1158: The Science Behind Why People Quit with Dr. Anthony Klotz

Pete Mockaitis
Anthony, welcome!

Anthony Klotz
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat with you. You are undercover famous. Is that maybe the term we can use?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, it’s definitely undercover, low key, yeah, whatever synonym you want to use.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you are the man who coined the term, “The Great Resignation,” which is kind of wild.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, I mean, it still strikes me as wild and we’re coming up on almost exactly five years since that initial article came out and went viral, and it still strikes me as strange and surreal.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I understand there’s really some misconceptions as to what the heck that phrase even means. So let’s hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. What do we mean by that term and what is its relevance for career folk?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, so the Great Resignation was a prediction back in May of 2021 that there would be a spike in resignations in the US workforce, really the global workforce, but mainly centered on the US. And in the months following May, pretty quickly starting in June, we saw this wave of resignations, fairly historically high.

But it’s important, there’s a caveat there, that, really, we only started tracking resignation numbers closely in the US in 2000, so we don’t have the whole history there. But, yeah, turnover, quitting, resignations, whatever you want to call it, spiked and stayed elevated at historically high levels for almost two years into 2023.

And then it tailed back down, and it continued to tail down to where we are today, which is a rate of quitting in the economy that’s lower than it was before the pandemic, but not by too much. And so even though it feels like we’re in a pretty sluggish job market right now, it’s more active than a lot of people think.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Okay, so we’ve got 25-ish years of data here, and so we’ve seen some ups and downs. And so does that mean, now we’re kind of in a normal-ish band of resignation levels?

Anthony Klotz
We’re on the low side of normal, but we’re in that range of normal, for sure, on the lower end of it. I was going to mention, you asked about some of the misconceptions around the Great Resignation, and I think the biggest one that maybe continues to this day is that the prediction was that people would leave the workforce entirely.

And my prediction was largely that people would quit. And when people quit, the vast majority of the time it’s to find another job in the same industry or something related. We did see higher levels of people taking career breaks, of people starting entrepreneurial ventures, of people doing early retirement.

Yeah, but, in general, it’s when people leave jobs, they’re, of course, switching to another role somewhere else.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’ve done some real deep research into this phenomenon. Your book’s called Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters. So tell us, what’s a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made as you dug into this stuff?

Anthony Klotz
It’s just how close all of us are to quitting our job. And that doesn’t mean we’re always thinking about it or we’re always wanting to quit or anything negative like that. But we tend to, both as academics, as leaders, as workers, tend to think that quitting is a fairly rational process that slowly accumulates over time and slowly.

Maybe your discontentment with your current role increases or the appeal of these alternatives that you have to your current job increase over time, and you make this rational decision to move on. And that’s true about half the time.

But what we found is about the other half of the time, the decision to quit can be traced back to a single event. And these events, these jolts, can be big or small, they can come from our personal lives, they can happen in our professional lives, but they move the quitting process along sometimes fairly quickly.

Sometimes they move us along to where we’d like to quit, but we can’t. And sometimes they should be nudging us to leave and we completely miss them. But going back to your question, it’s that, and I think this is part of why I predicted the Great Resignation was this understanding of how these events work.

And, of course, the pandemic was several of these jolts wrapped up into one. And that’s somewhat surprising to me when I first learned it and to a lot of individuals, just this one event, how it can change our relationship with work and shape the arc of our career.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you expand on that? How is this event that…? It’s funny, I think many of us would like to forget entirely, so apologies to resurface this. But how has the pandemic shifted our overall perspective on work?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, so, like I mentioned, the pandemic had several different types of jolts wrapped up all into one, and I’ll mention a few of them. One of them was, of course, that for many people, work became different and more difficult in a short period of time.

So if you were a frontline worker or a healthcare worker, all of a sudden, your job maybe became more dangerous or completely changed. And when our job tasks change, for some of us, that comes at a point where we’re already not sure about our job and then, all of a sudden, it changes and that pushes us over into wanting to change what our job is.

For others, like healthcare workers, it also increased the level of burnout, so, “All of a sudden, this event changed my work in a way that it’s more difficult, led to higher levels of burnout.” Many of us experienced switching from working in person to working remotely, and we all reacted to it a little bit differently.

Some people, really enjoying it, some people not so much. And then, finally, there’s the pandemic being a health threat. And so for many individuals, or probably most individuals, at some point, it caused us to take a step back and think, “Is this the end of the world? Am I going to make it out of this?”

And when we think those big existential thoughts, we think about the way that we’re spending our time. And how we spend a lot of our time is at our jobs. And so these changes to how we work, these increases in burnout, this switch in the place that we were working, and then finally these big existential thoughts are different types of jolts that lead us to stop and rethink our relationship with work.

Now, hopefully, the pandemic, this is a once in a very long time event that we don’t have to go through again. But getting back to your question, there is some evidence that it has permanently changed many people’s relationship with work.

And this goes back to a question that’s asked in the United States on this general social survey every two years. And it’s been asked every two years since 1972. And the question is, “If you came into all of the money that you needed to live as comfortably as you want for the rest of your life, would you keep working?”

And this is called the lottery question. And it’s been asked every two years, and pretty consistently, about 70% of Americans say, “Yes, I would keep working,” which is somewhat impressive, and it shows that most of us see the value that work could have in our lives.

But what’s interesting is when you look at that 70% has been sort of flat as a board with a little bit of fluctuation from 1972 to 2018 before the pandemic. And so a little bit of a side note to this is this thought that nobody wants to work anymore or that less and less people want to work. The data don’t really support that, with one exception.

Coming out of the pandemic, it dropped from just over 70% to 62%. And so that equates to 10 to 20 million Americans who are, if you extrapolate that out to the country, who are answering that question differently.

And, keep in mind, they were answering this question during the Great Resignation, which was one of the best labor markets for employees, for workers that we’ll ever see. And yet, more people than ever were indicating that, “If I struck it rich, I’d be done with work.” And that number has stayed in this sort of 65% range, five points lower, you know, millions of Americans lower than the 70%.

And so what that suggests is the pandemic years and the tumultuousness that it caused in the world of work, and the thinking, and the jolts that it caused, there’s some percentage of the population now who have permanently changed the way they view work. And I think that’s going to be part of the lasting legacy of that period of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m intrigued about that question. They would continue working if they won the lottery, but do we have the clarity on would they continue working with their current employer or role or doing…? Because, I guess, this is what researchers do. We get definitional in terms of, I imagine, I wouldn’t sit on the beach continuously, but I would probably make some changes in what I was doing. I’d keep this podcast going because it’s fun and awesome, talking to peeps like you. So do you have some detail on that?

Anthony Klotz
So that’s a fantastic follow-up question. And it’s a question that I didn’t think of at first, and then somebody suggested it to me, and it really changed the way I thought about this question. So after I had learned about this lottery question, I would ask my student audiences, executive audiences, professional audiences this question and see how many hands go in the air. And it’s always around 70%.

You’re asking Gen Z, Baby Boomers, it’s always around that 70% mark. And that’s usually an eye-opener for people. And then I was asking that question during a masterclass that I was giving once up in Idaho, at Idaho State University a few years back after the Great Resignation.

And one person gave the follow-up question that you gave, they said, “Okay, okay, that’s great. Ask it again, but ask how many people would keep working at their current job if they struck it rich, if they won the lottery.”

So I’d asked the first question and seen the 70% response rate. So I asked again, “How many of you, if you won the lottery, would keep working at your current job?” It dropped below 10%. So I haven’t collected big data on this, but every time I present this now, I ask the two questions.

And it’s a little less consistent on that second question depending on the audience, but it always drops from this like 70%-ish down to 10 to 20% of people who would keep working. And, to me, there’s this really powerful lesson there that the majority of people see the positive side of what work can do for their lives.

Like, in general, want to work and see a positive version of work out there that they would really enjoy doing. That is not the version that most people are getting in their current job. So there’s this gap there between what we think work could be for us and our wellbeing and our happiness and our sense of meaning in life, and then what we’re actually getting.

And you mentioned you would keep doing this awesome podcast. So I asked people who say they would keep working even if they won the lottery at their current job, “What are you doing? What’s your profession?”

And it’s almost always something in the entrepreneurial realm or something that they’ve clearly chosen that really is their passion. And so, you know, “I always knew I wanted to be a chef and that’s what I pursued,” or “I always wanted to be a chef, but then I went and I was an accountant for 30 years, but then I circled back and went back to being a chef.”

So it’s these really deliberate choices people have made that align with their interests or that give them a great deal of autonomy, which is like entrepreneurship, having a fantastic podcast, being able to have the kind of impact that you want on the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, that’s heavy. It’s almost kind of sad that it’s so low. I mean, we all got bills to pay, sure, but… So, this is funny, my wife, she gave me a hat, a hat out of nowhere, and it said, “Ever since I was little, I’ve always wanted to turn unstructured data into actionable business insights.”

Anthony Klotz
Perfect hat for you.

Pete Mockaitis 
It’s a lot of words on a hat. and it’s sort of funny, like, “Ha, ha, ha, that’s the joke. No one wants that when they’re little. They want to be an astronaut or a firefighter or something.” And yet, sure enough, when I was in high school, I did want to be a strategy consultant. And then I did that, and it was fun, you know? I wanted to make some adjustments to that career path, which I did, entrepreneurially.

And it really hits home for me that I’m a bit of an anomaly here, like, to actually go after it with this kind of purpose, and then for it to work out.

Because you might think you want to be a lawyer, and be like, “Oh, shoot, this isn’t what I wanted. Oopsies!”

Anthony Klotz
That happened to me.

Pete Mockaitis 
So I guess it’s not only that you’re autonomously pursuing the thing, but the thing ends up being the match that you hoped it would be.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, that’s exactly right. When I started out of university, I had grown up in a family business in logistics. I got my degree in logistics. I thought, “I’m made to do this. I’m good at it,” got good grades, and then went to work for General Mills in their manufacturing plants in logistics, and was terrible at it and didn’t enjoy it.

So it was like, in theory, this is what I was put on this earth to do. In practice, not so much. So I switched over into management, into operations, and that was a somewhat better fit. But, yeah, I mean, I think there is this experimentation that goes on.

And, yeah, probably for a number of people who are saying, “If I won the lottery, this is what I would do.” Some percentage of them would find, if they made that switch, it’s actually not what they want to do.

I mean, this is part of the rough thing about being humans. We’re terrible at forecasting, you know, what’s going to make us happy. And it’s not until we actually experience it, that we see if our affective forecast lines up with how we’re actually feeling when we do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, so you’ve painted a stark picture for us. So I would love for you to unpack a little bit of the big idea associated with Jolted. You say we don’t so much super rationally and gradually come to the conclusion that, “Ah, yes, it would, in fact, be optimal for me to exit now.” What is going on?

Anthony Klotz
Most of us in our day-to-day work lives are on a bit of autopilot where we’re trying to be successful in our jobs, have a nice life outside of work, pay the bills, enjoy time with friends and family, and so forth. And these jolts come along and disturb that.

And so jolts are these moments where we question what’s going on with our relationship with work, “Am I on the right path or am I not?” And these can be really confusing. And you’re not really sure what to make of it.

In the book, I talk about, you know, that jolts are sort of everywhere in the modern work world, and there’s six different types of jolts that we’ll experience over our career. And so the problem is these can be really useful signposts to tell us maybe we do need to make some changes to the arc of our career.

But often, when they appear and sort of snap us out of this autopilot, we’re not sure how to respond to them. We get stuck in a bit of a rumination loop. Maybe we give them too much credence and we end up moving towards the exit door too soon. We just don’t really have a system to process them when they happen.

And so what I advocate for in the book is being more deliberate about realizing that, “Hey, look, these events, we don’t know what they are, we don’t know when they’re going to strike, but they’re coming, and they’re going to make us question our relationship with work. And that can sort of lead us down a path to make a suboptimal decision about our career and our happiness.”

Or, if we’re a little bit more prepared for them and we have a bit of a system, not a super strict system, but a system for dealing with them, we can treat them sort of appropriately when they arrive and make a much clearer and better decision about what we should do with them.

You know, part of the punchline here is that a lot of these events that cause us to rethink work should really be dismissed. And if you just walk away from them for a little while, they’ll go away naturally. And I think part of the challenge of the modern work world is we are able to take action pretty quickly when we have a moment where we think, “I don’t know if I want to work here anymore.”

Well, you know what? Almost right away, you could mass apply for hundreds of jobs in that moment right then. You can go on social media and burn bridges really, really easily. This wasn’t the case, I’ll just say, 50 years ago.

When something really terrible happened on a Tuesday, you’d think, “You know what? I don’t know if I want to work here anymore. Maybe this weekend I’ll get out. I’ll get out my resume and freshen it up, or I’ll go look for a new job. But by the time the weekend gets there, you realize, “Oh, that was just a bad Tuesday. No big deal.”

Here, you know, nowadays, we’re in a position to take action right away and make career changes that we may end up regretting. And, let’s face it, the research is clear that almost the majority of career moves end in some form of regret, not complete regret, but some form of regret.

And so understanding these jolts and how to respond to them at an appropriate level, I think, is critical for staying level-headed in our day-to-day work lives and to also be really intentional about crafting a career that brings us what we want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that’s one tremendous takeaway that could really alter a life trajectory right there, Anthony, in terms of, like, “When some bull crap goes down and you’re thinking, ‘I’m out of here,’ hold on for a moment.” Duly noted.

Anthony Klotz
Well, in terms of being really powerful advice, doing nothing, it’s kind of a hard piece of advice to sell. But, again, these these jolts, these moments are fairly common, and I think the more that we have the news coming to us while we’re at work, the more that we have social media in our lives, the more we have these moments where we think, somebody else is getting a better deal, there’s better options out there, and so all the more reason why doing nothing as a first option is a good option.

Now a lot of these problems that you experience or that a jolt signifies some sort of real problem with your relationship with work, some of them don’t go away with time. And if you get to the weekend or you’ve decided, you know, for me, like about every six months at the start of the year, and then midway through the year, I sort of sit down and think through the past six months and what have I experienced at work and how am I feeling.

In that way, over the course of time, as I experience problems with work, instead of having to deal with them right away in the course of my working week, working day, I can sort of tell myself, “Come June, I’ll sit down and I’ll think through these.” And I might even write on Post-It notes and set them aside to think about then.

In that way, when it comes to that time when I’ve batched those jolts together and I can think through them, I can realize a lot of these don’t matter anymore. This was just something that mattered in the moment, but didn’t really matter.

But there’s probably a few of them that maybe I’ve written down a few times that signal, “Something is off here and I need to address it.” Now that doesn’t mean quitting. That means addressing it. And there’s a number of ways that you can address problems at work without quitting.

And so that’s sort of the next step. You experience a jolt, it reveals a problem with your relationship with work that time isn’t healing, then you have to take some more action. Doing nothing won’t cut it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you mentioned six types of jolts. 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?”

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, so six types of jolts, 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 is wrong, and we need to attend to it. Whereas, positive events are more like, “Keep going. 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.

So we’re increasingly seeing that small acts of incivility, like being treated rudely or being ostracized, like, you find out that your office has a group chat that you’re not on. That has a pretty strong effect, a pretty strong signal that you’re not part of this group. So direct jolts, negative events that happen directly to us at work.

The next type are collateral jolts. These are events, often negative, that happen to those around us at work and reverberate and have effects on us. A simple one would be witnessing mistreatment. Even though you’re not the victim, it can have an effect on you that makes you think, “I don’t know if I want to be in a workplace like this.”

But the most common type is turnover contagion. So when we have a friend who quits, it’s sort of a triple whammy for us. Our workday becomes less bright because our friend is gone. We probably have to pick up some of their work in the interim, and we wonder where they’re going. Like, “Are they getting a better deal?” So those are collateral jolts.

Maybe my favorite kind of jolts, and they were the ones when I learned about them, I was the most surprised, are honeymoon jolts. So there’s this statistic that surprised me that the most common year for quitting across all years of your employment is year one.

And we tend to think, “Year one? That’s when people are the most committed and the most excited about their jobs.” But honeymoon jolts, you know, during the recruitment and selection process, we form this idea of what that job is going to be like.

And honeymoon jolts happen when we’re in the first year and we realize, “Wait a second, the way I thought this job was going to be in terms of the schedule or the pay or whatever it may be, is not lining up with reality. And I took this job under maybe false pretenses,” or we perceive that we do. So those are honeymoon jolts.

You know, moving outside the workplace, there’s crossover jolts, which are negative events that happen in our personal life that make us rethink, “What am I doing at work?” And anybody who’s had a health scare or a family member or friend who’s had a health scare has experienced those.

And then, finally, for negative jolts, there’s remote jolts. And we’re increasingly seeing that negative events that happen on the other side of the world that you hear about can have this sort of effect on you because they often call to mind the preciousness and the scarcity of life and make us think, again, these big existential thoughts, like the pandemic did of, “How am I spending my time?”

There’s a little bit of research that shows that this is especially likely to happen if the event on the other side of the world happened to a group of individuals who you identify with in whatever way that could be.

And then last, but not least, are happy positive jolts. So, sort of counterintuitively, the good things that happen in life can also lead to us quitting. Not as often, but this is because when positive events happen to us, they open our minds.

We tend to start to think, “I can achieve more than I thought I could. I’m on a roll here. This is great. I could take on more things.” And you have this open-minded positivity at the same time that your resume has just gotten more impressive than ever, perhaps, because you just had a promotion or some accomplishment at work. Of course, they can come from wonderful events in our personal lives as well.

So, like I said, jolts are everywhere. They’re common. We’re going to experience many of them in our careers. And the key is to be ready for them, and then manage them appropriately when they happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So what is the ideal or optimal or appropriate way to deal with a jolt beyond doing nothing?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, well, we already talked about the first one, right? Do nothing and wait and see if it goes away on its own. Now, obviously, and it goes without saying, for egregious jolts, that might not suffice. In my dissertation research, I talked to one worker who said they had a toxic boss, but the worker themselves, they had thick skin.

And so the boss could insult them, you know, whatever, it didn’t bother the worker. They were happy to do their job. But the boss noticed this, “I’m not getting under that person’s skin.” And so one day they went one step deeper. They didn’t insult the person. They insulted the person’s daughter to really get…

Pete Mockaitis
My goodness.

Anthony Klotz
And it worked. The worker said, “I took my keys off my belt, set them on the desk, and walked out the door,” which we call impulsively quitting. So that’s an example of where this do-nothing strategy is not a good one. There are times where, if you can, perhaps impulsive quitting is the right thing to do if you’re in a really bad situation.

But most of the time, the next step is to say something, to speak up. And this sounds again pretty simple, but it’s amazing how many exit interviews that I’ve been in or that I’ve talked to leaders and they say in exit interviews, one of the most common things that happens is the person says they’re leaving because of this reason, that they really can’t stand their work schedule, or they need a little bit of pay bump.

And so they’ve gone out and got another job because they’re not getting it here, and they didn’t ask for it first, or the leader didn’t hear it when they did ask. And so it’s pretty critical… Often as workers, we don’t have the power in the work relationship. The leader has the power, or the organization has the power.

So it’s easy for us to think, “Why would they give me a raise? Why would they change my schedule in this way?” And so we don’t speak up. But if you’re going to move down the path of, “I want to solve problems, or else this may make me leave the organization,” it’s really important that you, at least, give the organization a chance to fix it.

Not only because they may surprise you, but what’s also useful is, if you do continue to move down the path and you do end up quitting, you’ll do so in the knowledge that you tried to fix this problem. You gave them a chance to do it. And that will actually lower the odds of regret down the road, “Maybe I shouldn’t have quit. Maybe they would have fixed that.” No, no, no, you know, because you asked.

I talked to one worker who was in a really bad situation, and I guess this is similar to the prior story, but they were working closely with a coworker interdependently, and the coworker was really abusive. And one day, the abuse got to a point where the worker said, “I can’t take this anymore.” And this person worked in a hospital, and they said, “This is harming my wellbeing. I’m going to quit even though I like this job because I can’t work with this person anymore.”

And they walked around the hospital, and on their walk, they found a random empty office. And they had this thought and they went to their boss and said, “I just walked by this empty office. Can I just move out of where I am near this person and move into this random empty office?”

And I think there’s a lot of bosses who would say, “No, you can’t have some special office in the corner.” But this person’s boss said, “Yeah, you know what? Sure, that’s fine.” And this person was completely surprised, moved their stuff over into this new office, and is now like, that was like three years ago, and they’re now happier than ever in their job.

And so it’s just an example of, like, even if you think it’s wild, ask, especially for medium performers and high performers, the companies do not want to lose you.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, I am vibing with that and I’m thinking back to, boy, I think of him often, it’s my buddy, Muhammed Mekki, back in Episode 346 in 2018, he said, “All the time, you don’t get what you don’t ask for.”

And that was his observation, is that in almost any context, you do not suffer reprisal, like it rarely hurts to ask. I’m sure there’s counter examples out there and maybe some of these toxic bosses that you’re mentioning here.

But, yes, it rarely hurts to ask. And at worst, I think you’ll get just a little bit of a, “Oh, man, this guy, huh? Can you believe it?” And then you move on and that’s over. So you may well be surprised. You get a cool office space. Any number of things can be opened up to you if you just ask.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, and the research does show that, yeah, a lot of the time these positive outcomes can happen just by asking. There’s also some research that shows, in organizational settings, when you ask for something, you’re much more likely to get it if you frame it in a way that it doesn’t just benefit you, but it, of course, benefits other people or benefits the organization.

So, like, “I need Saturdays off,” “I need a $10,000 raise,” “I need,” “I need.” You’re better to take 10 minutes and say, “How do I frame this such that it doesn’t just benefit me, but here’s why it benefits the company, here’s why it benefits my colleagues, here’s why it benefits, it makes my boss’s life easier?” Something like that, like a little bit of sweetener that really increases the odds of the medicine going down successfully.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. And I’m thinking about, I think there was a famous book about fundraising called Asking. Well, you’re going to know the answer now, it was like, “You know, the number one reason prospective donors do not give to a nonprofit organization…?” Can you guess, Anthony?

Anthony Klotz
Because they’re asking what’s in it for them?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, they weren’t asked at all. No one asked them, it’s like, “Hey, could you support this cool work we’re doing?” It’s like, “Oh, that was not on my radar. But now that you asked, that does sound pretty cool.” So you got a real crack at it.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, that’s spot on.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Okay. So ask. So maybe do nothing, maybe ask. What are some other top tips?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, so after you ask and you find out what is, and let’s say it doesn’t go well. Let’s say that you’ve identified this problem with your relationship with work. It’s draining your well-being. It’s draining your positive energy, and you ask and try to make some changes proactively or reactively. It doesn’t work.

Then it’s time to think about, “Okay, is this a sustainable situation?” And maybe it’s sustainable and you think this is just a bad part of my job, but it’s okay because the good parts outweigh it. And so part of, I think, as you start into this process, it’s important to weigh up the positive sides of your job.

And there’s the obvious positives like, “Hey, I’ve got a nice office. I’ve got this amount of pay. I work with friendly people.” But also thinking about the goodwill that you’ve built up over the years, because that won’t carry with you if you move into a new organization.

So as we work in an organization for a while, things tend to get easier for us because we’ve built this sort of goodwill with the people around us when we can get things done. So really being honest about the positives and the negatives of your situation.

Now if you find that you’re in a situation where, “I can’t leave this job,” for whatever reason it may be, then I think that takes you down a different path than, “I can leave this job.” So for much of our working careers, most of us are in a situation where we can’t just up and leave right away.

And it could be this term is called embeddedness, like how embedded are you in your job and your community. And it could be like, “Look, this is the only engineering firm in this town that I’m in, and my family is never going to leave this town. So this is it for me, so I can’t leave,” versus, “Yeah, I’m in this metropolis with all sorts of engineering jobs and I can go remote and whatever it may be,” then you have a much lower level of embeddedness and you’ve got options.

But if you’re in this situation where you’re in huge problem with your relationship with work that can’t be fixed and you can’t quit, which I think many people are in this situation right now, then it makes sense to think about, “How do I reduce the size of work in my life in a way that doesn’t cause negative repercussions back on me?”

And so this is why the term quiet quitting, I think, went viral, right, three years ago, is thinking about, “How do I lean back a little bit from work such that I can dedicate my time and energy to pursuits outside of work?” and that could be anything from just well-being to a side gig or whatever it may be, or dedicate more time to try and find an alternative.

And I talk about, when you want to shrink the size of work in your life, when you want to lean back a little bit, it doesn’t make sense to do that in the core of your job, your core job tasks, because that’s going to lead down a negative path.

But I think most of us, if we’ve been in a job for a little while, we find this phenomenon called job creep happens, where we slowly take on more tasks, we slowly do a little bit of extra here and there. And not through anybody’s fault, our job becomes sort of bigger than we meant it to be.

And so then it’s time to do a little bit of landscaping and say, “What are the parts of my job that I’ve taken on, that I’m doing, that really don’t add much to me, to the organization, that nobody would notice if I quit doing, that I could delegate these tasks to someone else?”

And so it’s really about job crafting, about rightsizing your job to say, “How can I make this sustainable because I’m stuck in this situation for now?” So I think that’s the next move after speaking up, is maybe saying, “I need to lean back and see if maybe this job is actually fine if it’s just a nine-to-five job and not with all of this extra attached to it.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I guess I’m curious about the other side of all this in terms of we’re not jolted and we are on autopilot, and yet, we would totally stop working if we won the lottery. Do you have any prompts or questions or approaches where perhaps we need a jolt to cause us to evaluate what’s up and see if we’re, in fact, where we ought to be?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, that’s interesting. There’s some old research where some researchers studied, “How do people and why do people become entrepreneurs?” And there’s this narrative of entrepreneurship as sort of a very proactive, positive career move that people make, that breaking free from the corporate overlords and becoming an entrepreneur.

But when they looked into it, they found that most people end up as entrepreneurs as a result of some negative event, some failure or something like that. And when they talked to the entrepreneurs, they were like, the entrepreneurs were like, “Look, I was stuck in inertia. I was stuck on autopilot, and I needed these layoffs to shake me out of it.”

And they’re, essentially, saying, “I needed these jolts in order to live the life I wanted to live.” So I think you can self-jolt perhaps in a couple of ways. And one I already mentioned, which is saying, “Every year or twice a year, I’m really going to sit down and take a hard look at my relationship with work, the trajectory of my life. Is it moving toward my version of the good life as much as I want it to?”

The other thing I would say is having some sort of partner who really challenges you, to have that meeting with them every six months. And the two of you, and who knows, it could be your romantic partner, it could be a friend, it could be a therapist, you know, sit down and say, “Let’s really question, take a critical look at my relationship with work. And do I need to make a change or not?”

And so I think you asked a great question, there are certainly times that entrepreneurship research would suggest that there are life pivots out there that we should take. And if we can self-jolt into them, for some of us that would make sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Anthony, tell me, any final things you want to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Anthony Klotz
The only final thing I would say is after this sort of leaning back or shrinking the size of work in your life, I mean, if that doesn’t work, or if you have the option to quit, then I think it is time to quit. This is why jolts do lead to a lot of quitting.

And I would just say, you know, especially for people early in your career, which was me at one point, like, nobody really teaches you how to quit or gives you advice on how to quit. More and more today, we’re seeing employees boomerang back to their former employers. And that only works if you resign in a way that’s largely positive.

And so there’s a lot of, I would say, online content showing the upsides of burning bridges as you leave organizations, and I think that’s probably quite overstated.

Pete Mockaitis
Upside?

Anthony Klotz
I think a lot of people are saying that it’s somewhat… there’s a lot of videos that make it seem like it’s really cathartic to have a marching band play as you quit your job, bake your boss a cake that says, “This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

And these are hugely entertaining, as your laughter is suggesting, but as you might imagine, I’ve done a lot of research on how people quit their jobs, and there’s several different ways that people do quit their jobs.

And you can imagine that from a career standpoint, the positive styles of resigning make the most sense. And there are a few rare instances in which I would say it’s okay to burn bridges, but those would be very, very rare.

My research shows that about 10% of people engage in some form of dysfunctional behavior on the way out, some form of bridge-burning. That sort of behavior is probably only warranted in like 0.1% of quitting.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess, if anyone needed to hear that now, you’ve heard it from the expert on the matter. Don’t get a marching band and a dramatic exit. Maybe, like, if your career move is into a viral video creator and you’re getting a kickstart with the marching band, but almost never.

I think, yeah, I mean, that was my impression is that, yes, this video is entertaining, but it is not a optimal life approach. That’s what I think the imagination is for. Enjoy imagining doing that, but don’t actually do it.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, go ahead and type up that email and then delete it, what you really want to say when you quit, yeah, but don’t actually say it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Anthony Klotz
There’s a quote by George Mallory when he was trying to hike up Everest, and people wanted to know why he was doing it. And I won’t get this quote exactly right, but he essentially said, “There is no reason. We just do it for the sheer joy.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And can you share a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, there’s a study, Greenberg 1990, where somehow this researcher talked a manufacturing company that was doing pay cuts into letting him manipulate the way that they deliver those pay cuts, which we wouldn’t even be allowed to do anymore for ethical purposes.

But it showed that just in very small ways, the way that leaders deliver negative messages have huge implications for whether employees steal and quit after a negative announcement, like a pay cut or a layoff.

Just doing it with compassion and care versus doing it in a very perfunctory style makes a huge difference for how negative news is received and reacted to by workers. It’s just a really powerful design.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Anthony Klotz
I like dreaming and reading about travel. So probably The Log from the Sea of Cortez by Steinbeck, where he’s tooling around Baja Mexico, the Sea of Cortez, and making all kinds of fun discoveries with his buddies. That sounds pretty good.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Anthony Klotz
In the evenings, usually about an hour before I go to sleep, I put away the screens and go for a walk, usually with my partner. But being away from screens, going for a walk, definitely contributes to a good night’s sleep, which then kind of has a more positive effect, a nice little cyclical positive effect.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, if folks want to learn more and get in touch, where would you point them?

Anthony Klotz
I would point them to email, for one. Anybody can reach out to me at my UCL email, which is easy to find, or I’m at AnthonyKlotz.com or LinkedIn, of course.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Anthony Klotz
If you’re looking to be awesome at your job, I would recommend challenging yourself to say, “When these jolts come, I’m going to set them to the side for the moment. I’m not going to ruminate on them, give them more energy than they need. And I’ll revisit them every three months or every six months.” So that would be the challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anthony, thank you.

Anthony Klotz
Oh, it’s been a pleasure, Pete.