Fixable
Quick Fixes: How to quit and how to work smarter
May 13, 2024
[00:00:00] Anne Morriss:
Hello everyone. Welcome back to another week of Fixable. I'm your host, Anne Morris.
[00:00:08] Frances Frei:
And I'm your other host Francis Frei. I'm your co-host. You're the host, and I'm the co-host. I think that that sounds right.
[00:00:14] Anne Morriss:
I'll take it.
[00:00:14] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:00:15] Anne Morriss:
I'll take it. This is a show where we believe meaningful change happens fast, and today we're gonna try something totally new.
We're gonna attempt to cash that check that our egos have written as the great commander Stinger from Top Gun once put it. And today we're gonna try a new type of episode, which we're calling The Quick Fix.
[00:00:38] Frances Frei:
Which means it's just gonna be me and you baby. We're gonna tackle two listener submissions and we're gonna do it in under 20 minutes.
[00:00:48] Anne Morriss:
Our first question comes from a listener. We're gonna be calling Jessica, so let's hear her voicemail.
[00:00:55] Jessica:
Hi Anne and Francis. I am calling in today to figure out how best to approach a question with my boss. I'm a marine scientist and I've been working in my lab for about 10 years, and I would like to make a big move across country, which involves leaving this job, leaving this intimate relationship.
It's a small niche field, so I know that I'm going to come across the folks in my lab again at some point in our careers, and I really just wanna make sure I'm not burning bridges, that I'm maintaining a really healthy relationship. I hope you guys have some great advice and help, and thank you so much.
[00:01:46] Anne Morriss:
Oh, I'm hearing the stakes in her voice, and this is a question, we get a variation on this question.
[00:01:53] Frances Frei:
Quite a lot.
[00:01:54] Anne Morriss:
A lot. Yeah. Which is, you know, how do I gracefully quit my job?
[00:01:59] Frances Frei:
Yeah. And I find there's two things we have to think about when we do it. One is when we're leaving our job, we tend to want to shrink what the world can handle from us. And so we're like.
[00:02:10] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:02:10] Frances Frei:
Oh, you know, I have to be this small little perfect thing in any perturbed. So we gotta like, we gotta own ourselves. I don't wanna shrink when we're doing it. And then the second part is.
[00:02:21] Anne Morriss:
Well, let me try the second part.
[00:02:23] Frances Frei:
All right. You do the second part.
[00:02:24] Anne Morriss:
So I, I, her question, and you can hear this in her voice, I think reveals what a thoughtful and high empathy person she is.
And I think it's really hard for. People like us, if I may be so bold to do things that will knowingly disappoint other people. So I think your point, number one, is really important for the people out there, for whom people pleasing is our weakness. And if that's the case, I think you really wanna plan this whole thing out.
So you gotta do the right thing here. And I think the right thing here means. Give proper notice in terms of time. Give people a heads up, give them a why. So give them some insight into your decision. You don't have to reveal all of it.
[00:03:16] Frances Frei:
No, please don't.
[00:03:17] Anne Morriss:
Uh, you can be a little selfish here, but you gotta reveal some of it, and you have to thank them for the opportunity to learn and grow in their presence essentially.
[00:03:30] Frances Frei:
And what I think we really wanna make sure that you do is that you give people a story that they can turn around and repeat. So whether it's to go tell their boss, it's going to say, here's what happened at work. But people need to have their version of the story that they can repeat to others and feel good about it.
So you have to give enough information to fill in the details of their story.
[00:03:54] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. And on the, on the gratitude part, Francis, I'm also thinking about the power of. Being sincere and specific in this moment, this is a great time to exercise that muscle of, of sincere and specific gratitude. Yes, you're leaving.
So chances are good that not every aspect of the job worked out perfectly, but something did. Um, and if you can describe it in the way, in a way that really feels authentic. Then it's, uh, it's gonna make the, this, this whole thing, this whole exit moment, uh, feel better and, and go smoother, um, than, than if you just, than if it's a vague thank you.
[00:04:37] Frances Frei:
And, and what I love about that, Anne, is that it will, the gratitude will be the highlight of the story. The person turns around and tells. So I, that's exactly right.
[00:04:46] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. I mean, and, and, and as the great Maya Angelou observed. People actually won't particularly remember what you say or what you do in this moment, but they are gonna remember how you made them feel, and that is the the person you're quitting on.
That's what they're gonna remember from this whole interaction is how you made them feel in that moment.
[00:05:05] Frances Frei:
Beautiful.
[00:05:06] Anne Morriss:
And I like to write this all down
[00:05:09] Frances Frei:
'Cause you're a writer.
[00:05:10] Anne Morriss:
Uh.
[00:05:10] Frances Frei:
I like to talk about it in front of the mirror.
[00:05:12] Anne Morriss:
But I'm a big believer in the proper letter of resignation here, in part because I also don't trust myself in that moment.
[00:05:21] Frances Frei:
In moment.
[00:05:21] Anne Morriss:
To your point, to not.
[00:05:23] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:05:23] Anne Morriss:
Make myself smaller and try to protect people from the truth. And so yeah, get out there, but plan it and don't be afraid of this kind of ancient artifact that is the letter of resignation.
[00:05:38] Frances Frei:
As you say that, I realized when I left HBS to go to Uber, I was in the administration.
I was a senior associate dean of blah, blah, blah, and um, I wrote a letter of resignation. And gave it to the dean at the time, but gave him a little preamble, let him read it in my presence. And then we had the conversation, and you're right, it went swimmingly well after that. And I don't think I would've been able to in the moment, capture it.
And so I think we wanna make sure we don't underestimate what people can handle.
[00:06:07] Anne Morriss:
Yes.
[00:06:07] Frances Frei:
But nor should we underestimate the context they need.
[00:06:10] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:06:10] Frances Frei:
They can handle a lot and they need a lot of context and let's put them in a position to wish us well and to continue to root for us.
[00:06:18] Anne Morriss:
Yeah, I think that's beautiful and a beautiful example be also because in that moment there.
A lot of emotions for us that are showing up too. There's a lot of adrenaline and this letter allows you to check all the boxes.
[00:06:31] Frances Frei:
It’s so good.
[00:06:31] Anne Morriss:
You wanna check without having to rely on that moment by moment performance. And then the last thing I'll say on this is. Plan it all out and then don't be attached to the results.
[00:06:42] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:06:43] Anne Morriss:
Because whatever happens next, that other person's reaction likely has nothing to do with you.
[00:06:50] Frances Frei:
Yes.
[00:06:50] Anne Morriss:
And and you know, and in this moment we're often not at our best, you know, uh, we often code this as a rejection of some kind, and it can spark all kind of emotions, and that's fine. Those emotions are likely temporary and they're also.
Totally outta your control. So just give yourself permission to be at peace at whatever then happens next.
[00:07:11] Frances Frei:
You know it. It's a lesson that I have learned in coaching faculty in the classroom, which is deeply prepare so that you can loosely teach.
[00:07:22] Anne Morriss:
Alright, Francis, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back we're going to talk about how to speed things up when we believe that they're moving too slow.
[00:07:33] Frances Frei:
Oh, and this is an ode to one of my favorite mathematical theorems.
[00:07:37] Anne Morriss:
Wait.
[00:07:37] Frances Frei:
Which our listeners might be hearing for the first time, but my wife is maybe hearing it for the first time today.
[00:07:50] Anne Morriss:
All right, we're cruising now. So let's take a look at another submission.
[00:07:54] Frances Frei:
I love it.
[00:07:56] Anne Morriss:
This one is from a manager who would like to remain anonymous, and they wrote to us with the following question, what is the right thing to do if employees are very slow at work? And the work needs to be done quicker. And they say they can't work faster.
[00:08:11] Frances Frei:
Ooh.
[00:08:12] Anne Morriss:
So Francis, where does your beautiful mathematical mind go with this one?
[00:08:17] Frances Frei:
Oh, Little's Law To the Rescue. So, So there.
[00:08:21] Anne Morriss:
What is Little's Law?
[00:08:22] Frances Frei:
Ahh! I'm so glad you asked. I've been waiting for you to ask.
[00:08:24] Anne Morriss:
I know.
[00:08:25] Frances Frei:
So Little's Law actually contemplates. Working harder and working smarter. And what I am hearing from this listener is that they have reached the limits of working harder.
And Little's law gives us a way to work smarter.
[00:08:41] Anne Morriss:
Say more.
[00:08:42] Frances Frei:
It's a, it's a cliff hanger, isn't it?
[00:08:44] Anne Morriss:
It's a cliff. How do I work smarter in, in a situation like this?
[00:08:47] Frances Frei:
Um, almost always we are working on too many things.
[00:08:52] Anne Morriss:
Mm.
[00:08:53] Frances Frei:
And so I just, I simply have too many things in front of me. So no matter how hard I work on any one thing, if there's 10 things in front of me, even if I get faster at each thing, it's still gonna take too long to get through them.
So what I as a manager need to do for my team is remove what we call the work in process. I need to remove. Some of the things they're working on so that we get a better, what we call throughput time. So work goes through more quickly.
[00:09:21] Anne Morriss:
And if I recall from the work of professor Little, part of his breakthrough inside here was that the length of your to-do list what we call the work in process.
The WIP, WIP doesn't just matter. It matters just as much as the--
[00:09:35] Frances Frei:
It matters more.
[00:09:37] Anne Morriss:
Oh.
[00:09:38] Frances Frei:
It matters much more.
[00:09:39] Anne Morriss:
Wow.
[00:09:39] Frances Frei:
So if you ask me, can you go faster by working harder, I, I'll say it's what your instinct is gonna be. You're gonna exhaust yourself and you're only gonna make marginal improvement. But if you affect the the to-do list, you will dramatically improve order of magnitudes better.
Working smarter is order of magnitudes better than working harder.
[00:09:57] Anne Morriss:
Okay. So what's your advice to anonymous here?
[00:10:00] Frances Frei:
One is that I would remove a little bit of the judgment that they have on their employees. Just a little bit. Just a little bit.
[00:10:05] Anne Morriss:
It's a little judgey.
[00:10:06] Frances Frei:
Um, and I would bring in curiosity and it's curiosity about what they're working on.
And I would practice radical prioritization and remove things. I wouldn't even give them a, not now. I would remove things from the list and watch what happens. Then all of a sudden, the employees that we're judgy about are gonna be superheroes and you're gonna wonder what did they do differently? They didn't do anything differently.
I. I did something differently by putting a different set of tasks in front of them.
[00:10:32] Anne Morriss:
So Francis, for the absence of doubt, if I remove the WIP in the system.
[00:10:38] Frances Frei:
Everything gets done faster.
[00:10:40] Anne Morriss:
Everything gets done faster.
[00:10:41] Frances Frei:
Everything.
[00:10:41] Anne Morriss:
And that's a better strategy than trying to go faster. Which, which your people call cycle time.
[00:10:47] Frances Frei:
Yes. And I would, if I wanna, if you wanna have like a sense of how much, I think it's probably 10 times more effective. It's wildly more effective.
[00:10:55] Anne Morriss:
So I shouldn't judge my team and yell at them and make them go faster. I should remove the number of things that they're doing to.
[00:11:01] Frances Frei:
Fools errand. You are the problem, not them.
[00:11:04] Anne Morriss:
Right. Who's judgy now?
[00:11:06] Frances Frei:
You're right. I got a little judgy.
[00:11:07] Anne Morriss:
You did get a little jud.
[00:11:08] Frances Frei:
I did. All right. Apologies.
[00:11:11] Anne Morriss:
This reminds me of the CEO of Etsy, who we wrote about in our book, Josh Silverman. So when he was turning the company around, one of the things he observed when he got there is that too many projects were, and this was his word, suffocating the organization.
[00:11:25] Frances Frei:
Oh, so good. It's exactly what they do.
[00:11:27] Anne Morriss:
And, and I just to, just to give you a little texture on this, the number of employees at Etsy was under a thousand. And the team was working on more than 800 business development projects, and this is in the public domain. This was reporting by Phil Wahba at Fortune.
So Silverman and his team eliminated half of these initiatives. So they took Little's Law for a test drive here, and they made an organization level commitment, as you say, to working smarter.
[00:12:00] Frances Frei:
And it's usually, we can't usually work smarter on our own 'cause we don't get to pick what we work on unless we're in very specific fields.
So this is actually the person who called in. That's exactly, it is within your power to have the work go faster. And you know what else is gonna happen? Quality is gonna be higher. Sentiment is gonna be higher. Like you have a beautiful thing that's about to happen, but you have to take responsibility for what you're giving them to work on, and you have an Etsy problem, is my guess.
[00:12:32] Anne Morriss:
The other fun fact about Little's Law. That I have retained is that it's often just a one time effort that's to pull WIP out of the system.
[00:12:42] Frances Frei:
Yeah. So that's a really important part that if it's usually, like the classic example is a call center and it, you call in with a problem and it takes two weeks to hear back.
You're like, oh my gosh, it's two week. And it's because that's how many things are in line in front, but they're staffed correctly. That is, they have the right number of people for the number of projects they're working on. There's just a two week backlog, and if you do the one time effort to remove the backlog, it goes effortlessly. So my
[00:13:09] Anne Morriss:
Wow.
[00:13:09] Frances Frei:
Description there might not have helped, but it is a one time effort.
[00:13:12] Anne Morriss:
So in the call center, if I brought in a crack team
[00:13:15] Frances Frei:
For one weekend.
[00:13:15] Anne Morriss:
WIP removers for a weekend. The problem is solved.
[00:13:16] Frances Frei:
The problem is solved, and the only thing you have to do is now monitor work in process. And you know what builds work in process when we think no idea is a bad idea.
Oh, that sounds good. Let's do that too. That's how we end up with the problem.
[00:13:31] Anne Morriss:
So as long as Etsy resists the mission creep of new projects, then the company gets to maintain this new speed that's Silverman inspired.
[00:13:41] Frances Frei:
And that's the beautiful part of it.All right, that's our show. Thanks for listening everyone. As always, please get in touch if you want to figure out your workplace problem together.
[00:13:55] Anne Morriss:
Or not together as in this format. Email us, uh, with any thoughts, emotions and feelings you have at [email protected] or call us at 234-FIXABLE. 234-349-2253.
You can even text us if that's easier.
[00:14:14] Frances Frei:
I really like this one. It's so nice to go fast.
[00:14:17] Anne Morriss:
Yes, it is. Uh, thanks for listening, everyone, and thanks to everyone who's reached out with a problem for us to solve. We couldn't make this show without you. By the way, we have been running some really interesting polls on Spotify and wanted to share a striking result from one of them.
Which is that when we asked people if they feel comfortable speaking candidly about mental health at work, almost 60% of people said no. So we definitively do not feel comfortable talking about this critical issue in the workplace.
[00:14:45] Frances Frei:
It's super striking, and that was the Lauren Cohen episode, and it really underscores a lot of the things that he said about the scope of the problem and that we can make a lot of headway in addressing it immediately.
Just by getting more comfortable, being honest about it. Half of us, if I can, round off half of us, don't feel comfortable. Imagine if we could move the needle on that. Wow.
[00:15:09] Anne Morriss:
Fixable is brought to you by the Ted Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris.
[00:15:15] Frances Frei:
And me. Francis Frei.
[00:15:17] Anne Morriss:
Our team includes Izii Carter. Constanza Gallardo, Banban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Corey Hajim, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Hai Lash. This episode was mixed by Louis at Story Yard.
[00:15:30] Frances Frei:
If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and tell a friend to check us out.