May 10, 2023 • 23 mins
On today's episode of the RecruitingDaily Podcast, William Tincup speaks with Amy Leschke-Kahle of ADP about loud quitting, and all the nonsense and nuance that goes along with this phenomena.
In this episode of the RecruitingDaily podcast, William Tincup interviews Amy Leschke-Kahle, Vice President of Performance Acceleration at the Marcus Buckingham Company and ADP company. They discuss "loud quitting", a term used to describe employees who leave their jobs in a more vocal and public way than traditional quiet quitting. The conversation also touches on the importance of engagement and discretionary effort in the workplace.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
William Tincup (00:33):
`This is William Tincup and you are listening to
the RecruitingDaily podcast.
Today we have Amy on from adp.
She's been a she's been on thepodcast several times.
You've probably already heard ofher, but our topic is loud
quitting, and when this firstkind of hit my radar, I couldn't
wait to talk to Amy about it.
So we're here now.
Amy, would you do us a favor andintroduce yourself and what you
(00:54):
do
Amy Leschke-Kahle (00:55):
at adp?
Yeah.
Hi.
Thanks for having me, William.
Sure.
I am Amy Lesky.
Carl, I'm the Vice President ofPerformance Acceleration at the
Marcus Buckingham Company andADP company.
And I do a whole bunch ofthings, including working with
our applied research team.
I lead our professional servicesteam, helping clients make work
(01:15):
better, and I do a couple littlethings like this, like talking
to you.
Awesome.
William Tincup (01:20):
If I see another press release about quiet
anything really, it could be itjust quiet and then the word
after it drives me into thewall.
But when we started talking backand forth about loud quitting, I
wanted to kinda get your take onthis.
So what are what are you seeing?
And then what do you mean whenwe say loud quitting?
Amy Leschke-Kahle (01:39):
Maybe we should start with the one thing,
the term that we, neither one ofus like a whole lot, which is
that quiet, quitting.
Quiet.
Yeah.
And it like almost doesn't makea difference what we call it,
right?
It's not new.
It's been happening a long timeand personally, I'm really glad
that it's actually become a moreopen conversation.
(02:00):
And the bottom line with quietquitting is people taking,
maybe, I'm gonna say like aneeded breath once in a while.
Are there folks that quiet quitthat maybe never put in a
reasonable amount of effort?
Of course.
And again, that's been happeninga long time.
And I think part of theinteresting thing about this
whole topic is that maybe peopleshould quiet quit more often.
(02:24):
Not all the time, not every day,all day, right?
But periodically take a littlebit of a breath.
William Tincup (02:31):
So what I used to think of them is engagement
was couched up or churched updiscretionary effort.
It's what, it's five o'clock ona Friday night, you get that
email from some customer orsomething.
You can easily handle it in anhour.
Let's say it's a task that wouldtake you an hour or you could do
it over the weekend or you coulddo it Monday morning.
(02:53):
And so as an employee, What doyou do?
And that discretionary effortfor me, that's how I always
looked at engagementhistorically.
I'm sure things have changed,but historically I looked at it
and said, okay, that employeehas that discretionary effort.
Do I do it now?
Do I feel like doing it now?
Do I want to do it now?
Do I, or do I do it over theweekend or later in the week,
(03:14):
whatever, next week, whatever.
And so I looked at engagement asthat employee then saying, yeah,
I'll go ahead and do this rightnow.
Just let's just take this offthe list.
Plus I like these folks, this,that, and the other.
Now that's just my warped viewof discretionary effort and
engagement.
So with quiet, quitting.
We're talking about people thatbasically, they might even love
(03:38):
their job.
Maybe they hate their job, maybewhatever, but they're taking,
they need to take a pause.
Maybe they've gotten in a rutand they want to try something
different, and this is their wayof quietly changing and doing
something different.
Even if they don't know whatthat thing next thing is.
Amy Leschke-Kahle (03:57):
Yes, maybe.
Okay.
I think it could be a lot ofthings.
Let's step back to theengagement and discretionary
effort thing.
Okay.
For just a minute, we defineengagement as the emotional
precursors to extraordinarywork.
Oh, okay.
So if you go to your example ofgetting an email on a late
Friday afternoon, and do I do itnow or do I wait till Monday?
(04:18):
Ultimately it's a judgment callon the employee, and it probably
depends, hopefully on what theurgency of the matter is, if
it's urgent.
Absolutely Friday night.
If it can wait till Monday,maybe.
It really just depends.
So I think that wholediscretionary effort thing has
been almost defined poorly ormaybe the expect expectations
(04:38):
are defined poorly around.
It's something that we ought tobe doing right now and pretty
soon everything has become a gotto be done right now thing.
I think the beautiful thingpotentially about quiet quitting
in the conversation is givingpeople the space and the agency
to make that decision forthemselves.
William Tincup (04:55):
Got it.
So why do that quietly then?
Amy Leschke-Kahle (04:59):
That is a great question.
I think we actually need to notdo it quietly.
We've put this, created thisbubble, if you will, or this
unspoken.
Norm of work where we've gotevery, everything that comes to
us, whether it be in an email ora task or conversation with a
(05:19):
boss, whatever it might happento be as urgent, right?
We live in a world of urgencyand the conversation around
quiet, quitting, I thinkactually needs to be louder.
We ought to be talking about,Hey, I'm not feeling so great
right now about work.
I need to take a breath.
Team leader, can you help me outwith this?
And it goes back to thoseconversations.
(05:40):
You and I may have even talkedabout this William around
wellbeing and wellness andburnout and resilience and like
all of that whole conversation.
We talk about it in the contextof things like this and podcasts
and articles and headlines,right?
And HR folks talk about it alot.
But when you pull it into theday-to-day real world of work
(06:00):
and into the flow of work thatwe're all doing, it's really got
to be that one-on-oneconversation with team leaders
about how you're actuallyfeeling about work.
And it, we've gotta make it okayto talk about it.
We talk about it at a kind of aglobal level or at a macro
level, but it's time to pullthat down to almost like a nano
level, like in the context of asingle employee's work.
(06:22):
We've gotta make it okay to talkabout it one-on-one.
William Tincup (06:25):
So two things.
One is if it's the word urgent,but we could use a lot of
different synonyms for the wordurgent, right?
It's if everything's urgent,nothing is urgent, right?
So if so, if it's just like theboy who cries wolf, right?
If every email is urgent, ifevery Slack message is urgent,
then how do they decide?
(06:45):
That's one, two.
Is you, one of the things thatyou're describing as
vulnerability is a team member.
Then having the space, as youcalled it, as you said it
earlier, called it earlier thanto then say, I'm overwhelmed.
I'm not at a good place.
I need a break.
I don't feel good.
Whatever.
(07:05):
Whatever it is.
That's vulnerability.
And in the.
The manager or the other teammembers then filling in and
helping out.
Like it's a true team effort ofbut again, true teams I think
the best teams are the ones thatare the most vulnerable with
each other or can be the mostvulnerable with each other cuz
(07:26):
there's trust.
So first of all I do, I havethat you, you study this stuff
for a living, so that's just,what do you see when it comes to
vulnerability and trust?
Amy Leschke-Kahle (07:37):
Yes.
Without trust, the team fallsapart.
We know this, again, we see itin the data, it's really clear.
But one of the things that wefound that I think is really
interesting around trust at workis oftentimes we interpret it as
being the soft, fluffy veryalmost too open kind of a thing,
if you will.
So part of the.
(07:59):
It's not even a trick.
It's like part of the nextpractice around that is
frequency.
And I know you and I have talkedabout this before about the
power of frequency and the powerof team leaders and team members
connecting really frequentlythat frequency builds trust.
The more you connect withsomeone.
The more trust that you're goingto build, particularly if that
(08:21):
relationship is one in which thekind of symbiotic, right?
You're talking to me, we'retalking about the things that
are most important at work andoh, by the way, are you doing
okay?
Yep.
That kind of a simple cadenceof, and we found from the data
that weekly is the magiccadence.
I know most managers, people,leaders, bosses, are gonna say,
oh, I can't afford to do thatweekly, or I do it all the time.
(08:45):
I talk to my people every week.
The thing is that we're oftenmissing the intentionality of
the conversation.
So if the team leader has the,again, manager, whatever term
you wanna use, if theintentionality needs to be,
what's the most important workdo you need to get done?
Do you need anything from me andhow are you feeling?
(09:06):
So that intentionality of thosethree simple questions are not
only the thing that buildstrust, but it also helps
accelerate work and performanceand quality.
All of the things that we'retrying to create at work come
from that power of frequency andthat kind of simple
conversation.
So it's not just a drive by,it's not once a quarter, it's
(09:29):
really light.
Touch cadence of what are yourpriorities?
How can I help?
How are you feeling?
So once we build that trust,hopefully fingers cross, we are
more likely to, if that happens,people hopefully are a little
bit more open and trusting withtheir team leader to say, ah,
what, can I'm really need anafternoon just to decompress,
or, I'd love to take theafternoon, or I'd love to take
(09:53):
this morning to go do somethingelse, or can I work on something
else?
We've gotta be able to have thatconversation.
And talking about it at an orglevel is great, but we've gotta
be able to pull it down to theteam leader level.
William Tincup (10:06):
So you put those three, there's three questions
out there in a particular order.
Dumb question alert.
Was that done purposely or canyou use any of the, basically
the questions of the questions?
Can you use'em in any type oforder or do you.
Suggest a way for leaders andagain, leaders, team members,
peers being able to talk to itto one another.
(10:26):
Is there a way?
Is that the, is there one orderthat's better than another, I
guess is the
Amy Leschke-Kahle (10:31):
question?
Not that we found, right?
I think whatever folks arecomfortable with, and by the
way, if your team leader, ifyour boss, your manager, isn't
asking you those questions everyweek, one of the things that you
can do as an individual is toanswer those three questions for
yourself, first and foremost,because taking a little bit of a
break and giving your chance toreflect on a previous week,
(10:53):
perhaps in the near term comingup, maybe the next five days is
really helpful.
Just even if you don't share itwith anybody.
But then telling your teamleader that even if they don't
ask you, is a really powerfuland easy way to start that
interaction.
Like we don't have to wait formanagers to ask us.
I don't know why we think thatthey should start that
(11:13):
conversation.
We can start it just as well asanybody else can.
You, I was
William Tincup (11:18):
gonna ask you about that is terms of
responsibility and and again,for the leaders that are
listening to this and theemployees that listeners, I
guess we're all employees onsome level, again if your leader
isn't great at this, that'sgone.
That just shifts the, that justshifts the responsibility of
okay, here's what's going on.
And again, being overcommunicative transparent,
(11:40):
letting people know what youneed that's not a bad thing.
Amy Leschke-Kahle (11:43):
No, and it's not hard.
I, and you think about teamleaders and most team leaders,
most managers, a lot of usanyway, become managers because
it was the only way that wecould make more money, get a
better job title.
And so we always have toremember a lot of them really
aren't that good at being amanager.
But when you simplify it down tothe critical few things, it's
(12:05):
something anybody can do.
I can do it.
You can do it.
I.
Do it quite frankly every weekwith my team, and it's easy
enough that even if you're not agreat manager, or hopefully
you're at least proficient, butanybody can do that and that
power of frequency.
You said one more thing,William, that's really important
that we've also seen a bit of inour research doing with real
(12:25):
people doing real work in thereal world, is that I often call
it your most important person atwork, your m i p.
So if you're not getting thatkind of attention from a team
leader, find a trusted teammember, somebody who you work
with frequently.
Find someone that you can havethat brief conversation with,
just to let them know mostimportant work that you're
(12:48):
doing, if you need help fromsomebody and how you're feeling
about work.
William Tincup (12:54):
This is probably a, maybe a generational thing.
Maybe Covid impacted some ofthis.
The phone and Zoom, are they thesame to, to some managers as
email and
Amy Leschke-Kahle (13:05):
Slack?
Yes, we have found that modalityright is not a critical path,
right?
To being able to have great, wecall them check-in
conversations, but being tobeing able to have a great
check-in.
And it works of course,differently for different team
leader, team membercombinations, but we.
(13:25):
Again, reading the headlines andsome of them, which I've written
like, don't let that be abarrier.
I think we sometimes look forreasons for something to not
work.
Try different things, find outwhat works for you, run an
experiment.
This is so easy to do.
And if we go back to the topictoday around loud, quitting.
(13:45):
We as individuals owe it toourselves as well as our
organizations and our teams toshare how things are going at
work if we need something.
So we actually need to be loud.
We shouldn't be doing thatquietly.
We should use our voices, if anyof you are parents or
grandparents.
We should be using our insidevoices.
We should make them outsidevoices, not in a obnoxious way,
(14:09):
right?
But just in a.
Grown up way.
William Tincup (14:13):
I wonder if sometimes employees, they either
feel like they're gonna bothertheir, the, their team leader or
whatever, the boss, whatever andso they go to other peers.
I've seen this at, I've seenthis happen in places I've
worked at where, one persondoesn't know how to solve a
problem and instead of askingtheir boss like, okay, how do I
(14:33):
solve this problem?
They go and ask peers.
And so it goes around five orsix different conversations when
they could have, they eitherfelt like they couldn't ask
their boss or that it was gonnabe bothersome, or that maybe it
was implied that they shouldhave already known how to do
something.
Again, getting back to that.
Trust and vulnerability andstuff like that.
(14:53):
It's like I see theconversations happening, but I
see'em happening sideways.
Not necessarily vertical, if
Amy Leschke-Kahle (15:00):
yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
And it's one of those things Ithink as an individual that we
need to take a little bit ofresponsibility for.
But if you're not comfortabletalking to your leader for
whatever reason, it could evenbe just something like human,
like bad chemistry, right?
At least you're reaching out tosomeone, but hopefully like you
get in practice of doing.
(15:20):
The weekly ritual or the weeklypractice of, Hey, here's what
I'm working on.
Just so you know, can be a quickemail, quick text, just so you
know, here's what I'm working onthis week.
I need this from you, or I'm allgood and I'm feeling fine.
So that practice makes it easierwhen those times do come when
you do need something and we, wehave to own it as individuals.
(15:43):
And yes, sometimes it's hard andsometimes we don't like our
leaders or our managers or wedon't get along with them or we
have bad chemistry.
Maybe we can make a little bitbetter chemistry.
I don't know.
But humans are prickly that way,right?
So maybe in that case I wouldsay email, text.
Don't talk to them.
Do something.
Take advantage of the technologyyou have sitting right in front
of you.
(16:03):
Use that.
William Tincup (16:04):
Leave a voicemail.
You're good.
And anything.
Yeah.
What does any of this, thesecheck-ins the way that we were
thinking about'em, does any ofthis get documented?
Or should it, I guess isprobably a more appropriate way
of thinking of it is should anyof this be documented or is this
just like you said, next levelpractices and thinking about
(16:26):
things and being, learning fromwhat we learned from the
pandemic, being more empatheticin our communications, but also
communicative and what's holdingus back, what we need from
others, et cetera.
Like all that sounds great to menow.
The jaded part of my personalitythen goes does this end up in
performance management somehow?
Amy Leschke-Kahle (16:49):
I love that question, and you are on a
really important kind of line ofinquiry, which is if we start
documenting and using thesecheck-ins, if you will, as a
tool for hr, they no longerbecome this trusted back and
forth, this trusted dialoguebetween hundred percent the
(17:11):
leader and a team member.
William Tincup (17:12):
Hundred percent could.
Amy Leschke-Kahle (17:15):
Our strong recommendation is to use them as
that one-on-one tool, not one toteam leader, one to team
leaders.
Team leaders.
Team leader, right?
One to HR for people to go checkup on me.
That's why we don't call it acheck up.
We call it a check in.
So having documentation, by theway, is helpful from a personal
(17:35):
level, from an individual level.
As a team leader level, becauseI can go back in time and find
out what, find out what did Iwork on three weeks ago because
I can't remember.
So it can be helpful.
But as HR practitioners andleaders, I think we need to
think long and hard about whogets to see that information.
And the way to start thatconversation in our
organizations is to say, what isthe intent of this?
(17:58):
Is the intent, a compliancetool?
Is the intent a performancedocumentation tool?
And if the answer is no, firstand foremost, we really want
this to be a productivity tool.
We need our employees to bedoing more, better work, higher
quality, more productive, moreefficient, more effective, then
let's focus on that as theprimary way to do that, and
(18:21):
don't instill.
I don't even know what to callit.
Don't instill compliancepractices that are gonna be
countered productive to thething we're actually trying to
get.
Do that in some other way
William Tincup (18:32):
or not.
But I absolutely am glad I askedthe question because I, the
separation of church and statefor the, for me is historically
performance management has beena tool for management.
To get more yield out ofemployees, basically, we're
gonna under the guise of lettingyou know what you're doing wrong
or what you could do better.
(18:53):
You're gonna go do those things.
It's documentation, it'scompliance.
If we need to let you go, we'vegot a paper trail, et cetera.
It's not really for theemployee.
It's never, it wasn't set upthat way, at least historically,
to be for the employee.
It's, it can be for theemployee, but not.
Not really.
No, it's a myth.
It's,
Amy Leschke-Kahle (19:12):
it's it's a complete myth that performance
management, as most of us haveexperienced it at work, yeah.
Somehow helps people performbetter.
No, it's a total myth.
I think maybe we started,someone started that to make
team members, to make employeesfeel a little bit better about
the process.
In fact, the bottom, it's allcounterproductive.
So if you go into a traditionalperformance review conversation,
(19:34):
there's two questions that anemployee wants to know.
A direct report wants to knowit's how much money am I gonna
get and am I gonna get fired?
It's two questions.
And yet we go through all thethings Now that doesn't help me
perform better at all.
It's, yeah it's really a mythabout work.
And the thing again that we seein the data incredibly clearly,
(19:56):
if you wanna move the needle onperformance, if you wanna help
people do more, better work,then pay more attention to them.
That's it.
Like it's that simple.
Yeah.
There's all kinds of otherthings I'm sure.
But the one that we have foundto be most powerful is just
attention.
Pay attention as a human.
Please pay attention to me.
Care.
William Tincup (20:14):
I dunno.
Just
Amy Leschke-Kahle (20:15):
do that about that.
Wow.
That's novel William.
William Tincup (20:21):
Two questions are probably similar to you but
it's about ex one, the employeeexpectations.
What have you seen there as itrelates to this?
Do they do the expectations?
I'm not gonna say have theychanged?
I'm assuming they have changedbecause of covid, but the ex of
employee ex expectations, butalso the ex of employee
(20:42):
experience as it relates to loudquitting.
Amy Leschke-Kahle (20:47):
What we're seeing from an employee
expectation perspective, theimpact of not only covid, but of
a lot of things, it is quiet,quitting and or loud quitting.
But that's the expectation.
If you're not gonna payattention to me, bye.
If you're not gonna help me domore, better work, you know
what?
Fine.
I'm not gonna give it to you.
Or.
(21:07):
It is a burnout.
I'm so burned out fromcontinually giving this
organization my all.
I just can't do it anymore.
So we see that happening interms of expectations and it's
not unreasonable.
In fact, that's why I think weshould be louder about it for
employees to expect that.
The most important people to meat work, my team leaders, maybe
(21:30):
key colleagues even are payingreally frequent attention to me.
Around the best of me.
I think that's a really goodthing, and we should be really
loud about that from an employeeexperience.
The other ex, from an employeeexperience perspective, one
thing we can do as practitionersis really take a little bit of a
(21:52):
step back and say, how can wesimplify all of the things that
we have asked employees andmanagers to do over the last
several decades that quitefrankly aren't returning?
The productivity and qualitythat we thought that they would.
We just talked about performancemanagement as one of those
(22:12):
things.
Performance review is the annualreview process, right?
But there's all kinds of otherthings you could put in that
bucket as well.
So what I see, it's really a twopath approach, which is one, how
can we simplify a lot of theburden, quite a lot of it,
emotional burden, but also timethat we've put onto managers in
particular, but employees aswell.
(22:33):
So that's one path.
And then the second path is whatare those practices, those
habits that we know from thedata and the research actually
do make a difference.
Weekly check-ins is a greatplace to start that.
And technology is a great thingto use to remind us to do that.
That's awesome as well.
But simplify.
And then instill those practicesthat actually make a difference.
(22:55):
And if you're, that's nothappening in your world as an
employee.
You should be loud.
You should be really loud.
William Tincup (23:03):
Drops my walks off stage.
Amy, thank you so much for yourtime.
This has been wonderful.
And we can unpack a couple ofthese things and our next
podcast.
So thank you again for your
Amy Leschke-Kahle (23:13):
time.
Thanks so much for having me,
William Tincup (23:15):
William.
Absolutely.
And thanks for everyone forlistening.
Until next time.
`This is William Tincup and you are listening to
the RecruitingDaily podcast.
Today we have Amy on from adp.
She's been a she's been on thepodcast several times.
You've probably already heard ofher, but our topic is loud
quitting, and when this firstkind of hit my radar, I couldn't
wait to talk to Amy about it.
So we're here now.
Amy, would you do us a favor andintroduce yourself and what you
(00:54):
do
Amy Leschke-Kahle (00:55):
at adp?
Yeah.
Hi.
Thanks for having me, William.
Sure.
I am Amy Lesky.
Carl, I'm the Vice President ofPerformance Acceleration at the
Marcus Buckingham Company andADP company.
And I do a whole bunch ofthings, including working with
our applied research team.
I lead our professional servicesteam, helping clients make work
(01:15):
better, and I do a couple littlethings like this, like talking
to you.
Awesome.
William Tincup (01:20):
If I see another press release about quiet
anything really, it could be itjust quiet and then the word
after it drives me into thewall.
But when we started talking backand forth about loud quitting, I
wanted to kinda get your take onthis.
So what are what are you seeing?
And then what do you mean whenwe say loud quitting?
Amy Leschke-Kahle (01:39):
Maybe we should start with the one thing,
the term that we, neither one ofus like a whole lot, which is
that quiet, quitting.
Quiet.
Yeah.
And it like almost doesn't makea difference what we call it,
right?
It's not new.
It's been happening a long timeand personally, I'm really glad
that it's actually become a moreopen conversation.
(02:00):
And the bottom line with quietquitting is people taking,
maybe, I'm gonna say like aneeded breath once in a while.
Are there folks that quiet quitthat maybe never put in a
reasonable amount of effort?
Of course.
And again, that's been happeninga long time.
And I think part of theinteresting thing about this
whole topic is that maybe peopleshould quiet quit more often.
(02:24):
Not all the time, not every day,all day, right?
But periodically take a littlebit of a breath.
William Tincup (02:31):
So what I used to think of them is engagement
was couched up or churched updiscretionary effort.
It's what, it's five o'clock ona Friday night, you get that
email from some customer orsomething.
You can easily handle it in anhour.
Let's say it's a task that wouldtake you an hour or you could do
it over the weekend or you coulddo it Monday morning.
(02:53):
And so as an employee, What doyou do?
And that discretionary effortfor me, that's how I always
looked at engagementhistorically.
I'm sure things have changed,but historically I looked at it
and said, okay, that employeehas that discretionary effort.
Do I do it now?
Do I feel like doing it now?
Do I want to do it now?
Do I, or do I do it over theweekend or later in the week,
(03:14):
whatever, next week, whatever.
And so I looked at engagement asthat employee then saying, yeah,
I'll go ahead and do this rightnow.
Just let's just take this offthe list.
Plus I like these folks, this,that, and the other.
Now that's just my warped viewof discretionary effort and
engagement.
So with quiet, quitting.
We're talking about people thatbasically, they might even love
(03:38):
their job.
Maybe they hate their job, maybewhatever, but they're taking,
they need to take a pause.
Maybe they've gotten in a rutand they want to try something
different, and this is their wayof quietly changing and doing
something different.
Even if they don't know whatthat thing next thing is.
Amy Leschke-Kahle (03:57):
Yes, maybe.
Okay.
I think it could be a lot ofthings.
Let's step back to theengagement and discretionary
effort thing.
Okay.
For just a minute, we defineengagement as the emotional
precursors to extraordinarywork.
Oh, okay.
So if you go to your example ofgetting an email on a late
Friday afternoon, and do I do itnow or do I wait till Monday?
(04:18):
Ultimately it's a judgment callon the employee, and it probably
depends, hopefully on what theurgency of the matter is, if
it's urgent.
Absolutely Friday night.
If it can wait till Monday,maybe.
It really just depends.
So I think that wholediscretionary effort thing has
been almost defined poorly ormaybe the expect expectations
(04:38):
are defined poorly around.
It's something that we ought tobe doing right now and pretty
soon everything has become a gotto be done right now thing.
I think the beautiful thingpotentially about quiet quitting
in the conversation is givingpeople the space and the agency
to make that decision forthemselves.
William Tincup (04:55):
Got it.
So why do that quietly then?
Amy Leschke-Kahle (04:59):
That is a great question.
I think we actually need to notdo it quietly.
We've put this, created thisbubble, if you will, or this
unspoken.
Norm of work where we've gotevery, everything that comes to
us, whether it be in an email ora task or conversation with a
(05:19):
boss, whatever it might happento be as urgent, right?
We live in a world of urgencyand the conversation around
quiet, quitting, I thinkactually needs to be louder.
We ought to be talking about,Hey, I'm not feeling so great
right now about work.
I need to take a breath.
Team leader, can you help me outwith this?
And it goes back to thoseconversations.
(05:40):
You and I may have even talkedabout this William around
wellbeing and wellness andburnout and resilience and like
all of that whole conversation.
We talk about it in the contextof things like this and podcasts
and articles and headlines,right?
And HR folks talk about it alot.
But when you pull it into theday-to-day real world of work
(06:00):
and into the flow of work thatwe're all doing, it's really got
to be that one-on-oneconversation with team leaders
about how you're actuallyfeeling about work.
And it, we've gotta make it okayto talk about it.
We talk about it at a kind of aglobal level or at a macro
level, but it's time to pullthat down to almost like a nano
level, like in the context of asingle employee's work.
(06:22):
We've gotta make it okay to talkabout it one-on-one.
William Tincup (06:25):
So two things.
One is if it's the word urgent,but we could use a lot of
different synonyms for the wordurgent, right?
It's if everything's urgent,nothing is urgent, right?
So if so, if it's just like theboy who cries wolf, right?
If every email is urgent, ifevery Slack message is urgent,
then how do they decide?
(06:45):
That's one, two.
Is you, one of the things thatyou're describing as
vulnerability is a team member.
Then having the space, as youcalled it, as you said it
earlier, called it earlier thanto then say, I'm overwhelmed.
I'm not at a good place.
I need a break.
I don't feel good.
Whatever.
(07:05):
Whatever it is.
That's vulnerability.
And in the.
The manager or the other teammembers then filling in and
helping out.
Like it's a true team effort ofbut again, true teams I think
the best teams are the ones thatare the most vulnerable with
each other or can be the mostvulnerable with each other cuz
(07:26):
there's trust.
So first of all I do, I havethat you, you study this stuff
for a living, so that's just,what do you see when it comes to
vulnerability and trust?
Amy Leschke-Kahle (07:37):
Yes.
Without trust, the team fallsapart.
We know this, again, we see itin the data, it's really clear.
But one of the things that wefound that I think is really
interesting around trust at workis oftentimes we interpret it as
being the soft, fluffy veryalmost too open kind of a thing,
if you will.
So part of the.
(07:59):
It's not even a trick.
It's like part of the nextpractice around that is
frequency.
And I know you and I have talkedabout this before about the
power of frequency and the powerof team leaders and team members
connecting really frequentlythat frequency builds trust.
The more you connect withsomeone.
The more trust that you're goingto build, particularly if that
(08:21):
relationship is one in which thekind of symbiotic, right?
You're talking to me, we'retalking about the things that
are most important at work andoh, by the way, are you doing
okay?
Yep.
That kind of a simple cadenceof, and we found from the data
that weekly is the magiccadence.
I know most managers, people,leaders, bosses, are gonna say,
oh, I can't afford to do thatweekly, or I do it all the time.
(08:45):
I talk to my people every week.
The thing is that we're oftenmissing the intentionality of
the conversation.
So if the team leader has the,again, manager, whatever term
you wanna use, if theintentionality needs to be,
what's the most important workdo you need to get done?
Do you need anything from me andhow are you feeling?
(09:06):
So that intentionality of thosethree simple questions are not
only the thing that buildstrust, but it also helps
accelerate work and performanceand quality.
All of the things that we'retrying to create at work come
from that power of frequency andthat kind of simple
conversation.
So it's not just a drive by,it's not once a quarter, it's
(09:29):
really light.
Touch cadence of what are yourpriorities?
How can I help?
How are you feeling?
So once we build that trust,hopefully fingers cross, we are
more likely to, if that happens,people hopefully are a little
bit more open and trusting withtheir team leader to say, ah,
what, can I'm really need anafternoon just to decompress,
or, I'd love to take theafternoon, or I'd love to take
(09:53):
this morning to go do somethingelse, or can I work on something
else?
We've gotta be able to have thatconversation.
And talking about it at an orglevel is great, but we've gotta
be able to pull it down to theteam leader level.
William Tincup (10:06):
So you put those three, there's three questions
out there in a particular order.
Dumb question alert.
Was that done purposely or canyou use any of the, basically
the questions of the questions?
Can you use'em in any type oforder or do you.
Suggest a way for leaders andagain, leaders, team members,
peers being able to talk to itto one another.
(10:26):
Is there a way?
Is that the, is there one orderthat's better than another, I
guess is the
Amy Leschke-Kahle (10:31):
question?
Not that we found, right?
I think whatever folks arecomfortable with, and by the
way, if your team leader, ifyour boss, your manager, isn't
asking you those questions everyweek, one of the things that you
can do as an individual is toanswer those three questions for
yourself, first and foremost,because taking a little bit of a
break and giving your chance toreflect on a previous week,
(10:53):
perhaps in the near term comingup, maybe the next five days is
really helpful.
Just even if you don't share itwith anybody.
But then telling your teamleader that even if they don't
ask you, is a really powerfuland easy way to start that
interaction.
Like we don't have to wait formanagers to ask us.
I don't know why we think thatthey should start that
(11:13):
conversation.
We can start it just as well asanybody else can.
You, I was
William Tincup (11:18):
gonna ask you about that is terms of
responsibility and and again,for the leaders that are
listening to this and theemployees that listeners, I
guess we're all employees onsome level, again if your leader
isn't great at this, that'sgone.
That just shifts the, that justshifts the responsibility of
okay, here's what's going on.
And again, being overcommunicative transparent,
(11:40):
letting people know what youneed that's not a bad thing.
Amy Leschke-Kahle (11:43):
No, and it's not hard.
I, and you think about teamleaders and most team leaders,
most managers, a lot of usanyway, become managers because
it was the only way that wecould make more money, get a
better job title.
And so we always have toremember a lot of them really
aren't that good at being amanager.
But when you simplify it down tothe critical few things, it's
(12:05):
something anybody can do.
I can do it.
You can do it.
I.
Do it quite frankly every weekwith my team, and it's easy
enough that even if you're not agreat manager, or hopefully
you're at least proficient, butanybody can do that and that
power of frequency.
You said one more thing,William, that's really important
that we've also seen a bit of inour research doing with real
(12:25):
people doing real work in thereal world, is that I often call
it your most important person atwork, your m i p.
So if you're not getting thatkind of attention from a team
leader, find a trusted teammember, somebody who you work
with frequently.
Find someone that you can havethat brief conversation with,
just to let them know mostimportant work that you're
(12:48):
doing, if you need help fromsomebody and how you're feeling
about work.
William Tincup (12:54):
This is probably a, maybe a generational thing.
Maybe Covid impacted some ofthis.
The phone and Zoom, are they thesame to, to some managers as
email and
Amy Leschke-Kahle (13:05):
Slack?
Yes, we have found that modalityright is not a critical path,
right?
To being able to have great, wecall them check-in
conversations, but being tobeing able to have a great
check-in.
And it works of course,differently for different team
leader, team membercombinations, but we.
(13:25):
Again, reading the headlines andsome of them, which I've written
like, don't let that be abarrier.
I think we sometimes look forreasons for something to not
work.
Try different things, find outwhat works for you, run an
experiment.
This is so easy to do.
And if we go back to the topictoday around loud, quitting.
(13:45):
We as individuals owe it toourselves as well as our
organizations and our teams toshare how things are going at
work if we need something.
So we actually need to be loud.
We shouldn't be doing thatquietly.
We should use our voices, if anyof you are parents or
grandparents.
We should be using our insidevoices.
We should make them outsidevoices, not in a obnoxious way,
(14:09):
right?
But just in a.
Grown up way.
William Tincup (14:13):
I wonder if sometimes employees, they either
feel like they're gonna bothertheir, the, their team leader or
whatever, the boss, whatever andso they go to other peers.
I've seen this at, I've seenthis happen in places I've
worked at where, one persondoesn't know how to solve a
problem and instead of askingtheir boss like, okay, how do I
(14:33):
solve this problem?
They go and ask peers.
And so it goes around five orsix different conversations when
they could have, they eitherfelt like they couldn't ask
their boss or that it was gonnabe bothersome, or that maybe it
was implied that they shouldhave already known how to do
something.
Again, getting back to that.
Trust and vulnerability andstuff like that.
(14:53):
It's like I see theconversations happening, but I
see'em happening sideways.
Not necessarily vertical, if
Amy Leschke-Kahle (15:00):
yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
And it's one of those things Ithink as an individual that we
need to take a little bit ofresponsibility for.
But if you're not comfortabletalking to your leader for
whatever reason, it could evenbe just something like human,
like bad chemistry, right?
At least you're reaching out tosomeone, but hopefully like you
get in practice of doing.
(15:20):
The weekly ritual or the weeklypractice of, Hey, here's what
I'm working on.
Just so you know, can be a quickemail, quick text, just so you
know, here's what I'm working onthis week.
I need this from you, or I'm allgood and I'm feeling fine.
So that practice makes it easierwhen those times do come when
you do need something and we, wehave to own it as individuals.
(15:43):
And yes, sometimes it's hard andsometimes we don't like our
leaders or our managers or wedon't get along with them or we
have bad chemistry.
Maybe we can make a little bitbetter chemistry.
I don't know.
But humans are prickly that way,right?
So maybe in that case I wouldsay email, text.
Don't talk to them.
Do something.
Take advantage of the technologyyou have sitting right in front
of you.
(16:03):
Use that.
William Tincup (16:04):
Leave a voicemail.
You're good.
And anything.
Yeah.
What does any of this, thesecheck-ins the way that we were
thinking about'em, does any ofthis get documented?
Or should it, I guess isprobably a more appropriate way
of thinking of it is should anyof this be documented or is this
just like you said, next levelpractices and thinking about
(16:26):
things and being, learning fromwhat we learned from the
pandemic, being more empatheticin our communications, but also
communicative and what's holdingus back, what we need from
others, et cetera.
Like all that sounds great to menow.
The jaded part of my personalitythen goes does this end up in
performance management somehow?
Amy Leschke-Kahle (16:49):
I love that question, and you are on a
really important kind of line ofinquiry, which is if we start
documenting and using thesecheck-ins, if you will, as a
tool for hr, they no longerbecome this trusted back and
forth, this trusted dialoguebetween hundred percent the
(17:11):
leader and a team member.
William Tincup (17:12):
Hundred percent could.
Amy Leschke-Kahle (17:15):
Our strong recommendation is to use them as
that one-on-one tool, not one toteam leader, one to team
leaders.
Team leaders.
Team leader, right?
One to HR for people to go checkup on me.
That's why we don't call it acheck up.
We call it a check in.
So having documentation, by theway, is helpful from a personal
(17:35):
level, from an individual level.
As a team leader level, becauseI can go back in time and find
out what, find out what did Iwork on three weeks ago because
I can't remember.
So it can be helpful.
But as HR practitioners andleaders, I think we need to
think long and hard about whogets to see that information.
And the way to start thatconversation in our
organizations is to say, what isthe intent of this?
(17:58):
Is the intent, a compliancetool?
Is the intent a performancedocumentation tool?
And if the answer is no, firstand foremost, we really want
this to be a productivity tool.
We need our employees to bedoing more, better work, higher
quality, more productive, moreefficient, more effective, then
let's focus on that as theprimary way to do that, and
(18:21):
don't instill.
I don't even know what to callit.
Don't instill compliancepractices that are gonna be
countered productive to thething we're actually trying to
get.
Do that in some other way
William Tincup (18:32):
or not.
But I absolutely am glad I askedthe question because I, the
separation of church and statefor the, for me is historically
performance management has beena tool for management.
To get more yield out ofemployees, basically, we're
gonna under the guise of lettingyou know what you're doing wrong
or what you could do better.
(18:53):
You're gonna go do those things.
It's documentation, it'scompliance.
If we need to let you go, we'vegot a paper trail, et cetera.
It's not really for theemployee.
It's never, it wasn't set upthat way, at least historically,
to be for the employee.
It's, it can be for theemployee, but not.
Not really.
No, it's a myth.
It's,
Amy Leschke-Kahle (19:12):
it's it's a complete myth that performance
management, as most of us haveexperienced it at work, yeah.
Somehow helps people performbetter.
No, it's a total myth.
I think maybe we started,someone started that to make
team members, to make employeesfeel a little bit better about
the process.
In fact, the bottom, it's allcounterproductive.
So if you go into a traditionalperformance review conversation,
(19:34):
there's two questions that anemployee wants to know.
A direct report wants to knowit's how much money am I gonna
get and am I gonna get fired?
It's two questions.
And yet we go through all thethings Now that doesn't help me
perform better at all.
It's, yeah it's really a mythabout work.
And the thing again that we seein the data incredibly clearly,
(19:56):
if you wanna move the needle onperformance, if you wanna help
people do more, better work,then pay more attention to them.
That's it.
Like it's that simple.
Yeah.
There's all kinds of otherthings I'm sure.
But the one that we have foundto be most powerful is just
attention.
Pay attention as a human.
Please pay attention to me.
Care.
William Tincup (20:14):
I dunno.
Just
Amy Leschke-Kahle (20:15):
do that about that.
Wow.
That's novel William.
William Tincup (20:21):
Two questions are probably similar to you but
it's about ex one, the employeeexpectations.
What have you seen there as itrelates to this?
Do they do the expectations?
I'm not gonna say have theychanged?
I'm assuming they have changedbecause of covid, but the ex of
employee ex expectations, butalso the ex of employee
(20:42):
experience as it relates to loudquitting.
Amy Leschke-Kahle (20:47):
What we're seeing from an employee
expectation perspective, theimpact of not only covid, but of
a lot of things, it is quiet,quitting and or loud quitting.
But that's the expectation.
If you're not gonna payattention to me, bye.
If you're not gonna help me domore, better work, you know
what?
Fine.
I'm not gonna give it to you.
Or.
(21:07):
It is a burnout.
I'm so burned out fromcontinually giving this
organization my all.
I just can't do it anymore.
So we see that happening interms of expectations and it's
not unreasonable.
In fact, that's why I think weshould be louder about it for
employees to expect that.
The most important people to meat work, my team leaders, maybe
(21:30):
key colleagues even are payingreally frequent attention to me.
Around the best of me.
I think that's a really goodthing, and we should be really
loud about that from an employeeexperience.
The other ex, from an employeeexperience perspective, one
thing we can do as practitionersis really take a little bit of a
(21:52):
step back and say, how can wesimplify all of the things that
we have asked employees andmanagers to do over the last
several decades that quitefrankly aren't returning?
The productivity and qualitythat we thought that they would.
We just talked about performancemanagement as one of those
(22:12):
things.
Performance review is the annualreview process, right?
But there's all kinds of otherthings you could put in that
bucket as well.
So what I see, it's really a twopath approach, which is one, how
can we simplify a lot of theburden, quite a lot of it,
emotional burden, but also timethat we've put onto managers in
particular, but employees aswell.
(22:33):
So that's one path.
And then the second path is whatare those practices, those
habits that we know from thedata and the research actually
do make a difference.
Weekly check-ins is a greatplace to start that.
And technology is a great thingto use to remind us to do that.
That's awesome as well.
But simplify.
And then instill those practicesthat actually make a difference.
(22:55):
And if you're, that's nothappening in your world as an
employee.
You should be loud.
You should be really loud.
William Tincup (23:03):
Drops my walks off stage.
Amy, thank you so much for yourtime.
This has been wonderful.
And we can unpack a couple ofthese things and our next
podcast.
So thank you again for your
Amy Leschke-Kahle (23:13):
time.
Thanks so much for having me,
William Tincup (23:15):
William.
Absolutely.
And thanks for everyone forlistening.
Until next time.
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