poorly? And how do you turn that into what McKinsey has mastered? And I think what we've had a lot of success with is like alumni, you know, you can have.

John Jantsch (14:00.407)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:19.211)

Yeah.

Robert Glazer (14:19.92)

your alumni at some point might be more than the number of employees you have. And they can either be net promoters and that distractors our alumni like McKinsey consultants who go in-house at companies and hire McKinsey. They go in-house at large brands and you know, they tend to hire us back to help with that. But that only works if they, if they left on a good note. So there's a real long game to be played. You know, we live in the real time checking and glass door and review world. it, it, it, it, it's everyone knows about.

scorched earth these days. Actually, people know more about it of the company that scorches earth rather than the candidate. I'm waiting for someone to build the inverse of Glassdoor. But it's all interconnected and your brand's kind of live out there. And if you can turn something that's a negative into a positive, we put all this work into hiring well and culture and we've just totally ignored leaving.

John Jantsch (14:50.807)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:14.209)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is sort of the ultimate expression of culture, isn't it?

Robert Glazer (15:19.79)

Yeah. How you treat someone out the door, probably the door probably said when you have nothing to gain from them, it's the same thing. How do you, you you enter, know a lot of people interview and they always try get into a meal and try to see how they treat the help or the server. How do they treat people that, you know, they're not trying to impress because they tend to show their true stripes.

John Jantsch (15:26.893)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:34.817)

Yeah,

John Jantsch (15:41.197)

Since you've been doing this for a while, I assume, do you actually consult with other companies to do this? I'm not sure if that's part of your model.

Robert Glazer (15:48.816)

I haven't, I've done some workshops or I do more speaking on the topic, but other than the, this is actually like, I had a lot of people reach out just from the Ted Talk and the HBR article and tell me, I went and decided to try to have one of these real conversations. It was so much better, but they didn't have sort of the playbook. So this is the first time the sort of playbook has hit the market. And so, yeah, if there are companies that need help with it, I'm happy to talk to them about it.

John Jantsch (16:06.391)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

John Jantsch (16:18.765)

Well, I mean, it to me, it sort of perfect workshop, you know, kind of material. But again, I think the hard part is you got to still you got to come with the right frame of mind. This is not going to fix the wrong frame of mind, is it? Yeah. Yeah.

Robert Glazer (16:23.46)

Yeah.

Robert Glazer (16:31.554)

No, you have to have the right company and the right people and there has to be a level of frustration and understand that the behavior of the employees will focus, will inherently go around what they see. There was a company I talked about in the book years ago that had won these cultures award and talked about their culture, super proud of their cultures. When I asked them how people left their company, t