Robert Glazer: The Revolutionary Idea to Rethink the Two Week Notice!

The traditional two week notice is killing companies, but it's not for the reason you think. So today I have Robert Glazer on the podcast. He's the founder of a global marketing empire and a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. He's revealing today that this respectful practice of giving two weeks to leave a company like an employee or anyone on your team, that it's actually destroying workplace relationships and companies are losing a ton of. Ton of money because of lost productivity. And it's actually something Europeans think we're pretty nuts for keeping this, this ritual. So the, the whole thing is that there's a counterintuitive approach that Robert's been teaching and implementing in his company and others around the world. And you gotta hear what it is and the way that he goes about it. So you're not in this situation and you save a bunch of money and time and help people out in the process. So let's get into it. Chat with Mr. Robert Glazier.

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Let's get to the episode.

All right, Robert, we're doing this.

I'm happy we made the time. We gotta thank, you know, good old friend Charles Bird for making this happen. Super connector. Gotta shout him out, you know. How you doing today?

I'm good. We're.

We're getting close to the holiday break, which is always my favorite time of year because it's the one time where when I break, the world is also breaking and I don't get any emails.

Do you normally break at that time of year?

There's plenty of times where you can take a week off and you come back to 400 emails. My email goes out to almost nothing over Christmas week, so I love it, Love it.

Well, you probably have the system. You dial that in, I'm sure over the years. Well, we got connected from Charles saying Charles has been on the podcast before and the guy always selects great people that I should know and then I should share with others. And he introduced us because of this book that just got released recently called Rethinking the Two Week Rethinking, Two Weeks Notice. And it's done really well, and it was immediately a concept. I was like, wait, yeah, the two week notice concept. We've all experienced it in way some.

We've all been on one side of it. In fact, the book starts with imagine you. There's an A. I won't get this correct. But you know, you're sitting in your office working, your employee comes in, they close the door and they say, hey, Jody, have a minute. And like you're like your heart's saying. And everyone's been through that conversation, like you know what it's like.

And it never feels good either side of the table, you know, so why. I mean, yeah, two weeks. It's so because ever since I started a job, you know how to shop at Burger King back in the day, two week notice. Know I knew that when I was moving on up.

Gotta give that two weeks.

But it's like the why, the why is interesting. I've studied this pretty extensively. Like most people, even Europeans, they don't understand, like it's not a real thing. Like you are an employment at will in the us you can leave at any time. You can leave on one minute's notice. Somewhere along the way, it became known as sort of the respectful, responsible thing to give two weeks notice. There are plenty of managers and leaders out there. You know, if they have a number two and they've worked with them for five years, like that doesn't feel respectful or helpful or anything. So there's. And then there's people in Europe who are like, I don't understand. We have to give three months notice. And it's statutory, it's on both sides. So it's been around for a while. The problem is, I'm always fascinated by cognitive dissonance. You know, our ability to hold two different things in our head at the same time. We know that we're not in a market of lifetime employment on this side of our brain. We know there's no pensions. People aren't gonna work for our company for 10 or 15 years. If you go through a list of the best companies in America, Maybe the average 10 years, two to three years. Given that the bulk of their employees are probably in their 20s and 30s. So we intuitively know that when people go to leave, we act more like it's a marriage breakup than it is like the end of a sports contract, which is really more what it should be like. And so you have this hiding and lying and doctor appointments because people don't know any other way to do it. That's just sort of what they were told by their forefathers and mothers.

Yeah, that's a good point. It's like you relate this to a. It should be more like a sports contract. It's usually two to three year deals. Ish.

By the way, they should be evaluated. Right. Like, we'd all be better if you signed a two year deal and it's coming to the end. I'm like, joe, do I want to re sign this? Are you getting a raise? Are you getting a pay cut? Like.

Is it time to just like, we got a rookie and we want to try him, you know, instead, so. But we're acting more like it's a marriage. And so, you know, it is. Which is not the right analogy. So it'd be the equivalent of if I said someone just walked in your relationship. Let me not in marriage. You're dating someone, they're like, look, I'm moving in two weeks, I'm moving in with someone new and I'm going to a different city. Like, that's not going to feel so good.

No. Like, what did I miss? Why did we not communicate in that context?

People are like, yeah, that's ridiculous. I'm like, it's not that different. Different than like, I've been working for you and smiling every day and I've been securing a new job for six months. Right. It's not that. The only difference is the expectation. Right. That so.

Well, so how do you change that? Like, you know, there's the two week concept. So we got that and it's on both sides. So I guess as someone being the employer or the hire or, you know, the one with the business. Yeah, yeah. What's, what's the.

So it's on. The onus is on me. There's a lot of disclaimers with this book. The first disclaimer is, you don't read this book and go into your, you know, company that fires people every time they say they're unhappy and say, look, I want to talk, I'm a little unhappy. Like, so this is, this is really. The employer needs to say, we're changing the stigma around how people leave. And I advocate for this concept called open transition programs, where like, when you want to leave, you can go through a period of transition. Again, back to the sports analogy. Someone's finishing their free agent contract and you know, they're not signing with you. They still play the game and they show up, they haven't signed the new contract yet, but like, they're an adult, they're not tanking at the end. There's repercussions to that. So this notion of, hey, you can start a discussion, it is totally safe. And we said that to our employees when we started the program. If you want to talk about, I'm not feeling great about this. I want to do something different. Can I explore a different role? I'm not saying we'll go on forever, but we are not going to walk you to the door tomorrow. And actually with that information, we have a lot better chance of creating a better outcome. We might figure out it's not solvable. And so you get to start go looking for your next job and winding down this job. And we kind of do a wreck and start hiring. And if you're in a professional services business, I always like to double click on this because we are. I mean, you have a lot of service firm, like, what's the thing that annoys you the most about a service firm? What's the thing that makes you want to usually fire them the most when you have, you know, on the flip.

Side, I mean, it's got to be. Communication is one of the biggest things if there's not good communication.

And what about when the person you love, your account manager, like, suddenly is gone, like two weeks later?

That's even more. That's worse. Trust, right?

Well, yeah. So the number one thing people hate is when they're. The person they're dealing with, like, is constantly leaving and moving, right? And this is how it plays out in reality. If Joe is at my company and gives two weeks notice and the client loves him, I have to go in there and Joe has to be like, look, I'm actually leaving in two week. You're going to have a new manager. I don't know who it is. Someone you don't know is going to get on the phone with you or otherwise, like, not good. Joe enters our open transition program because he started a conversation, or we started a conversation saying, joe, your performance has been like, really bad for a while. Like, do you want to do the work on this? Do you want to be doing something? And Joe says, you know what, I really just don't want to be doing sales or account management. Can you, can I, can I sort of start the process of, of leaving? Well, what would happen was, you know, we, we grabbed Sarah or hire Sarah, and we'd start bringing Sarah to the first four or five meetings and slowly Sarah would take over all the calls and build the reporter client. And then somewhere in six weeks, Joe's say to the client, you know, I'm actually going to be leaving in a couple weeks and you've gotten to know Sarah and she's going to take over. That's a totally different experience for the client.

So it's kind of like, you're shat. Yeah. There's communication happening well in advance, and it's. It's kind of an expectation of the company is that this is how we operate. Right?

Yeah. And one of the objections, I have a whole chapter on objection, handling in this. The objection to me, like, people like, this won't work, and it won't work. Like, so one of them is, look, we can't have this person's day and work. Like, they're already toxic and it's already a mess and otherwise. And I would say that, yes, that could be the case. But. But for this person. But what the. Let's say, like, I'm firing Joe. Let's pick on Joe. I'm firing Joe today in December. We're recording this probably around January, like, and we're all pissed each other. Now, the early signs of the problem with this were probably in March. Right. And Joe's a little disengaged. His work isn't great. I could put Joe on a pip. Or what I'm advocating for is, like, real conversations where the manager sits down. Like, Joe, your work's been like, like, definitely below par recently. You kind of like, what. What's going on? And they have the psychological safety to do that, and they have the relationship. And I talk about. If you dig. This is called digging to the root in the book. And if you dig to the root, there's usually three. There's three common routes, like things that the employee needs to change, things that the employer can change if they want to, and things that are not going to change. So Joe might say to this conversation, you know what? I lost my childcare. And I've been, like, exhausted and stressed, and I can be like, okay, well, now I know this. Like, let's try to work around it. You're going to have to fix this. You're going to have to get childcare and do the work. But we can. We can mess with your hours. And, like, I understand that this is sort of an external thing that's impacting your work.

Right.

Joe might come in and say, look, I. Couple of things. He could say, I transferred into sales last year and I really don't love it. I'd like to go back to marketing. Or, look, I know the last three people you hired are paid more than me, and I was promised a raise and this like months ago. And so I'm just really frustrated and the company might be like, oh yeah, we screwed this up. Like Joe missed the cycle and so we fix that, right? So now in these first two cases, like we fixed their different problems, though we tend to the performance improvement plan is like giving a Tylenol to. Everyone has a headache when like one person might be dehydrated, one might be allergic to gluten and one might have a brain tumor. Right. There are different source reasons that they have a headache. So in this first one I figured out an external thing. That's the problem we worked on. At the second one, it's an internal. Or Joe might say, look, I miss an office and this is a remote only company. And I might say, Joe, we're not opening offices anytime soon, so why don't we help you go work at a company that has offices. So Joe's misperformance was showing up in the results. But like why it's happening plays a big part on whether I could. Joe's gone from green to yellow. Like, can I get him back to green either on his way internally or out the door once he's on like red, red. And because if I let this go on, then let's say I never found out that it was your childcare. Then I'm like yelling at you and get you're lazy. And then you're like. And then like, then we just get to a point where the whole thing is unrecoverable. The whole basis of this program is shifting that timeline way earlier to the early warning detection systems. And you'd be surprised how many times a real conversation someone's like, look, I just don't want to be in client service anymore. And you're like, that's okay. So why don't you start going and looking for a job elsewhere and we'll start looking for your replacement.

Yeah. So how early is too early to have these conversations? Or at least set the.

I think you should set this up as you hire people. Like I think not, like as you hire people.

You should say, look, this is the way people leave our organization, by the way. It makes it like if they made a mistake, they're going to feel a lot better that there's a good way out of this. So when you want to leave, this is how you leave. Just so you know. And we have this program. But when you see a change in performance or performance isn't being met, you should try to dig in also just in regular check ins. Like, how's it going? Are you happy? Are you liking on a do Engaged. And look, a lot of people will say one thing, but if you're a good manager and good, you will notice that their facial expression or have you ever asked someone about a reference and like Joe, what do you think about Steve? And they're like, Steve. And I'm like, you don't have to answer the question. I'm good, I got it. Whatever's coming out is not a raving endorsement. Right. So you say something like, how's work? Are you liking it? Are you engaged in that? Well, you know, and so like that's worth digging in because that's probably the early signs of a, of a, of a bigger problem.

Yeah, I was just creeping on your Elevate podcast. I saw you had Robert Cialdini on there. I had him on my show years ago now. Awesome.

Yeah, he's in my like 15 books on my desk over here that has sort of been like mainstay books.

He sent me one of them and signed it. I was like, oh, this is cool. But I'm thinking of just the psychological part right there. It's like there's different things that you want to pick up on in conversation, in words and tonality, in body language. You know, it's like, and a lot of us are remote. So I'm sure it gets a little tough, you know, with this kind of remote work culture that I believe you built your companies.

Yeah, we were remote. And look, this goes to my 1 and 1. So I, the way I open a lot of things is like, hey, like how's it going? And that's a very open question. That's not how's work? Or you know, and a lot of times like I get an answer like, you know, sucks. I'm fighting with my ex wife again and someone who's going through and that's what they want to talk about for 10 minutes. And so like we do that. So these open ended questions give you. And then I might have thought that this person was disengaged and not paying attention this week or elsewhere. But really like they just have a personal thing going on that's like in their way and maybe I could help them with that. And then so then maybe like they're a little more engaged at work. Right. And obviously like if that's going on every day, that's a different situation. But yeah, look, I mentioned before, I'm a big student and fan of, I don't know, fan of. But like I'm always looking. I just Think cognitive dissonance is. Is so interesting, causes so many problems. And one of the core. I haven't. It's a spinoff of cognitive dissonance. I haven't named this principle yet, but I'd like some psychologists to do it for me is that, like, this is the problem managers have. So Joe's. And we'll keep picking on Joe because it's easy. Joe's on my team and Joe's like a really good guy and he's on my sales team, but he's at 50% of quota for four quarters in a row, right? And so I'm like, I got to do a bad thing to Joe. Like, Joe's like, Joe's got to go. But I like Joe. And so this brain does not know what to do with this, so it has to solve the dissonance. So the easiest path to solve it is like, I'm going to make Joe out to be a bad person so that when I do a bad thing, I'm the good person. So I start being like, oh, Joe's lazy, he's not trying. I've given him chances. He's whatever. So when I finally fire Joe, I'm like, Joe deserved it. And I'm. Now I'm disrespectful and now Joe's pissed and now he sues me. And that's why we end up that you could flip it and do it the other way. You don't have to. Leaning into the relationships and having high standards aren't mutually exclusive. I can be like, Joe, love you, like, but the sales thing objectively isn't working. We can see the numbers. You're the lowest rep on here. Like, what do you want to do? Do you want to go to the sales training and do the work? And like, I can give you a quarter or two to like get up to everyone else, but after that my hands are tied. Or like, do you want to do something else? And should we look for internal or external? Right. Like, that's the opportunity. And if you've never tried one of these conversations, they're actually like, people don't want to do a bad job. They know when they're doing a bad job. Like, they're actually really refreshing versus the normal process.

Yeah, it's like a check in.

Right.

Like if you do these constant check ins, I do it with my team.

You know, but it's like a humanistic check in. Right. It's not a perfunctory one.

Yeah, well, and I think that's the thing is is inherently, we have this work relationship. So we feel like we have to. Oh, how's it going? Well, I got to talk about work. Right. You know, it's like I'm not gonna bring up everything about my family or kids or, you know, haven't been sleeping because I got a one year old at home, so.

Right. And that may be the, that may be the source of your poor performance. Right? That right now. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's, it's interesting. And the cognitive dissonance is a real thing. Especially like if there is a problem that happens, we can choose to, you know, go down the path of how, how did this happen? You know, like let's, you're, you're trying.

To close the gap. What your brain is always doing is it can't hold these two incongruent things at the same time. So it has to close the gap. So it's either like, I, I'm going to do a bad thing, so you're a bad person. I'm actually saying let's lean it the other way. Like I'm a good person. So, but, but I also, because I'm a good person, I can't let Joe continue to fail and let down the whole team. So I'm gonna try to like lean into the relationship and see if we can get a better outcome here. Because Joe's a, Joe's a good guy and he's trying, but it's also not fair to let him suck. Like.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's gotta be a different shift or something to. Yeah. Find the root. Of course it sounds like dig to the root, which I think is a super cool thing. Cause either on the employee, the employer, or you just can't change it, but might as well talk about it. Right?

Exactly.

Yeah. And you mentioned safety because with this whole thing, and I know a root human need for all of us is a sense of safety wherever we're at.

Yeah.

And with this discussion, to me it seems like that breeds safety or at least this feeling of trust within an organization.

Yeah. Start having these conversations and people find out that like, oh, like there's no negative consequence to it. Right. I mean psychological safety is just is. It's used a lot these days. But like the definition for me is it's trust at scale. So if you and I have trust and a one on one thing, I walk into a team and I just sense that there's trust. I can speak truth to power. I can say Joe, like, I think that's a terrible idea. We're going to Lose our money and, like, no one's going to be like, oh, my God, you can't say that in front of him. Like, yeah, I. I always hate to say this. I wish I had a better line, but. But having. It's a little like the line on pornography where someone says, I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. Like, I've been in company. You just see it in companies that have psychological safety. You can see it, you can feel it, but it's very hard to, like, put your finger on it.

Is it like a culture thing or is it more than that?

Yeah, it's part of the culture. I think it's the core tenet of good cultures. But I think the two biggest components are like, vulnerability and feedback are pretty normalized. Right. I was asked to give a keynote speak to Peach to a company for their leadership off site. And they invited me to join the meeting in the morning before I was speaking. And so they all went around and they did highs and lows and there was a lot of tears and people sharing some pretty deep personal lows that they had. And that was sort of my first tip off. And then the second time they did a, hey, what are the elephants in the room? Starting our off site? And people said stuff and the CEO was right there and they were pretty, you know, honest. I was like, God, this team's gonna have no problem with their planning. And then what they were doing later on was trying to do five and ten year organizational planning. And so to do that, you had to know. And they were like, look, we're not sure that we're all gonna be in these seats. You know, we're gonna plan out the seats. And they went around and asked people like, Joe, how long do you see yourself wanting to do this? And you're like, I see myself here another, like, five years. Someone's like 10 years. So they were even being honest at like, how long they wanted to be at the company, but they needed that for the planning. And it was not a surprise to me after watching that opening in the morning, that when you got into the other stuff, that they had no problem having these conversations.

That's cool. Yeah, that's just those open, like you said, vulnerable conversations that welcomes feedback and open questions. It's not like it's one sided either.

Those are the two ways the Johari window is this concept. Those are the two ways you can create more vulnerability. Right.

Is.

Is to be accepting of feedback and showing that, like, give me the feedback and then be Sharing and more vulnerable because it, it's sort of like it opens up the windows of what other people know about you and what you sort of know about them.

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Yeah, yeah. Is there, is there a process or protocol you'd recommend people to follow? Like that sounds like, you know, in that team's meeting it was like maybe part of their weekly meeting, for instance.

Yeah. I mean, yes, and I talked about that. You can add simple questions into check ins. Like again, high and low. What was the big thing from the weekend? And. But the key thing is though, the leader always goes first and whatever the leader says will set the tone for the whole meeting. I was with a facilitator years ago who showed us this. He took six people in our group and he was, I'm going to watch my, I'm going to do an exercise. And he said, all right, we're all gonna do something we don't know about each other. And he's like, I was a fiddle player growing up and everyone went around. And the second time he was like my ex. My stepdad was a raging alcoholic and I spent most of my childhood at night trying to figure out who he was gonna hit and who I had to distract and you know, otherwise. And then everyone, he didn't, Then everyone went around again, like totally different level of stories. Right. So, you know, we've done that even in a quarterly meeting. We were like, what's something that like you would like a mulligan on, which is a golf term for do over, you know, from last quarter. And if a leader steps in, there is like, man, I just blew the call with this partner because I was unprepared and I rushed into it. And in retrospect, like that is like so empowering for then other people to share similar stories. So it's just these little, look, you can do off site stuff and trust building. Maybe you can introduce these little personal segments into your regular calls and meetings. That's, that's, that's one way to do that.

I'm just thinking of like how that that changes everything. Just all Communication even not just within, you know, the leaders there, but within the community or the team themselves. I mean, you know, that that just fosters just a sense of trust with everyone.

You know, I don't love using examples of myself, but I was doing this core value discovery. And look, I'm the founder of the company. I'm not as involved anymore, but I do a lot of our leadership training. So these are a lot of new up and coming employees. They haven't met me before. And like, I understand, like, I think I'm a kind of a normal, approachable person, but it's intimidating. It's like the founder of the company and whatever. And when I do this session, I'm talking about, look, when we're doing this core value stuff, you gotta think about your childhood and things that were formative for you because 99% of cases, like, it's why this is a value for you. And I'm like, here's my deal. Like, I was a huge underachiever. It was super embarrassing for me. So I solved that by being an overachiever. It created these other sets of problems. And this is kind of why, you know, this is important to me and these values. And I think, like, I mean, I was told that so many times. Like, I don't even, I don't even tell you to people I don't know at this point, I think it's pretty surprising for people. And then the stuff that they shared was, I actually could really help. Like two people shared stories about a pretty formative childhood experience that were definitive to their values and showed up in their leadership. Like, you just can't have that kind of experience. And I was able to show them how it helped, how it influenced their leadership style. And it wasn't a good or a bad, but like they had to understand that because it was really going to. And that was helpful for them. But had I not set the table for that, they probably wouldn't have shared that and I couldn't have helped them. And so that's sort of how it works. I wasn't looking to use it against them. I was looking to help them with it.

Well, especially if, well, for one, with your company, if you're not the one leading the day to day, you want to have other leaders or at least people that are conveying that sense of culture, trust, communication that you're after anyway.

Yeah, exactly.

And you mentioned the whole good values. Like I know you're working on a whole another book and you have multiple books out there, so definitely go, what.

I lack in quality, I make up in quantity.

So it's okay, you're getting it done. So like personal goals, core values. Not personal goals, but personal core values make up, like you just said, leadership potential or at least qualities and ways that people interact with each other.

I guess help me define that, like the concept around that because this definitely relates to what we've been talking about.

Yeah.

A lot of people are like, look, I have values, but they can't name them. Right. And so if you can't name them, you probably know when they're broken. You know, when you're in flow, you can feel them. The way I say is like, look, if I took a really nice sports car and I drove it through a tunnel and the tunnel had walls and a yellow line, I turn off the lights, the yellow line is your, is your values. So you're going to, the car is going to drift past the yellow line, it's going to hit the wall, you're going to go, oh, you know, bad. We're going to go to the middle, I'm going to hit the other wall. I'm probably going to get out the other side. But that car is going to be like banged up as hell. Right. If you turn on the lights and I see where the yellow lines are, like, I stay in the right lane. And so to me, like, personal core values are just the fundamental, best decision making tool that you have in your life. And I talk about the big three of your vocation, your community and your relationship. And if you don't make those decisions in a way that's aligned with your values, they have a very low chance of working out. So when we're trying to sort of do leadership development, one of my things like, look, you got to understand this was the unlock for me that you are going to be the best leader. If you are authentic and you got to understand yourself and you got to understand the strengths and weaknesses that you bring to the table and you're not changing. But there's a lot of baggage there. And I can't give you the number of examples of someone like, there are leaders for whom trust is paramount and their core value is relationships based on trust. If I look at those people and I say, let me ask you, once we do the work and we figure out that their value or their why is trust? Does your focus on trust come from a violation of trust somewhere in your life, in your childhood? And they don't have to answer, I say, I won't ask you what it is. And normally the tear that's rolling out of the eye or the facial tells me that there is some deep pain. And they're not going to change that because over years they've had a small group of friends. It's hard to get in the circle or otherwise. So it can work for you as a leader. If you say, hey, trust is really important to me on my team. If you miss meetings, if you show up late, if I can't find you, these are all things that lose trust. The problem is for that leader, when that trust happens or those things, it's triggering like that nuclear, like, trust is kind of a life and death thing because the last thing that happened is my dad left or whatever it was that sort of did that. So it can be a pro, it can be a con. It all depends on if you know it. What's fascinating is these trust leaders that we've had a few of them over the time. They were basically like, half their team was in jail, the key was thrown out. Like, they had no idea. But when you really act, they're like, yeah, like. And you could hear from the HR department, they were like, this person's always just so hot or cold on people and they're like irredeemable or they love them too much and like, that's the problem. It can really work for them. But to work for them, they have to know it and they have to articulate it. So their team's like, look, if I can't find you, if you're late for things or whatever, that is kind of irrecoverable for me as a leader. So I'm just telling you that up front so that we know how to work together.

Ooh, that's huge, man. I can't even. I doubt most people are approaching things that way with that.

No, look, this is seriously deep work. It is the most impactful thing I've ever did. I love doing it with people and leaders because I think when they get it, they tend to have this like, just like explosion of they start looking back at their whole life and suddenly everything makes sense. Why I hated that job, why that relationship didn't work out again. They were that car that was hitting the wall, you know, the feeling of driving in the lane. But when you have these four things in front of you that says, like, you know, respect and authenticity are incredibly important to me. Long term orientation, like making things better. Like, you're able to look and be like, you know what? They're asking me to do a job where it's a short term job, I'm not gonna be able to make anything better. It's transactional, not relational. Like, this is gonna suck for me. Like, like, this is not, this is not gonna work for me. In fact, when I have people do that backwards looking lens afterwards and like, what's the worst job? Worst. But they're able to almost look and be like, look, this was, this was everything I hate at my, you know, at my core.

Yeah. Wow. And yeah, looking back, I mean, I'm just assuming that's probably the best. Yeah.

You start having all these like, firework thing goes off because it's like you get the stencil and then you start taking the stencil back to high school and whatever and this. And you're like, they look eerily similar. Yeah. Like, the pattern is really clear. Like, you know, like given autonomy. Like, it was great. And you know, we did this work for someone and they came back to me with their list and they're like, you know, I just exited like a long term relationship. And looking at. I didn't know why, but in looking at this list, it's really clear to me now. Right. Maybe that would have happened for them three to six months earlier. Like, whatever it was, that person couldn't give them, like the thing that was basically most important to them. You can be. My wife and I are not the same person. We do things differently. We have different activities. You can be different. But if you think about a relationship or spouse or part, you have to be aligned on the big things. Like when it comes to our family and our kids and the important decision, like, we're always philosophically on the same page. That doesn't mean, like, you know, she likes tennis. I like that. Like, like that stuff's not values oriented. That's sort of hobbies and activities and that sort of stuff.

Yeah, well, so, so the values, like some. It's interesting. Yeah. Relationships. You know, a lot of people, if you have partners in a relation or in your business that is, it's kind of, it's a similar kind of thing. I've had partners over the years on a whole bunch of companies.

Each of your personal values needs to somehow dot with a company's values in order for it to work. Right.

Bingo. Yeah. There needs to be an overlap there. So, yeah, I'm thinking of like a practice. So to identify, let's say the person listening, watching is like, okay, well, I got to get clear of my values first before I start to, you know, ask other people of theirs. So I'm not just thinking oh, I'm going to adopt some of that. Yeah. For me, I've done the Jordan, Dr. Jordan Peterson has this whole self. Oh my gosh, the self authoring program, it's called. So you go back in the past and then you present and then the future. But you know, you start in the past. And that unlocked so much for me where you go to the root of things and you find.

Yeah, it's probably a lot of what the, the process that I use. And look, I actually had to figure this out on myself for years. And then I built a process with our team and then people would always ask me after my book elevate because I talk, how do I do this? I was like, it's not like a quick thing. So I ended up. I've developed a course, like over 2,000 people have taken it. It's kind of an hour. It will really kind of give it to you. But the behavioral based questions are designed to elicit all those historical examples because they really do tell the story. And then you might look at all those examples, figure out the value and then if you really go back, like for most of these things they connect to. I find that most people are going back to something in childhood and they are doubling down on something that was very important to them, maybe overdoing it or they are running 180 degrees away from something they hated or despised. Wow.

That's all. And yeah, it's getting to the root. It's typically. Yeah, it's like one or a couple things at least I've found. Yeah. From childhood. Yeah.

And it's six years old. It's not a victim. Look, here's a great example. The example of, and I use this in my book, let's say that you grew up with a single parent, Right. And let's say the parent died, the other parent died. You grew up with a single parent. This parent worked three jobs and got this kid into college or into Harvard and they went on and having an incredible career. And then they decided to develop an after school, the biggest global after school program for kids of single parents. Why? Because they were really lonely as a kid. They're not blaming the parent. This parent like did everything they could. I think people have to look, oh, I'm looking for, you know, psychologists have gone, it's not about blame, it's about understanding. And we're all like, so you were lonely as a kid. That was your lived experience you was doing because your parents was working three jobs to put food on the table and get you in an Ivy League school and put you into this position. It doesn't change the truth for you and it doesn't change that that became the real motivation to build this program and do a lot of good. Right. It's not like we're not looking for, like, who can we blame? But we're looking to just understand why that person double clicks on loneliness, you know, more than, more than someone else.

And if you know thyself, you know.

At least you don't have to dwell.

On all that stuff. Just know it, understand it, know it, understand it, understand.

You probably work better in teams. You don't want to work alone. Right? Like, these are all. This is how it all shows up as a 40 year old leading a team of people in the workplace.

Workplace, absolutely. It's never too late. So get that work done. Well, I'm thinking now, Robert, with like technology, AI and remote work, like, are there any trends or maybe other best practices we should think about with, you know, I mean, with AI and technology, there's a lot of fear people have sometimes like, am I being replaced? How do I learn this? I can't keep up with this. Yeah, talk about that. Yeah. What are your thoughts?

There's my rule on any new thing is to not be a minimalist and not be a maximalist. Right. So I understand ChatGPT. I use it every day. I figured out how to make it more productive. You know, all of this stuff, I am, I am not. And then there's a whole other camp, like, you know, everything's going to be AI or like they set up a thing where this chatbot texts his girlfriend in the morning and their chatbot texts you back. And I'm like, I don't want to live like that. Like, like that's not like. So I want, I actually want to. I think that with all the AI, there will actually be a huge interest in real experiences. Or if it's doing all your work, then like probably you want to invest in campgrounds and travel things and the things that, like where humans are going to need to connect. So I think it's important to understand these trends. And look, you can't afford to not try ChatGPT or understand what it could do or if you're doing any sort of work, like it's my personal assistant like that I'm working with all the time. Like, I don't, I. One of my, one of my weaknesses is like, I can write very fast, I'm a very slow editor and I miss spelling mistakes and stuff. Well, boom. Make sure. There's no spelling problems in this right now. You should. I have no reason to ever send an email again that has a spelling mistake in it. So if I didn't even play around with that, then I'd be missing out on the innovation. I think the, everything's going to be this and go all in with my stock portfolio. Like, like that's, that's how bubbles get born. And we know it tends to go to an absolute fever pitch, blow up and then the sort of more dominant permanent use cases come up. Kind of like we saw with the Internet's kind of trajectory. But remember if it was two years ago, you were being told if you didn't pivot your business to blockchain, you were going to be dead. Right. So like that fervor was almost as bad. I mean, Long Island Blockchain, the ice tea company that renamed itself Blockchain. Like, oh man, when these manias happen, it's very hard to sort out the, the sort of reality from the, the, the bubble.

Yeah. And I think, you know, as it pertains to teams communication, what we're talking about here is to have open communications about technology and how it plays a role in our day to day.

Yeah. Like my kids, I'm like, look, like, do not use it to write your papers. Don't cheat, don't get the right. But, but I've, I've shown them you can put your paper into it and say I'm an 11th grader and this is the assignment. Tell me what grade you would give me and give me critical feedback.

Like that's cool.

That like, so you get like a free teacher review on it. Like to me, that's a great way to use it and then go do the work.

Yep. Or ask it questions and help refine, you know, ask better questions.

You can develop a study guide based on every. I'm taking ap, whatever. Here are the questions. Like, give me a study guide, make note card. Like, like if you're not playing with that, you're really missing out on some opportunities there to save some time.

Absolutely.

But also on the flip side, look, if we remove struggle, if we remove difficulty, we will have all kinds of other problems. I'm far enough in my career. I don't want to do some of the crap work now. But if you never have to do anything hard, that's going to have a whole bunch of other implications.

It'll just introduce other hard things will just show up in your lap.

If you're hard, things will come. You just won't know how to deal with them. I love the quote where we are, we are preparing kids for the path rather. No, we are preparing the path for the kids rather than we're preparing kids for the path. Like that is the problem with parenting these days.

That ain't gonna work out. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Robert, like, what's. Because you've, you've grown.

So, you know, large partnership company, Acceleration Partners. You, you write a newsletter every single week. You know, it goes out to hundreds of thousands of people. Podcast.

Like what's.

And you know, we'll link all that stuff in the show notes and, and yeah, of course you have another book coming out. You're a machine man. And like, was there a tipping point or something that got you to think like that? Like, you know, with the core values with.

Yeah, so, so 100%. So it's actually 2013. So I, I, as I've been doing speaking over the last five or 10 years, it was about three years ago and someone was reading my bio for the speaking and I had this revelation. I was like, every single thing they just listed in this book was after 2013. And for 2013, me was when I went to this leadership off site with, with EO and it was this sort of core value thing. It was, I thought we were going to learn how to be better leaders, like tools and trick. And it was like the first two days were a big mirror which were like, who are you? What do you want? What do you value? Figure that out first and then we can talk about what kind of leader you're going to be. And so it was the six months after that that I figured out my values. The practical implication of that was I went and changed my company's values. I said, I'm going to double down on these things. I made a list of things I'm going to quit. Because it was really clear. I switched boards. I dumped relationships. So for me, it was like that was sort of the pivotal moment of figuring out how to reallocate my time even as a parent. You know, one of the things like, look, I struggled in school. I was add kid creative. I would go to these parent nights and like, like, I just hate. It's just torture. Like, it's like, I can't. I'm not paying attention what they said. I'm daydreaming. It's like back in school, I'm like, this doesn't make me a better parent. Like, I like doing challenging. I taking my kids to the rope course. Like, that's in service of my Core values. Going and sitting and like mindlessly through this two and a half hours, I just like stopped going to back to school night. Like, I was like, this isn't my contribution. I'd rather like take my kid and go do a lesson with them or do something like that. So there were small things and they were big things, but that was 100%. When I changed this, I said that was sort of the cooking with gas moment, I think for me.

Yeah, that's cool, man. And you're noticing in times, in the day to day, you know, and I think when that mirror, it needs to, it's going to shine on you at some time. And if you choose to have it shine, you know, I mean, you probably didn't know it was coming in that leadership training, but I did not. We all have the ability to at.

Least shine a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.

No kidding. Well, is there, is there a best next step that you would recommend folks to take after this? I mean, we talked about the, the two week, you know, the whole gap there, but also the value side of things. I think there's some.

Yeah, look, if you go to, if you go to robertglaser.com so the Friday Forward newsletter on Substack is on there. You can see the courses, my books. If you go to the Friday Forward substack, you can actually get the first three chapters of the book for free. So you can read almost half the book and you're like, I'm in on this. And I think, I don't know, it's like a $3 investment after that or something of the ebook if it's, if it's valuable. So you can check out the newsletter and the course is on there. And I just think anyone who does that, who goes through the 12 weeks of the exercises that come on the email and doesn't have some fundamental clarity that they can make sense on their life. Like, call me, like, tell me that we'll, we'll make it right. Like I said, about 2, 000 people have done that. It's just it, there's no other scalable way than to do that work. And it's not, it's not rocket science. It's like other things. It's going to ask you a bunch of these questions. It's going to help you synthesize the answers and pull the trends out of them.

Cool, man. Yeah. And I love substack too. So just in.

Yeah, Substack seems to be like tipping. Like, it just seems like every everyone's moving. I getting a lot of moving signs. Like I'm moving to substack, you know, from wherever they are.

A lot of moving science. Yeah, well, putting good thoughts out there, man. You know, it's like blogs were the thing back in the day. Now I feel like substacks are, you know, trending up. But, dude, Robert, I appreciate you your thoughts, and I know you've done the work. You've thought deeply on all this stuff, so it shows. And so thank you for your time.

Thanks for having me, Joe.

Sam.