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Marco Bartolome

Jun 08
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1159: Precise Word-for-Word Scripts For Flourishing at Work with Erin McGoff

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Erin McGoff shares the simple word shifts that will supercharge your confidence and improve your image at work.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to get a raise with just a few words
  2. How to set boundaries like a pro
  3. The one phrase to stop using at work

About Erin

Erin McGoff is an award-winning filmmaker and content creator—known as the “internet’s big sister” through her AdviceWithErin branding. McGoff has built a significant online presence with millions of followers, delivering candid career and life advice for Gen Z and Millennials. She received a Pulitzer Fellowship in 2017 and was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient in 2025. Her impact has been recognized by publications like The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, and others, and she is currently a contributor to CNBC. Her New York Times bestselling book, THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF WORK, is on sale now.

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Erin McGoff Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Erin, welcome!

Erin McGoff
Hi! I’m so happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am happy to have you here talking about the secret language of work and more. So, wow, you have quite the impressive audience, six million plus followers across everything. Could you maybe kick us off by sharing what’s a piece of advice you’ve offered that’s been counterintuitive, such that folks are like, “No way!” but you just staunchly believe, “No, this is, in fact, the way”?

Erin McGoff
I don’t know. Small talk comes to mind. People tend to kind of hate and downplay small talk, thinking that it’s just something that’s not for introverts. But I always urge people to know the difference between being shy and being introverted, and to understand that small talk is as old as humans are themselves, and that it’s a really, really important thing to master in order to develop rapport with people.

So sometimes people are a little surprised, as an introvert myself, that I’m so pro small talk, but it really is a very, very important thing to master.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us, make the case, why is small talk important, if it’s just small?

Erin McGoff
Yeah, right? I talk about this in my book, about how, you know, small talk is not really about the conversation. It’s about signaling to the other person that you’re not a threat to them. And this goes back to our caveman days.

Like, if a person from another tribe, like, tries to come in, you know, to your village, small talk is the way of you both communicating that you’re not a threat to each other. And I think it’s still that way today when we go into work.

Being able to maximize those first few minutes of a Zoom call with a client when you’re still waiting for your boss to get on, that’s like a really golden time for you to showcase your professionalism and your maturity and how capable and competent you are.

And a lot of people think, “Well, small talk is just so cringe-y and I’m just so much deeper than that.” But you need to just get out of that mindset because it really doesn’t do you any favors. So that’s kind of, like, generally my advice is just to get out of mindsets that aren’t doing you any favors and get into mindsets that are.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I don’t know who said it, probably one of our guests – we’ll dig into the archives – that small talk leads to big talk, and I think it’s so true. Because if you went right for big talk, because I mean, I don’t know, I’m in that ballpark, too.

It’s, like, “I don’t care about the weather. I mean, what are we doing?” And it feels like almost silly and performative. And yet, if the opening question was like, “So, Pete, what’s the deepest fear you’re wrestling with right now?”

Like, “What? I don’t…Who are you? Why would I tell you that out of the gate?” And so it’s sort of, like, there needs to be some kind of a bridge or stairway between just meeting or silence and the really deep stuff that turns into a strong relationship.

Erin McGoff
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I love that small talk turns into big talk. I think that’s very, very true.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and you’ve got some hyper-helpful scripts for us in that situation, and dare your subtitle promise, “Every Situation.” So could you share with us,  what’s the big idea with your book, The Secret Language of Work?

Erin McGoff
Yeah, so “The Secret Language of Work” was really birthed out of what my content is. I started posting career advice online in 2021 and it was mainly script-based. I was helping people actually figure out the exact words to say in situations or, at least, giving them examples for inspiration.

I always was kind of frustrated with a lot of career advice that felt very vague to me, you know, “Speak to your strengths,” “Walk in your truth.” And I’m, like, “What does that sound like, though? I need examples.”

So I really wanted to write a book that democratized access to really high-quality soft career advice, and not only did that but also gave people hyper-helpful, like very, very helpful scripts and examples of what to say in certain scenarios, how exactly to network without being cringe-y, or how to negotiate without accidentally being rude.

Because a lot of us, we want to do things, we want to ask for a raise. The only thing that’s actually holding us back is the fear of coming off offensive or the fear of failure, lots of fears. So I wanted to write a book that was designed to supercharge people’s confidence by giving them the tools and the scripts to actually speak what they want into existence.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Well, we love supercharging confidence over here, so we are in the right place. This is good news. Well, could you share with us perhaps a story of someone who was kind of bumbling and unaware of the secret language of work, but then picked it up and what kind of results that unlocked for them?

Erin McGoff
Just yesterday, I got a DM from a man, Eduardo, and he got a dream offer, and he really didn’t want to rock the boat. He had never negotiated his salary before, but he did think that he was worth a little more.

He grew up in a household where his parents had never negotiated, and that financial literacy aspect wasn’t something that he was inherently taught. And he said, “I read your book. I read the chapter. I’m going to go in and I’m going to try it.”

And he updated me this morning that he was able to negotiate a 10% increase. And that was just probably three minutes of using mouth sounds, and it made cash appear instantly. And so that’s the power I want people to understand, is if you can just use your mouth sounds right, you can make cash appear out of thin air. So I have tons of stories, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Mouth sounds. Well, yeah, you know, in a way, that’s kind of silly and flippant, but in another way, it’s very accurate. Because I think we can overthink it, right, in terms of like, “Oh, my god, I have to say  just the right things, but then if I say this, he might say that. But then if I say this and then…”

But it’s like, “You know what, they’re mouth sounds, they’re words, and no need to get all worked up about them,” but almost, like, sort of this, well, the magic words for a genie or something. Well, since we’re on this example, what are the mouth sounds or the magic words for, “Yeah, I’d like you to pay me 10% more”?

Erin McGoff
Well, every negotiation is unique. It’s all going to be a case-by-case basis and all that. And that was something that always annoyed me when I would get career advice, is people would say, “Oh, well, it depends.” And it’s like, “Just give me an example. Just give me some inspiration.”

And so that’s really what I try to do in the book. And it’s so important to stay aligned on your shared goal. You know, the recruiter, or whoever is negotiating the deal with you, they want to hire you. They have an incentive because their job is to get somebody in the role. The company needs somebody to do a job, you can do the job, they offered it to you. So don’t be scared.

In the United States culture, negotiating your salary is a given. It’s what they expect. They rarely give you the best offer or the highest offer they can. And if they do, they oftentimes will say, “This is the highest offer, by the way. Like, we can’t go any higher.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, or, “This is standardized across all of North America. It’s kind of what it is, you know.”

Erin McGoff
Yeah, exactly. So it’s always important to come in with a case, three things. AI can also be helpful, too, if you’re struggling to think about like, “Ugh, I don’t know, the three extra reasons, you know.” It’s helpful to try and figure out what you bring to the table that maybe somebody else doesn’t.

I always say it’s kind of, like, you’re looking at two pairs of jeans, and everybody says, “Oh, they’re just going to go with the cheaper candidate,” and it’s like, “Do you just always go with the cheaper jeans? No, you go with the jeans that look the best on you and they’re the highest quality and they’re the best value for what you’re getting.”

So it’s kind of important to productize yourself, which sounds odd, but to go to them and say, “Hey, I really want to make this work. I want to sign this paperwork today. In order to do that, here’s a salary that I’m looking for, and here are the three reasons why I bring this additional value to the role.”

So it’s really important to remember that, I always say, it’s not personal, it’s just professional. This is just a business transaction. You’re going to provide a service to them, and they’re going to pay you. And a mindset shift that people find really helpful is I like to think about myself as like a vendor or a freelancer.

And I’m not necessarily, like, begging for this job, but rather I bring a certain specialty and skillset to the company, and I’m going to alleviate problems, and I’m going to use my professional skill to improve the company and to provide value, and they’re going to pay you.

And so you’re just negotiating what this proper rate is. Everything is made up. The salaries are changing all the time. Do your research, but also make sure that you are getting paid what you think that you’re worth. And you’d be surprised how well a negotiation can work. It’s just a few minutes of awkwardness for, like I said, cold hard cash.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that was a hyper-helpful script in terms of, “I want to sign this paperwork today, and here is really what would do the trick for me.” And as I’m hearing it, it doesn’t feel rude. It’s funny, as I’m putting myself in the role of the recruiter there, it’s like I’m excited, “Oh, she wants to sign today. Good news.”

And I’m already predisposed to want to be able to say yes. You know, and then I’ll probably either give it to you if I can, or, you know, you just be really clear about why I can’t. But I think that’s a good feeling to know that you explored that rock. You know, “Okay, well, I tried and this is, I believe them when they said that’s the highest they can go.” That’s cool. Okay.

Erin McGoff
Yeah, and there are other things you can always negotiate besides salary, too. If they can’t go higher in salary, maybe they can do a higher 401k match, or more PTO days, or remote flexible Fridays. So it’s just always important to just see what you can get.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s very nice. Well, so we’re going to maybe dig into all kinds of little hyper-helpful scripts in particular situations. But I’d love to know, are there a few of your favorite go-to’s, like, “Oh, this is a handy script that is useful in many situations.

Erin McGoff
Something that I help people with a lot is setting boundaries, which is tough, you know, when you’re working and, especially in an economy like this, where it’s really an employer’s market, you don’t want to rock the boat.

At the same time, it’s really important to set boundaries for yourself. It’s not other people’s responsibilities to set your boundaries. People will, generally, take what they can get from you. So it’s important to show people what they can expect from you and what they can’t expect from you.

So it’s important to learn how to say no in professional ways. And something I love is, “Oh, I’m currently at capacity.” So let me give you an example. So say your boss is just throwing things on your plate. Instead of getting bitter and frustrated at your boss, “Oh, why don’t they understand that they’re overloading me, they’re stressing me out? I’m drowning as it is.”

First of all, give everybody the benefit of the doubt. Your boss’ job isn’t to micromanage everything you do, they’re not inside your brain. Their job is to do their job, and your job is to do your job. So you have to communicate with them.

And so let’s say they put yet another thing on your plate, and you’re like, “I just…I can’t do this.” Instead of going to your boss, and saying, “I’m overwhelmed. I’m stressed out. I can’t do this all,” that’s just giving them another problem, and every manager hates that.

Instead, you always want to come to your boss with solutions. So you want to say, “Hey, I noticed that you gave me another task today. I’m currently focused on this task. Which would you like me to prioritize?” And then you’re giving them, “Oh, huh, which client is more important? Which one can we shift? Which one can be moved to Monday?” You’re giving them something to work with.

So saying, “I’m currently at capacity with client A’s presentation. I know that you want me to focus on client B. Which one would you like me to prioritize today? And which one would you like me to postpone to Monday?”

In that way, that is like music to a manager’s ears because then they have something to work with. And they’re not just dealing with your stress and your problems, but you’re providing them a potential solution.

Pete Mockaitis
And it sounds very nice when you say it. Good job. I guess my nightmare, when you talked about fear at the beginning, is I always fear a response that’s very curt or mean, you know, along the lines of like, “Well, Erin, we expect you to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time here.”

It’s like, “Well, you know, hey, Erin, actually, both of those are critical. So make them both happen and don’t whine to me about this.” So, anyway, I feel like that’s a bit more edgy than the vast majority of managers will communicate, but they may well convey something along those lines in a more diplomatic, professional way.

So what do you think about that in terms of, one, can you deflate my fears, like that happens almost never? Or, two, do you have the follow-up for when they’re pushing back on your pushback?

Erin McGoff
Yes, absolutely. This is something that people actually like about my videos, is that I always offer a pushback. I actually just posted this, or filmed a video about this today. Because, yeah, on the internet, in a video, a perfect script is going to get the job done.

But, in reality, when you’re working with a difficult boss who does tell you, “Hey, I need you to prioritize both,” that does happen. And, you know, obviously, I recommend that you don’t work with a boss like that, but we can’t always control who we work for. We can’t just quit our jobs if we don’t like our boss. We’re going to have to work with people that we don’t like constantly.

So if your boss does push back, again, don’t make it personal, keep it professional. So I always recommend, when people are coming to their boss, with like a complaint or an issue that they reframe a personal problem as a professional concern.

So instead of saying, “I’m personally so overwhelmed,” all they’re hearing is you’re not competent. You can’t get it done. A bad boss. A good boss will work with you, but a bad boss is just hearing, “They’re not competent.”

Instead, you want to turn it into a professional concern, “Hey, I know client A is a really, really important client, and I really want to make sure that we get this report done right and on time. I have this much capacity today, and I want to make sure that we have time for both. So can you work with me to figure out a solution here to make sure that we can get both reports out the door?”

Again, align your goals. Always be aligning your goals. The boss wants the reports out the door. You also want the reports out the door. But it’s impossible right now to get that done as is. So you want to come to them and say, “Our goals are aligned here, but the strategies, the car is broken down. It’s not going to work.”

And then present them with a solution, “You know, James has a lighter workload today. Would you mind if I gave him the remainder of project A so I could just focus on project B?” And maybe give them, like, a worse second option or something like that? Just give them options.

Pete Mockaitis
“Or I could just have AI generate it entirely.” “No, don’t. Don’t do that.”

Erin McGoff
Don’t do that. And you can relieve that mental load from your boss and actually get what you want. So that’s the secret language of work. Like, the first page of my book, I talk about the desired outcome. So is your desired outcome from this conversation your boss understanding that you’re stressed? No, your desired outcome is working on one thing at a time. So always always keep the first thing the first thing. And, yeah, keep those goals aligned.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, if I may, we’ll keep the pushback going in terms of it’s, like, “Well, Erin, I think that both of these are possible so long as you just crank at it till midnight. What’s the problem?”

Erin McGoff
“I could certainly crank it out until midnight. but that doesn’t solve the problem of these reports being done on time and with quality. You know, unfortunately I’m only one person and we do need two people on this, or we need to rework the deadline. It’s not possible.”

People are oftentimes tempted to say, “Well, why stop work at five?” It sounds great in an internet video, it sounds awesome. You stick it to the man, you know, those videos always go viral, but it doesn’t work in real life.

So I try to give like very realistic advice. And, again, it always goes back to that desired outcome. Aligning your goals and talking about workflows and solutions. And, yes, when it does come to time-based activities, like that can be really tricky.

Like, if your boss is just like, “You need to stay late,” remember that that’s not a sustainable solution. So, like, sometimes, yeah, you might need to stay late at work. You might need to get something done. I’m like very pro working hard. I’m not anti working hard. I think people should prove themselves at work, but I also believe in working smart.

And working a long time doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re working hard or working smart. It just means that you’re working a long time. So it’s always important to collaborate with your boss. I like to have things in writing, too.

Like, send them an email, and be like, “These are all the things that need to get done in the next 12 hours. Even if I stay working until midnight, that’s not going to happen.” So again, just working with them, keeping it positive, keeping it solution-oriented.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and I like that frame associated with, and you didn’t say it explicitly, but what I’m hearing, and maybe you could highlight it explicitly, is the notion that quality is likely to suffer if you are cranking at it at 9:00, 10:00, 11:00 p.m. And I think that we could all just appreciate that that is true of the human biological entity, straight up. That just is.

Erin McGoff
Yeah, it’s important to remember your boss wants to look good to their boss. And you messing up a client report because you ran out of time, that doesn’t make them look good to their boss. So always think about what they’re looking for and how you can align your goals.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think, even to that notion, in highlighting the burnout or sustainability piece, I think it really does give rise to all kinds of other creative solutions. It’s like, “Okay, maybe you can work until midnight and then you’re going to go ahead and take tomorrow off.”

And, like, that’s reasonable and that there are times when that is 100% cool with the manager, like, “Yeah, please go for it.” And you have the chat and you got a win-win there.

Erin McGoff
Yeah. I mean, you can’t fix a bad manager. Like, the only solution is to get away. People don’t change. You just have to get away from them.

But you’re totally right. That’s another solution that you could offer, “Hey, yeah, I could stay until 2:00 a.m. tonight, get it out the door. I’m willing to put in that extra work because I have this goal of becoming a director in 12 months.”

Like, always remind them of, like, what your goal is, like speak it into existence is something I talk about, “I’m willing to put in this extra effort because I want this goal or promotion. However, I’d really appreciate being able to come in at noon tomorrow, as a way of catching up on sleep,” or something like that. Always offer different solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, framing it in terms of the the goal, the objective, what they want is fabulous. One of my favorite quotes, I don’t know where it came from, was, “Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have it your way.”

And I think that that’s kind of what we’re doing here, is you’re always speaking about it in the terms that they care about.

Erin McGoff
Exactly. Yep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so we talked about some favorite words. How about some least favorite words? Anything you think just needs to go?

Erin McGoff
Yeah, as far as phrases, like, to remove from your vocabulary, well, first of all, there’s always the the fillers, which I intentionally use, by the way – “you know, just, like, um.”

In the book, I talk about them as language softeners because, as a woman, if I tend to speak the way I feel most comfortable, which is like more blunt and plain, people tend to not like me very much.

So I use fillers intentionally, which people are always really interested to hear about because I’m probably one of the only communication experts out there that is not telling you to tone it down. Now some people certainly need to tone it down. But I’m not a hater of fillers, in general, especially in conversations like this. You don’t want to sound too robotic.

But a phrase that I think is really helpful to get rid of, in a professional and personal setting, is the phrase “I don’t have time.” “Boss, I didn’t have time to do this,” “I don’t have time for that.” People just really don’t like hearing that you don’t have time.

And it’s also not helpful to you because there’s no such thing as not having time for something. There’s not making it a priority. And you can’t make everything a priority. And that’s just that. And this is really, really helpful for people on an individual level because when you say “I don’t have time,” you’re taking your power away from yourself.

You’re saying, “I’m not in the driver’s seat of my own life. I don’t have time for anything. I’m flustered. I’m flailing, I’m all over the place.” But when you say, “I don’t have the ability to make this a priority right now,” you’re putting yourself back in a place of power. And you’re saying, “I have control over my life. I have control over my days. I’m not in a position to make this a priority right now.”

And maybe that’s updating your portfolio or cooking homemade meals. It’s totally fine if sometimes you don’t have the ability to make everything a priority. So I’m really a fan of using language that empowers yourself even when it’s way more fun sometimes to use language that disempowers yourself and lets you be a victim. I’m typically a fan of putting yourself back in the driver’s seat even when it’s hard.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. “I don’t have time” is false, fundamentally. I guess it’s almost like the phrase “I have to” or “you have to.” It’s incomplete and on its own false, but it means “I don’t have time” relative to “I don’t have time to do this, in addition to the things that I’m super duper committed to and unwilling to give up,” which is the same thing as saying, “It’s not a priority.”

And, likewise, “I have to” or “you have to” is false on its own, but is only true in some context, “You have to do this in order to achieve a particular result, subject to some particular constraints and commitments.” But that’s a lot of words.

Erin McGoff
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, tell us, any other super favorite transformational language shifts that we got to highlight here?

Erin McGoff
One of the things that I talk about in the book, kind of like these basic fundamental idea, is strategic communication is all about playing chess and not checkers.

So there are things that you’ll want to say in the moment, things that your gut is telling you to say, you feel compelled to say. It’s impulsive. And a lot of the times it’s really true and really right, and you’re, like, totally fine for saying that. Like, “Boss, you suck.” Your boss might suck. I totally agree.

However, it’s always important to remember what your goals are. So a great example is when you’re quitting your job. A lot of people, especially if you’ve been working for a bad boss, which is unfortunate, want to tell off their boss.

And it totally makes sense that you want to tell off your boss. That’s what you do in your personal life. You know, if somebody’s being rude to you or disrespecting you, it makes sense. There is a way to do this, though, that stings so much more and protects you from the negative repercussions. And that’s playing chess and not checkers.

So playing checkers would be, “I’m quitting. You’re the worst boss ever. I hate working here. You suck. I hope I never see you again.” Hey, that’s all true, fine, and dandy. All the power to you. You’re expressing your emotions. It doesn’t benefit you.

Because, five minutes after you walk out of their office, that stink will follow you. And you’d be surprised how small the world is. And I’m not saying that you need to get your boss to love you, but I’m saying that there is a professional way to leave your job.

You can say, “Hey, I’m putting in my two weeks today. Thank you so much for my time here. I would love to provide feedback, if possible. If not, that’s fine. But April 6th would be my last day.”

Just keep it short and sweet, and then you can provide professional feedback, whether that’s to HR or in an exit interview. And that is so much more painful and effective because you’re doing it in a professional way. So you’re not getting distracted by your personal emotions, but rather it’s professional feedback.

And you can go to Glassdoor, and you can scream in a pillow, and go to kickboxing classes, and get it out in a healthy way. I always recommend getting out your emotions in a healthy way and expressing them. But do it in a way that benefits you and doesn’t accidentally back backfire and hurt you down the line.

And so the book is very, very much about, “How can you strategically use your words to get what you want, maybe in a way that seems counterintuitive at first, but, over the course of time, will pay off?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s a nice distinction there. It’s, like, you’re a human being who has emotions, and those emotions have validity, and it is often helpful and beneficial to have those emotions expressed somehow.

And yet, often in the workplace, about the thing that you’re mad about is not quite what’s going to give you the optimal result.

Erin McGoff
Exactly. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Very nice. Okay. Well, do you have any final pro tips on sounding more confident?

Erin McGoff
Yes. You know, something I talk about a lot is this idea of the person that you talk to the most is actually yourself. So a lot of people focus on external communication, “How can I communicate better with my coworkers and my boss and recruiters and all this stuff?” And that’s great.

But none of it really sticks the landing unless you already have a good relationship with yourself. So the person that we talk to most is ourselves. The way that you talk to yourself really matters. And we all tend to have this internal dialogue that’s hypercritical, not very positive. and it takes work to kind of train yourself out of that.

And so something I always say is to be your own best friend. Next time you mess up at work and you say, “Oh, my gosh, I’m such an idiot. I’m always messing things up. I don’t deserve to be here. Everybody’s going to figure out I’m such a fraud and a failure,” pretend your friend is saying that. And how would you respond to them?

You’d say, “You’re not a failure. You’re not an imposter. You just messed up a spreadsheet. It’s really not a big deal. Just go in and fix it. Let your boss know, and move on with your day.” Like, kind of get used to, like talking to yourself inside your head.

It sounds neurotic and nuts, but once you get in the habit of doing it, you become very, very kind to yourself, but you also become stronger because you’re able to deal with obstacles and issues and challenges much better. You’re able to overcome things much, much quicker.

So before talking to anybody else, so this is how I open up a book, is you need to first figure out how you’re talking to yourself and make that into a healthier conversation and dialogue. And it takes a little bit of work at first but, over the course of time, it becomes much, much easier. And then you treat others how we tend to treat ourselves.

So you tend to treat others with more kindness and empathy and dignity, and that gets you so far. I always say, like, manners go so far. You’d be shocked at how many people come into an interview and don’t even say thank you at the end.

I don’t know if it’s because they were never trained to, or because they’re entitled, or maybe they just forgot, that happens, too. But just saying “thank you,” “please,” “I really appreciate that,” like, just these little tiny things can go so, so, so far.

So the devil is really in the details but, yeah, my overarching advice is that if you’re looking to improve your communication with other people, first, improve your communication with yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
And I like that a lot. Well, you talked about the Golden Rule, fundamentally, treat others the way you’d like to be treated, in terms of, like, “How are you treating yourself?” And so it’s often the case that we are much more vicious to ourselves than we would ever be to a third party.

And I’m right with you. I felt that recently, actually. I’ve had some conversations with myself in terms of, like, you know, maybe I’m disappointed that I wasn’t able to take care of business in a couple of days. But to be able to say, like, “Hey, you know what, Pete? It’s been a pretty hard couple of weeks here.”

You know, they cut down my beautiful forest view to make a new house, which is not, yeah, not fun. I’m listening to the beep, beep, beep of the construction machines. I’m sick. So a number of things. And so it’s, like, “So it kind of makes sense that it’s not your most uber productive day in the record books given the context you find yourself in.”

And so, in a way, it feels silly to speak to yourself in that way. And yet it’s very soothing. It’s almost like a a sweet, motherly word of encouragement to your four-year-old self. And I was like, “You know what, that’s right. Okay.”

Erin McGoff
Yeah, you’re right. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
“You know, tomorrow’s another day. It’s all good.” So any pro tips on, if we’re feeling some awkwardness there, or we’re not accustomed to engaging ourselves in this sort of a kind conversation, how do we kind of get more in that groove?

Erin McGoff
That’s a really great question because it’s actually a lot harder than people realize. It’s hard to catch yourself in the moment when you’re in this 24/7 habit of being so self-critical and so hard on yourself. So I recommend this proactive approach.

Every morning, when you’re brushing your teeth, just look in the mirror and be, like, just think, “I’m going to have a great day. Like, I’m really good at my job. People like me. People like working with me.” Those affirmations sound really silly, and a lot of people would roll their eyes with that and scoff.

However, they’re really effective on a neurological basis. And I think if you can just look in the mirror and say three things, “I’m going to have a good day. People love working with me. I’m going to crush this project,” like, if you can get specific about it, too, it will turn into a habit, just slowly over time.

And at first, it’ll feel really weird. Sometimes when I encourage people to do that, they say, “I’m not doing that.” And it makes me really sad because, in that moment, I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, you are so mean to yourself that you can’t even be nice to yourself for five seconds.”

And it’s very, very sad to me, and I just say, “You know, what happened to you where you feel like you can’t be kind to yourself?” It’s tough. People grow up in really rough households and really rough childhoods, and they learned that the only way to survive is to hate themselves. And so, things can get pretty deep pretty quick sometimes with career advice.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, you’re right. Well, “What happened to you?” I’m thinking about the book that that Oprah co-wrote there, which was a good one. And it’s intriguing, it’s sort of not that, speaking from my own experience, it’s not that we’re incapable of that, like, “Yeah, I can say the words in the mirror, sure. It’s just that I feel kind of weird and silly and awkward doing so.”

And what’s interesting about that is, well, one, I think that’s the case for all conversation, it’s like, “Well, if you’ve never done it before, everything feels weird and silly and awkward the first time you do it, just straight up, as a fact of learning and how that works.”

But, secondly, and I find it encouraging that the affirmations you spoke – we had Hal Elrod on the show, talking about, you know, make your affirmations truthful in terms of like, “Money flows to me effortlessly.”

He’s like, “Well, no, it really doesn’t, actually. You have to hustle.” So I think with one of my latest affirmations, which I find it’s like it’s really true, and I actually assembled the evidence for it, I wrote it down, because sometimes I can get in, like, a negative loop, and this is just objectively true, “Sometimes things work out better than you expect.”

Erin McGoff
Yep, what’s the best that could happen?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, because, you know, sometimes it’s like, “Ugh, it’s going to be a lot of effort. It’s not even going to turn into anything, anyway. I don’t feel like it. I don’t want to bother. Blech!” It was like, “Okay, yeah, maybe.”

But also what is true is sometimes things work out better than you expect. And, hey, what do you know? I’ve written down a dozen examples and I found that quite encouraging lately. So I think that’s kind of the sweet spot for affirmations. It’s not the – was it Gordon Smiley – or, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and, doggone it, people like me.”

But rather, “Hey, here is something that is true, and when I bring that back to the forefront of my awareness, it provides encouragement.”

Erin McGoff
Yeah, I love that realistic approach so much, “I have a big day today. I have a big calendar. I’m feeling really overwhelmed, and I think that I’m really capable of getting this done.” You know, it kind of reminds me a little bit of Tim Ferris’, you know, we’ve all heard of goal-setting when you set goals for your life.

And he has this whole idea where you practice fear-setting. So you actually, like, write out all of your biggest fears. So if you try to start your own company, what’s the worst that can happen? And then you work your way backwards from there to be like, “Okay, well, I go on a debt.” And then you talk about how you would rectify, like, the situation.

And I think that that’s really effective. And I think that if you can just work through it and be really realistic with yourself, like, “I had this big presentation today. I think it’s going to go great because I’m super capable. And if it doesn’t, here’s what I’m going to do.”

I think that’s really, really effective. I like to give as realistic of advice as possible. So I I really enjoyed what you said.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, now let’s hear rapid fire about some of your favorite things. Can we hear about a favorite quote?

Erin McGoff
Yeah, I was just thinking, “Don’t get mad. Get curious.” I don’t always say that. I usually say my favorite piece of career advice, but from our conversation today, I think that’s something that these listeners might need to hear.

It’s just, you know, when you’re feeling angry at work, don’t get mad, get curious, you know, “How did we end up here? What happened to my boss’ childhood that’s making them act this way?” It’s kind of a good general rule of thumb.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Erin McGoff
So I think it was in the 1990s, there was a study that found a phenomenon called the liking gap. And it talks about how they found that, when people exit a conversation, the people who you left, the group you left, tend to rate you way more favorably than you think it went.

Like, consistently across the board, people actually tend to like you more than you think that they liked you. And I encourage anybody listening, go read the study, go watch a YouTube video about it. I think it’s absolutely fascinating because there are a lot of interesting studies out there, but I don’t hear people talk about the liking gap very often. And it can be very, very validating if you’re somebody who’s socially anxious.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Erin McGoff
I used to say The Alchemist. I feel like a lot of people say The Alchemist though, so I am going to also say Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. I feel like everybody kind of loves that book now, but it is truly the Bible on negotiating. And I think Chris is a great reader on the audiobook. He gives great stories. I think it’s just a well-structured and well-written book.

Pete Mockaitis
He is a great reader on the audiobook. He was on the show, and just the way he says, “Salsa red pearl,” it’s like, “I got to have that truck.” Whenever I see a red truck, I think of Chris Voss. I mean, he makes an impression.

Erin McGoff
Yes, he does.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Erin McGoff
Ooh, I’m using a lot tools now. I’m, of course, using Claude Cowork. I absolutely love Claude Cowork. I think when you learn how to prompt things correctly, it’s very helpful. Where people run into issues with AI is that they don’t put in the effort to learn how to prompt correctly.

So if anybody’s listening to this, watch some YouTube videos, learn how to improve your prompts, and you would be shocked at what a great sidekick something like Claude Cowork can be.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favor habit?

Erin McGoff
I drink a ton of water every morning. I’m not even kidding. I think drinking water is like a really great piece of career advice. People in the afternoon, you know, they think they need that second cup of coffee, that 2:00 p.m. coffee. You don’t. You’re dehydrated. You need water. Go drink a ton of water.

And if you still feel like you need the coffee, then drink the coffee, okay?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that folks really dig, they quote it back to you often?

Erin McGoff
I always say no one knows what they’re doing, and people love it. Some people get really upset. They’re like, “Don’t say that doctors know what they’re doing.” And I’m like, “Of course, they know what they’re doing. Of course, professionals know how to do their craft.”

But when you really zoom out, everybody is winging it. Everybody is making it up as they go along. Nobody predicted COVID. Like, nobody knows what tomorrow brings. Economists are wrong all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, the tech bros hype their things, and most of them don’t do the vision they portray. All these TV shows get canceled, “Well, shouldn’t the execs know what shows are going to be a hit?” No, they can’t do it. Yeah.

Erin McGoff
They do not know. I know from experience.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Erin McGoff
Yes, follow me on Instagram, @advicewitherin. You can sign up for my newsletter, HyperHelpful.com, which is a fun weekly newsletter that I write to supercharge your career. Of course, I have my book, The Secret Language of Work.

And I have a new app out called StupidFish, which is extremely helpful. We have about 30 to 40, maybe even 50,000 users actually today, in our first week. So, yeah, definitely go down on StupidFish.

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

Erin McGoff
Find the job that you enjoy doing. It’s much, much easier to work hard at something when you’re having fun. I think people who are having fun always tend to win in the end. So find the job that you’re the best fit for naturally. It’s out there. I know it is. There are new jobs being invented every single day. Sixty percent of the jobs people have today didn’t exist eighty years ago. So go, go find your best fit.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Erin, thank you.

Erin McGoff
Thank you so much for having me.

Jun 04
0

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

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Dr. Anthony Klotz discusses how to manage the big and small moments that make us question our next career moves.

You’ll Learn

  1. How the pandemic fundamentally altered our relationship with work
  2. Why doing nothing is often your best solution
  3. How to find more satisfaction in a job you’re stuck in

About Anthony

Dr. Anthony Klotz is a professor of organizational behavior at the UCL School of Management in London. Known for predicting a global labor shift and dubbing it the Great Resignation, Klotz writes for Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal, and his research is regularly published in leading management journals. He has discussed the current and future state of work with media outlets, including The New York Times, BBC, and CNN, and with executive teams at Fortune 100 firms.

Resources Mentioned

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Anthony Klotz Interview Transcript

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.

Jun 01
0

1157: How to Improve Processes, Remove Friction, and Accelerate Innovation with Jon McNeill

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Tesla’s former President Jon McNeill reveals the five-step framework behind one of the world’s fastest-growing companies.

You’ll Learn

  1. What most miss when designing processes
  2. How to identify outdated requirements that slow things down
  3. Why automation should be your LAST step

About Jon

Jon McNeill is the CEO and Co-Founder of DVx Ventures. With a track record of founding and scaling companies, Jon has led teams that generated tens of thousands of jobs and delivered multi-billion dollar returns for investors.

Previously, Jon served as President at Tesla, where revenue grew from $2B to $20B in under 30 months, and later as COO at Lyft, helping double revenue and take the company public. He currently sits on the boards of General Motors, Lululemon, Asurion, CrossFit, and Stash.

Resources Mentioned

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Jon McNeill Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jon, welcome!

Jon McNeill
Thanks. Nice to be here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to discuss The Algorithm and I’d love it if you could kick us off with a story you shared, which I found riveting, in which when you were just getting started at Tesla, even actually before you had the job, you took it on yourself to tackle a project. Could you tell us the story?

Jon McNeill
Yeah, I was talking with Elon about joining Tesla and I kept saying to him, “I think you need a big company guy to come in.” And he said, “No, that’s exactly what I don’t need. I need a fellow entrepreneur.” And I said, “Well, I want to make sure I can be helpful to you. So, like, what’s your biggest problem right now?”

And he said, “We have a demand problem.” And I said, “Okay, like frame that for me. They’re public companies. So what’s your commitment to the street this quarter?” He said, “Roughly 12,000 cars.” And I said, “How are you doing so far?”

It was about a month into the quarter. He says, “It’s a month into the quarter. We’ve sold like 2,500 cars, short of 3,000 cars.” I’m like, “Oh, now I understand your demand problem. You’re going to miss your quarter. Let me go to work on that and see if I can help.”

So I went to, just in the travels with my own business at the time, I went to eight different cities over the course of about 10 days. And I went into eight different Tesla stores and did what I was told was the pinnacle of the sales process and sales funnel, which was taking a test drive.

And the whole idea was that people would come in, they would get in an electric car for the first time, hit the accelerator. And the accelerator in an electric car is way different than a gas car. It’s instant torque to the wheels, and so you take off like a rocket. And so a lot of people experience that. And then they can’t stop thinking about it until they’ve got a car.

So I went in eight stores, I did a test drive. And then, oddly, like a few days later, I hadn’t heard from any of them. So Elon had put me in touch with his head of sales ops. And I called him and said, “Like, am I blacklisted in the system or something? I used eight different email addresses so people wouldn’t know who I was. And people don’t know who I am anyway. And I’m not getting any callbacks. Why?”

And he looked in the system, he’s like, “No, you’re not flagged or anything.” I said, “Can you do me a favor? Can you tell me how many test drives you’ve given in the last 30 days that haven’t been followed up?” And he’s like, “Sure, give me, like, an hour. I can go run that.”

So he calls me back in an hour, and he said, “Nine thousand, 9,000 test drives, no callbacks.” I said, “Well, congratulations. You’re going to miss your quarter because you haven’t called anybody back. And no wonder you’re so far short of orders.”

So then I said, “Can you shut off a store rep’s ability to take any new leads until they’ve called all of their previous test drives back?” He said, “Yeah, I could do that.” I said, “How fast?” He said, “Globally? I could do that in a few hours.” I said, “Awesome. Do it, because we got to force-change, like, super fast or, otherwise, you’re missing your quarter.”

So he does it. Calls me back the next day, he’s like, “You won’t believe the orders are flowing in like crazy.” And I said, “Yeah, because you’re just calling people back. It’s the easiest thing ever. You’re asking for the order.” And then it dawned on me that I didn’t work for Tesla yet. And so I kind of gulped, and I said, “Hey, I got to call you back, because I got to call Elon and beg for forgiveness.”

So I called Elon and said, “Hey, look. Here’s the situation. You’re demand-challenged. Here’s what I found out. You’ve done 9,000 test drives with no callback. And so here’s what I did about it. I was on the phone with your head of sales ops and we shut down any new leads into the system until everybody called their previous test drives back.”

And I said, “But I got to ask your forgiveness. I was acting like this was my company because I’m a CEO in my day job. But this is not the company I’m the CEO of. You are. This is your company. And I did something and I didn’t even ask your permission. And I’m really sorry. I got to apologize.”

And I didn’t know it because we were just getting to know each other. But I had this long period of silence on the other end of the phone line, and I thought, “Oh, my God, what have I done?” And it seemed like forever. It was probably 60 or 90 seconds of just dead silence.

What I’ve learned since is that’s how Elon processes. He, like, shuts off all other sensory input and just thinks. And so I was about to ask him if he was still there, and he hopped on and he said, “You know what? That’s exactly a rational decision, and I’m so glad you made it. I think you’re going to fit in here just fine.”

And that was the last hurdle. I said, “Well, I think I’ve proven myself I can be useful. So I think I’m ready to sign on, too.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a lovely story on many dimensions. But when I reflect on it, what I’m stuck with is, “All right, Tesla, great, great brand, tremendous company, tremendous leaders, lot of smarts there.” How is it that we find ourselves in a situation where one of the most fundamental things one can do in a sales operation – call people back – isn’t happening?

Jon McNeill
I think I see this over and over again. People look at a lot of data and miss the obvious. And when you just go and see a process with your eyes – this is going to sound completely old-fashioned – but it’s actually the case.

Like, I believe that the strongest analytical instrument you have as a leader are your eyes and ears. And if you go to the front line and eat your own dog food and experience the product or the process for yourself, you’ll often see exactly what’s wrong. But unless you know the exact piece of data to look for that would give you the clue, you don’t know that.

And so this is a complete hack I’ve found in leadership is just go to the front line, go experience the process yourself. You’ll understand really rapidly exactly what’s wrong. And it doesn’t always work, but it works a lot of the time. And this was an example of that.

So a bunch of really smart people looking at data missed it because they didn’t leave their offices. And my encouragement to people, and those people, as I then became their leader was, “You’re going to leave your office at least one day a week, and you’re going to go to the front lines because you’re going to see stuff way faster than the data will show you. And, hopefully, we’ll miss a lot of these potential big divots in our plan if you do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s tremendous. We had Marina Nitze on the show, who was the CTO for the United States VA, and that was one of her core recommendations, is follow the thing all the way through the process and then you’ll say, “Oh, that’s why it’s taking forever because so-and-so is waiting for something to be faxed. Well, let’s stop that. All right, now we know. Understood.”

All right. Well, so then zooming out a bit, your book, The Algorithm, any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries you’ve made in your career or while putting together the book that you’re putting forward here?

Jon McNeill
I think this is, like, I had gone into Tesla having been a student of the Toyota Production System and Lean, and what I found was those frameworks were awesome for incremental improvement and optimization, but not awesome for quantum growth.

And so what we tried to distill in The Algorithm, this was the whole team at Tesla and, really, the leadership team that came up with this framework, was to distill a framework for quantum growth into some digestible steps that we could push to the edge of the organization.

And the edge could start to innovate super fast, because that’s what doubling a business every eight months at scale requires. And that’s exactly what the team was pulling off. They were doubling a business every eight months.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So the classic Toyota manufacturing, Lean, Kaizen, Kanbans, etc., is great for your small incremental growth and you’ve got a whole another thing for hyper growth. And can you unpack sort of basically what is the algorithm?

Jon McNeill
It’s a five-step process that we used on a weekly basis to drive innovation. And this is used at Tesla. It’s used at SpaceX. And I think, as leadership experts or academics go to study Elon 20 or 30 years from now, and ask the question, like, “What made this guy such a successful entrepreneur and industrialist? Like, what was it?” I think they’ll come down to this, like, weekly cadence of deploying this framework, because that’s exactly what he does.

He determines the one or two issues that are existential to the business. In other words, the two things that could kill you if they don’t come true. And then he just devotes his time to that. He delegates everything else to the team. And so you have great agencies as a leader because you’re running the business and he’s really working on two existential issues, but he’s doing it on a weekly basis.

And what that does is that keeps the organization innovating on a weekly basis. So if you’re doing that every week, you’ve got 52 opportunities to build advantage versus your competition. And that’s exactly what that delivers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so could you maybe walk us through a couple examples of, all right, grab existential issue and then work through the steps?

Jon McNeill
So I’ll take you through one to make this super simple. So the first step is question every requirement. Second step is you delete every step and you simplify. The third is you optimize. The fourth is you speed it up because no process can get faster and have high quality with speed unless it is like optimized, so that’s a test. And then you automate last, which sounds kind of nuts especially coming from a technical company or Silicon Valley company to say automate last, but I’ll kind of illustrate that.

So let me start with the first, the negative example. So we started to prepare for Model 3 production. And the idea of the teams was, “We’re going to have a fully automated line, the most automated manufacturing line ever in the history of automobiles.”

And so you might remember this phrase, “We’re going to build the alien dreadnought,” or, “the machine that makes the machine.” That was this whole era. And so teams went to design the Model 3 production line in digital simulation. Today they would call it a digital twin. And they designed all the machines, the flow, the conveyors, the people, everything. They didn’t lay it out manually and do it manually first.

And so when we were down to the wire in terms of, “We got to produce Model 3s because we’re going to be out of cash if we don’t,” they went to start that line, and the line wouldn’t work for a thousand reasons. There were major, major mistakes that were made in that digital SIM.

And digital SIMs usually don’t work because they can’t think of everything. And cars were falling off the conveyors, falling off the line. And that then led to a radical step, which was one of the leaders, Jerome Guillen, said, “I’m actually going to scrap this whole process and build a tent outside. And we’re going to do what we should have done from the start. We’re going to build cars by hand.”

And so we started, over the weekend, building Model 3s by hand. And we simplified the entire process because we didn’t have conveyors, we didn’t have a lot of the machines that were necessary, and we did the bare essentials to produce that Model 3.

So we simplified the process, we deleted all the unnecessary steps, we didn’t have the luxury, really, of having many steps. And then we started to optimize the process, and we started, we produced 50 cars a week, and then we produced 100, and then we produced 500. And the goal was to get to 5,000. And we kept creeping up, creeping up, creeping up by optimizing the process and applying speed to it.

Once we finally had the process nailed, then we automated at the very last step and moved from the tent back into the factory. We had rebuilt the factory production line by this time so that it could actually produce cars.

And when we went to do the postmortem, we said, “How would we have avoided this? Number one, we automated first, not last, and it almost killed us. We did not run the process manually first. We did not delete a bunch of steps. We did not optimize the process. We automated before we had done any of that work, and we almost killed the company.”

So it was, really, at the end of Model 3 production, that the algorithm came together, and we said, “Here are the steps we’re going to follow from here on out. When we go to launch a new product, when you go to invent a new product, we’re going to follow these steps.”

And so that’s an end-to-end example of how not to do it, but then it led us to a framework of how to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So maybe digging into each of these in some detail, with “question every requirement.” I have a feeling many of us, it doesn’t even occur to us to question the requirements because the requirements, they’re just like the air we breathe or the water we swim in. It’s like, “Well, this is just how it is.”

So could you maybe surface for us some prompts, or some examples, or some perturbations so that we can identify some requirements that maybe need to get questioned?

Jon McNeill
So when we started to sell cars online, we figured out it took 64 clicks to sell a car, but 44 of those clicks were in the financing process. And that’s because a loan doc or a lease doc for a car has 12 pages of paragraph after paragraph after paragraph. You’ve got an initial sign, all this stuff.

And so a question on requirement step that we did was I took that loan doc to our general counsel at the time, his name’s Todd Maron. I said, “Todd, out of these 12 pages, I need to get rid of some clicks. Can you tell me how many of these paragraphs are a requirement of law or regulation?” He came back about 24 hours later and he said, “None.”

I said, “Well, how does a 12-page document exist then?” He said, “It’s the result of a bunch of well-meaning corporate lawyers at banks trying to protect their client. And so they insert paragraphs for all these uncertainties or these edge cases that could come up to protect the bank.”

But he said, “None of these are required by law or regulation. And, actually, the bank has case law on its side. Like, they don’t need all this stuff because if somebody cheats in a certain way, that’s already been decided by case law. So it’s not like you need to make somebody acknowledge something that the courts have already acknowledged as being out of bounds.”

So I said, “Todd, you’re telling me we could have a one-paragraph loan or lease that says, ‘Here’s the price of the car, here’s the interest rate, here’s the term, and here’s the monthly payment?’” He’s like, “I’m telling you, you can do that.”

Nobody in the industry had questioned whether or not the loan doc or the lease doc should exist. We were just crazy, silly enough to make that, to raise that question. We discovered something that none of our competitors had discovered, which is you didn’t need to put customers through a 44-click process. And as you know, if you had to buy anything on Amazon, and it took 44 clicks, you’d probably opt out a lot. And that’s true in e-comm, and it’s certainly true when people are buying a $100,000-car online.

So we went to talk to banks to see if we could get anybody to go along with us on this one-click loan release, and we got the door slammed in our face by everybody, even though they would intellectually acknowledge that they didn’t need all these paragraphs.

They said, “I would never take the risk of doing this. I would never take the career risk of going to my CEO and suggesting we do this.” Finally, we found a very enterprising CEO at US Bank, and he said, “We’ll do it. In fact, we’ll talk to a CrossTown digital bank called Ally. They’ll probably do it too. We’ll take your loans, they’ll probably take your leases, and we’re off to the races.”

All that started because we questioned why a 12-page loan doc had to exist. And that’s probably the clearest example or the best prompt I can give you on questioning requirements. There’s a lot of stuff that nobody ever questions and takes as a given. If you question that stuff and it turns out it’s not a given, now you’ve got an advantage.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. And I’m thinking about, well, the phrase that comes to mind is checkbox marketing, or really checkbox anything. If your mindset is, “Well, that’s just what’s done. It’s just what needs to happen.” And I’m thinking about, well, I have a one-page guest release form.

And I think lawyers tend to want to put a lot of intense, you know, things in there. It’s like, “I own all of these forever, no matter what.” And I think, “Well, actually that’s not the vibe I’m trying to put out there when I’m just meeting somebody. I’m just sort of like, ‘Hey, you and I are both cool to do what we want to do with this thing, okay? So no pressure, it’s all good.’” And that’s kind of what I’m trying to convey.

So it was not the default. We had to shift and adjust and then it is, well, it’s much smoother because then I don’t have a lot of people say, “Whoa, whoa, hold on, buddy. What, what is this? I don’t know. Wait. Time out. I got to talk to my lawyer. I got to talk to my agent. I don’t know if we can do this, you know?”

No, that just about never happens because it’s very quick and it’s simple and it’s handy. And I liked that example because the law, in particular, feels like something that’s immovable, like, “Oh, ‘legal’ said, we just have to have that. And end of discussion. It was like, “Oh, well, maybe legal would be willing to have a follow-up conversation and see what can be done here.”

Jon McNeill
Totally. And it takes a certain mindset. So, like, Todd, as a leader of the legal teams was willing to come along on that journey with me and question requirements, and that’s pretty rare in that kind of a leader in that function, but he was super commercial and business-oriented.

And so he would start that journey without having a bunch of hesitation. Like, he’d say, “Yeah, let’s go, like, look into this and see if this is really true and if we really need this.” I don’t experience many general counsels like Todd because they largely go into that career to mitigate risk. And so that’s where their position starts.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and as a point of curiosity, I mean, I understand frictions and clicks are, you know, undesirable. They slow down the behavior you want, and this is cool and convenient and nice and pleasant to have fewer clicks.

But, you know, Jon, really, lay it on me, is a few dozen clicks for signing an initialing a hundred thousand dollar vehicle enough to move the needle so that folks are like, “You know what? I wanted that Tesla, but this is too much effort. I’m done with this document. I’m abandoning my cart”?

Jon McNeill
It happened a lot, and when we eliminated it, the opposite happened. People started to buy like crazy online, and our digital sales went through the roof, which is because it’s just science. In e-comm, clicks equal anti-conversion. So you get rid of clicks and your conversion rate goes up. It’s just math.

So this is why when you get to the cart in Amazon, the search bar disappears. They want to take away any potential click that you’re going to do other than hit order, because they know how hard it was to get to that point and how hard it is to get you to actually click the order button.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I believe they’ve litigated the one-click ordering.

Jon McNeill
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “No, this is ours, we own it, no one touch it.” And it’s like, “Very touchy,” and because the stakes are huge.

Jon McNeill
Because of that, because it’s powerful. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, can you chat with us about deleting the steps in the process?

Jon McNeill
Yeah, so here’s another example, and Elon actually cut a little video in this early on, but he had taken on this challenge in manufacturing where there was this separator between the battery and the car. And so it’s basically along the floor of the car.

And we could not produce this separator, big piece of plastic. We couldn’t produce it to save our lives. It was warping and it wouldn’t fit right, etc. And so this is one of the chapters where he’s literally sleeping in the factory trying to solve this problem.

And, eventually, he asked the team, “I got to talk to the engineer who spec’d this part. Who spec’d the part?” And the closest people around are the battery people, and they said, “Oh, it’s the auto dynamics team. They wanted a noise dampener in between the battery and the passenger compartment.”

So he grabs the guy that’s the head of the auto dynamics team, and said, “Why did you spec this part?” He said, “I didn’t spec the part. It was the battery team. The battery team told us they needed a heat shield between the battery and the passenger compartment.”

He’s like, “I was just with the battery team and they said it was you, not them.” He said, “Give me the name of the person who spec’d this part.” So they go look for the name. And it turns out the name of the person that spec’d the part was a summer intern that didn’t even work at Tesla anymore.

Elon had spent weeks in the factory trying to solve this problem, all for a part that didn’t need to exist. And so, at that point in time, “We said, nobody claims ownership of this ‘requirement.’ So we’re going to delete it out of the car. And, therefore, we’re solving a whole production problem that was holding us up.”

And you will find, over and over again, that there are steps you can delete from your sales process, from your delivery process. And the hack to finding those is, essentially, map your process on a wall with a bunch of sticky notes. Then have your team go circle those steps that the customer pays you for. It turns out there’s very few of those.

They don’t pay you for the order sheet. They don’t pay you for the PO. They don’t pay you for, in our case, the bill of lading. They don’t pay you for all this stuff. And the things they don’t pay you for are immediate candidates for deletion, because you’re doing those for internal reasons, and you’re creating cost for internal reasons.

Now some of the stuff is necessary to track dollars and cents. I totally get it. They don’t pay you for accounting. They don’t pay you for tax. I get that. But there are a bunch of steps you can cut out when you start to say, “Hey, the customer really doesn’t pay us for this. And we don’t really get anything out of it. So why are we doing this?” And those are good candidates to delete.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, I was curious, did Elon get on the phone with the intern? Like, “Hey.”

Jon McNeill
The intern didn’t even work there anymore. Like, didn’t even work there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, mean, hunt him down wherever he is.

Jon McNeill
He was like, “I don’t need to waste time talking to the intern, like, it’s gone.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So then simplify and optimize.

Jon McNeill
Yeah, so once you delete steps, now you’ve got way fewer steps. So you’ve got a simplified process and now you can start to optimize that process and make it go faster and faster and faster and faster. It’s a little bit like starting any skill, whether that is playing a musical instrument or a sport, where you start and you’re like, “Man, I can’t go very fast.”

And then you practice and practice and practice, and it turns out you get faster and faster and faster because you get more and more efficient and optimized. And that’s the idea here is you keep speeding the process up and speeding it up.

Now you’re still in manual mode. So you’re learning a bunch about what’s causing, what’s getting in the way of speed, and the stuff getting in the way of speed is usually a quality issue. And so you eliminate these quality issues. And then once you’ve got the target speed achieved, now you know you’re optimized and you can then start on automation.

Pete Mockaitis
A quality issue in terms of something needs rework or is outside of the spec we’re looking for?

Jon McNeill
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then with the acceleration, so there’s practice. What are the other drivers of accelerating?

Jon McNeill
Mainly, it’s putting speed goals that are double the current speed. So you say, “I want to either double the output at current speed or I want to double the speed at current output,” either one of those works in my book, just try to double.

And it starts to reveal, “Oh, here’s all the things that are in the way of doubling. So maybe we can delete more steps. Maybe there are more requirements that we should question. Or, maybe there’s a better method.”

And as you do those, then you start to identify, “Ah, there are a bunch of things that we didn’t see at first that we now see now, that we can either delete or simplify to help us speed this process up.”

Pete Mockaitis
So the doubling of the speed is not so much a, “Hey, it turns out we can just double the speed, it’s all good.” But rather, it’s sort of like a magnifying glass to identify, “Oh, that’s what’s holding down the speed doubling.”

Jon McNeill
Totally. There’s this great series of scenes in the Hulu series, “The Bear,” which is about this super high-end restaurant in Chicago. And it’s turned from a roast beef cafe with the same team in the back that is now trying to earn its Michelin star.

And there’s a woman that’s at the pasta station, and she has two minutes once an order comes in to cook pasta. And she starts at five minutes. And then she does things like she portions each serving of pasta in a little plastic container. So she’s pre-portioned.

And she starts to do multiple boiling water pots to drop the pasta into so she can do more than one at a time. And then she’s got a saucier step that she realizes, if she preheats the sauce, it meets the pasta at the right time, she can speed it up. And she gets the process down from five to two and a half minutes by just eliminating all these steps, but she’s still not at her two minute target.

And then the sous chef, who really runs the kitchen, comes over and is just helping her. They have a busy night. And so the sous chef comes over and does a few things that experienced chefs know to do. Bam! Bam! Bam! Order comes out in a minute and a half.

And the woman who is at the pasta station says, “I’ve been working this problem for like 90 days and I got it from five minutes to two and a half. And you walk over and you do it in a minute and a half.” And she’s like, “Yeah, I’ve done this before. So just watch me and you can see the extra steps you can take out of your process to make yourself faster.”

That’s what we’re talking about is just optimize, optimize, optimize until you get to a really different output than you’ve had before.

Pete Mockaitis
And then the final step is automation.

Jon McNeill
Yeah, and then you can automate it. Because automation is like wet cement. When you put it around a process, it sets up really hard and you got to get jackhammers to get rid of it. So you don’t want to automate until you’ve really got the process nailed. Otherwise, you’ll be suffering with the cement that’s already solidified the current process where it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So now, as we were talking about this with the restaurant example and manufacturing examples, I’d love to change gears a little bit and hear about, let’s say there’s someone who’s in the middle of an organization and their output is not physical, but, nonetheless, there is a process that’s cranking out something on the other end. Could you give us an example in that domain of working through those steps?

Jon McNeill
Yeah, so, like, whether you’re producing software or whether you’re producing marketing or you’re producing financials, I think the same steps apply. If you step back and say like, “Hey, look, I produce financial statements for the business,” or, “I produce a budget for the business.”

If you step back and say, “Okay, let me just map the process that we use today to do that. And maybe I should question some base assumptions here. And do we have to do all these steps? Like, are all these things really required?”

And so an example of that is Tesla, when I joined, was doing standard annual budgets. And the senior management team and the CEO would set the target for sales, and the target for gross margin, the target for cash flow. And so these annual budgets were being done in the way they’re done at almost every company.

The challenge was we were doubling the business every eight months. And so, like, if you’re trying to project out a budget for a year, it was horribly inaccurate by, like, month three, because things were changing so fast. So all that was essentially wasted effort, all that planning and budgeting.

So we asked ourselves a question, like, “Time is super, super valuable in this company. How could we improve this process? And rather than going through a big planning cycle every year, what actually needs to get done?”

And where we ended up was, we questioned the requirement of having a year budget. It turned out what we did was we had quarterly budgets because the business was moving on a quarter basis, not a year basis, and we would have these rolling four quarter budgets.

We would spend less than two days setting targets in the budget because it was only going be good for a quarter. So you didn’t want to spend a week of the quarter, a huge chunk of the quarter doing it. And that finance team evolved a whole different way to do financial planning and budgeting.

And they did it, not on an annual basis, but a quarterly basis. They did it on a rolling basis, and they just used the key inputs that everybody was looking at in the business anyway, “What’s the sales rate? What’s the production rate? What’s the margin?”

And we can build a budget off of that, and rather than taking the whole company’s time planning, we’re just going to keep rolling this and rolling this, and we’re absorbing everything that we’re learning from the market as we double.

And so you can apply this whether you’re sitting in a finance department or a marketing department or a sales department. You can apply these principles to your advantage, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Jon, tell me, any final top tips, do’s or don’ts, for folks looking to implement this stuff?

Jon McNeill
As we talked about, like one of the principles that is a complete hack is eat your own dog food. I learned this from Sam Walton in his book, Made in America, where he would tour stores on a weekly basis to find out what the customer wanted that they didn’t have, what they had too much of that the customer didn’t want, and what were the things that store managers were doing that were super good that he could spread across the company.

And I learned from that and started to see that, “Oh, he’s onto a complete hack.” Like, if you use your own product, if you experience the customer experience, you’re going to see all kinds of areas of improvement. And if you teach your people to see it before you, they’re going to move even faster than you can.

And so I would say, like, the secret hack is go experience your own product and use it. We even went so far at Tesla to have a rule that you couldn’t present product in a PowerPoint. We didn’t want to see, like, some rendering or rendition. We wanted to see the real thing. So if you’re presenting product, you had to do a live screencast onto the screen so we could see the product, we could play with the product, and we could see how it actually worked.

I was with a group of bank executives a few months ago. I asked them to raise their hand if they actually use their own bank’s consumer app. No hands went up. And I said, “I could have guessed that because I’m a consumer of two of your banks, and your app sucks.”

“It’s so bad that if you used it, you wouldn’t live with yourself for another day without fixing it. You would call up the head of engineering and you say, ‘We got to fix this, this, and this.’ But you don’t use it.” So the organization gets the sense that nobody cares. And if you can live with it, they can live with it.

And eating your own dog food changes all that. It creates an immediate feedback loop to the top and it allows you to set the bar of acceptability with your organization.

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

Jon McNeill
I think this whole approach is about simplicity, and so I love the Mark Twain quote, “I would have written you a shorter letter if I would have taken the time.” It speaks to how hard it is to simplify. Humans, I think, we are naturally complicators. We’re not natural simplifiers, and it actually takes work to simplify.

And I love that quote, because it reminds me, each time I read it, of the fact that simplification is work. It’s super valuable and rewarding work, but it’s work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And can you point to a favorite study or experimental or bit of research?

Jon McNeill
I think, if you want to understand AI and the current version of AI that we have with LLMs, the best piece to read is the original DeepMind paper.

Pete Mockaitis
“Attention Is All You Need”?

Jon McNeill
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Jon McNeill
Favorite book would be, I’ve got two right now, one is The Goal, which taught me a completely different way of looking at business, by Eliyahu Goldratt. And the second is Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. I think it applies to every business. It’s so good.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Jon McNeill
Reading. Like, if I could answer the question that way, I’d start every day reading for an hour and a half, and I read variety of things. I read books, I read, obviously, the news. I read Twitter, I read Reddit, Hacker News sometimes. Reading for me is a tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share with teammates, audiences, that they quote back to you often, a Jon original?

Jon McNeill
We had the standard for service at Tesla that gets quoted back to me, it got quoted back to me today actually, and that is, “Make them talk about you at dinner tonight.” Do something that is so awesome that they’re going to talk about you at dinner tonight.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Jon McNeill
I’d point them, you can find me at DVX.ventures.

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

Jon McNeill
Become a simplifier and you’ll stand out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay, Jon, thank you.

Jon McNeill
You bet. Thanks, Pete.