Quiet Quitting and Leadership

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our interview series with Greg Offner, also known as Junior, a piano and a piano bar pianist that lost his voice, got it back and is now using it as a motivational speaker and trainer for organizations that want to retain their staff that want to grow and improve and develop. And we are diving right back into the conversation. This episode, we're going to start into one of the sort of hot topics, I guess, is we're going to touch on the idea of quiet quitting and Greg's view of it and how as an organization you can try to avoid that, try to make that not an issue. And even I think if you are one of those people that are sitting in a quiet quitting seat, maybe this would be a little motivation for you to find somewhere where you're not a quiet quitter and maybe look at it a little differently. And whether that is going to be with your organization changing how you work with them, how you guys interact or whether it's actual quitting and you move on to an organization that allows you to grow, that remains to be seen. But that being said, it's time to get back into it. We'll pick up right where we left off. And this is part three of our interview with Greg Offner. And I agree. That's something that I find a lot of companies and organizations, especially hiring managers and that, I think they get a little scared about that stuff and say, well, if I start pushing things like being happy with your work and enjoying what you're doing and things like that, then we're going to lose because everybody's going to leave because they're not going to enjoy it here. And usually it is a two-sided sword because if you create a sucky environment, people are going to leave. You can't just trick them into it. And if you have a sucky environment and they're not happy, they're not going to be as productive. Think about instead of you lose these people that don't like being here anyways and replace them with people that this is what they want to do. You can find people that are passionate about things that nobody else is, whether it's like sweeping floors or cleaning bathrooms or chefs that want to have a gorgeous kitchen. Creating food and other people like, I would never want to cook ever and things like that. People exist that love doing that. And when you can create something that attracts them and sort of push out or better, I guess it's more like direct people that come in, don't like what they're doing, but you can direct them to something that they do enjoy. Then I think that's still going to come back to you. That's still going to be something that if nothing else, you're going to feel better about yourself because you're not going to go into your job saying, gosh, how am I going to trick them today? Instead you're going in and saying, how am I going to improve the lives of these people that I touch? You know, it's like it's it's like sales. If you're selling somebody to something, something to somebody that they want or they need, that's awesome. If you're trying to sell them something they never want, they're never going to use. It's just it's a difficult, challenging thing to get into. And it's never going to be as fulfilling. I mean, unless you're some twisted individual, I don't think you're going to go in and be happy with that. So there's so much value that you're teeing up in terms of where we can take this conversation right now. And immediately I think of Zig Ziglar, who was one of my first sales mentors. And one of his books, I don't remember which one, but in this book, he talks about the idea that salespeople don't convince people to buy things. That's not what selling is. Zig would say selling is a transference of emotion, getting you to feel the way I feel about this product. But really, at its core, selling is removing the barriers to purchase. My job as a salesperson is to remove any doubt, any barrier that you have in your mind that making this purchase is the right decision. It's not to convince you that making this purchase is the right decision. You've got to believe that. My job is to remove the friction, get all the doubt out of the way. That's a leader's job. A leader's job is to remove friction for their people. That's why you've got, you know, with the military, we'd say that's why you got the rank. It's not because you're such a great person that everybody salutes you so you remember how great you are. They salute you because of what you do for them, which is removing the obstacles to their success. I think a lot of leaders have forgotten that that's the reason they have the title. It's the reason they have that extra salary, that extra bonus opportunity. Your job is to make your subordinates job easier by removing unnecessary friction. Now, there's some friction, you know, like a little baby bird has to peck at that shell to be born. That's what creates the strength that it needs to survive. There's some friction that's just a part of getting good, of growing. But there's a whole lot of friction present in organizations that I call legacy friction that's there because of that shoulder shrug you did earlier that day. What are you going to do? Just the way it's been, you know, I dealt with that. You're going to deal with it, too. Friends, that is BS. It's it's it's long past time that leaders took a hard look in the mirror and said, am I coming to work to help my subordinates or am I coming to work because I believe they're there to help me? You know, service isn't spelled S.E.R.V.E. space, U.S. It's not serve us. It's service. We need servant leaders who are there to remove the friction, remove the obstacles for their subordinates so that they can get the job done. Now, that having been said, you brought up a really important point. There are some folks who land in a job and after a period of time decide this is not this is not for me. I call those folks leapers. They're a very important part of an organization. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics here in the U.S. recently released on a say it was like a twenty twenty nineteen or twenty twenty was this report. The average tenure of new entrants into the workforce at an organization is between two and four years. So someone starts at your company if they last four years, you're lucky. Two years, that's about average. Little less. OK, let's look into why. But two to four years. So if we know that we should prepare for the fact that we're going to hire people that aren't going to stay. Now, you said, well, is the approach that, you know, do we not train them? Do we not spend our valuable time and money developing them because they're just going to leave anyway? I would argue that if you don't develop them, they won't have the ability to leave and they'll be more incentivized to just stay to as minimum as they can. We call that that's being called quiet quitting right now. Right. Yeah. Doing doing as little as I can such that I don't get fired. I'd argue that we should call that silently striking because that's really, you know, quitting would imply you don't pay them anymore. But they're they're still there. So they're silently striking. I think that's more dangerous. And I think it's actually better for us as an organization long term to develop people and get them where they want to go, whether it's internally or externally, give them the resources and the development to get them where they want to go. And that will pay us in dividends long term. Here's one example, an organization called VaynerMedia developed an alumni program for people that leave the organization. The HR department keeps track of them over time. Little text message here, phone call there just once or twice a year to keep the line of communication open. These people are now effectively talent ambassadors. It's not an official title, but unofficially, they're out there spreading the good word about VaynerMedia because the folks there helped them get to the next stop. I saw this play out at the bar I worked at, the piano bar, when folks would come in and want to interview for a job as a bartender. We didn't hire people without bartending experience. So that means you had to go work at a bar somewhere. Let's say you came in to interview for the role and we said, no, go get some experience and come back. You're going to go somewhere else and they're going to teach you at a bartend. And as soon as you feel like you got your stuff together, you're going to leave because the piano bar I work at was where you wanted to be. That's one version of a leaper. OK, they need to they need to get experience, work experience to get to the place they really want to go. The other version is when we had somebody come in who had been a head bartender at a pretty impressive bar in Las Vegas and they'd moved to the East Coast area, moved to the Philly area. They came in and got a job as our general manager. That's an interesting leap. So they worked at a super high end place and then they came to our bar in Philadelphia, which I'm not saying was was not high end, but it's not a Vegas nightclub. And they took a very high titled role. Don't we see this happening to you? You're a you're a product manager at Amazon or Apple or name a big global company. And then you stay in that same industry, go to a much smaller company, maybe a mom and pop or privately owned, you know, 30, 40 person organization. And all of a sudden, you're the chief technology officer there or you're the chief sales officer. So we have folks that make that type of leap to. At the end of the day, who does retention benefit? You know, this this idea that, well, they're going to leave, why don't we get them to stay? Is this I often channel like my inner Chevy Chase from Kenny Shack, where he's like, is this Russia, Danny? This is Russia. Like, is this prison? This isn't prison. This is a company. But why is our why is our goal to keep, keep, keep, stay, stay, stay, keep, keep, keep, keep me, me, me like retention is such a selfish ideal or goal for an organization unless it benefits the individual. Do we want to retain you because we're giving you equity or the option to have equity? And so in five years, that would vest and you'll own part of this company. Well, then retention makes a whole lot of sense. Yeah, let's do that. But as an employee, what do I get if I stay longer? What's the take that a step further? Employee engagement. We know what the value is to the organization, but what's the value to the employee? Do I get paid more for performing better? Do I get paid more for performing better? I mean, literally paid more for performing better. Is there a way to do 110 percent of my job demonstrably, objectively, so I can make more money? If there is, then there's a direct correlation to engagement for the employee. If not, what's at the end of that engagement rainbow for the individual? I'd argue nothing. So we have to rethink this. And as organizations spend this time, thousands of hours, and they spend this money, millions of dollars trying to tackle the problem of engagement. We don't see any movement. We don't see the needle move at all. In fact, I was just at an event in Alabama speaking to a group of meetings, professionals. And someone there was saying they remember before the Internet, right, before the Internet. When Robert Half would produce reports on workforce engagement. So, folks, we're talking pre-Internet. That's the 80s. You know, that's like I'm not that good at math, but that's like almost 50 years ago now. So for 50 years, we've had the same problem. What if the problem isn't engagement? What if the problem is actually disengagement? Before you go, Doug, Greg, let me explain. A few years back, the federal government in the US had a crisis, right? We were running out of money and we couldn't borrow any more money because this thing called the debt ceiling. And so there was this big conversation in Congress. Do we raise the debt ceiling or do we curb our spending? How do we deal with this problem? And somebody came up with the analogy of sewage and a house. So if your house, Rob, was filling up with sewage, just pumping into your house, stinky sewage, would you want a bigger house or would you want to stop the flow of sewage? We spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours trying to build a bigger house, trying to create more engagement. But what are we doing to identify where the disengagement is coming from? Each person who comes to work in an organization, ostensibly, at the moment of hire is engaged. They've just participated in an interview process. They've accepted the job offer. In theory, they want it to go well. Everybody who walks into my piano bar, in theory, wants to have a good time. It's my job, like the professor said, to give them what they want. They will stay engaged as long as they believe I can and will give them what they want. We've got to get better at identifying what our people really want and delivering it to them. And for the Leapers, it's helping them get where they want to go. There's two other categories of people we're not going to get into now, but if we give them what they want, they will stay engaged. Unless and until we as an organization make our problem their problem. That's the moment when people disengage. Disengagement is a conscious choice. And it happens when I believe that you won't give me what I want or I get sick of you making your problem my problem. You know, for example, at the beginning of the pandemic, folks said, hey, we can't give out raises because we don't know where the money is going to go. Well, I'm an employee and that sounds like a you problem, Mr. Organizations. It doesn't sound like a me problem. That sounds like a you problem. Guess you and those high paid executives better figure it out. Maybe you could take a pay cut so the lower folks could get a raise. Show us that we're in this together. And there are lots of other ways to do this than money. I'm not I'm not fixated on money. There are lots of other ways to show appreciation. But if you're in a low paid organization, you're not going to get a raise. There are lots of other ways to show appreciation. But employees, if they're going to really engage, that's that's a two way street. You've got to be in this together with them, helping them get what you what they want. And they'll help you get what you want. Yeah, there's there's a ton in there. Yeah, I just you know, the one thing I think about is I use sports analogies a lot of sort of like the fruit fly of careers, because I think from the development point of view of an employee is look at these places, they go spend money. You get somebody that's out of the junior leagues or college or whatever. You bring them on your team. You want them to get better than you want them to. You know, you want them to be part of the team, but you also want them to get better because your your expectation is I'm, you know, hiring you as a rookie. But then in a year, you're going to be better and the next year after that, you're going to be better. And it is sort of a nice problem to have that you've now developed all these players to a point where it's hard to especially with salary caps on that. Now you're struggling because you have so many good people from a business point of view. If you think of the same thing, you get to a certain point where like, hey, we're known if we're known as we bring people in and the people that come in feel like they're getting better while they're here, it actually then gives them a disincentive to leave because they're going to say, wait, as soon as I leave, I'm going to I'm going to I'm not going to be growing as much. Now I'm going to have to find somebody else and take that risk. And that's like you mentioned, you know, VaynerMedia. And I think that is one of the one of the very missed things about Gary Vaynerchuk and how he's built stuff because I've watched him for years as before he was VaynerMedia and then how he's done that listening to some of his approaches is it really is. Yeah, he's really great. He grew up in this family kind of feel. And you can listen to all these people and look at those that have worked with him and they were grown and grown and grown. And sometimes they grew to a point where it's like, OK, you got to go off and do your own thing. Or they say, hey, I now want to spread my wings. I've learned all this. I want to actually start doing more than learning. And that's a good example of an organization that just and if you look at like the top 10 that come out for, you know, Inc. or Fortune 500 or whatever, almost every year you're going to find that one of the huge things they do is that they build their people. They don't they don't come in there and find a way to like lock them into, you know, handcuffs or that it's not pay. It's almost I don't like it's ever you don't see it like, hey, we're the most they pay their people more than anybody else. That's not it. That's a it's a you know, it's a complete false direction to go down. You find so many other ways. And I think the pay comes people will they'll be able to pay their bills. They'll be able to go get that yacht or whatever it is they want. But the bigger thing is that they're going to feel like every day I come to work, it's it's exciting. It's something I look forward to. I'm growing in some way. I've got new experiences. I've got people that are backing me. And it's I guess one other thing I say is like, yeah, you use the word that's become so popular. And it wasn't until recently and I wish I remember who it was was talking about it on leadership is he said, you know, I'm sort of tired of the servant leadership thing because that's that's just leadership. It's not, you know, it if you're doing it right, you know, you put it perfectly. You're removing the obstacles for the people that work for you so they can do their job better. And I've also heard it is you are you finding a way to expand and grow your abilities through this team as you're clearing stuff, you're showing them, you know, here's the paths to go get the work done. Now, go do it because otherwise, especially in the entrepreneur world and that then you end up sucking up all your time doing it and you're never able to scale. The way you scale is that you find ways to remove those obstacles, allow other people do it, grow them to that point. And then you're off and running. And that seems like a good place to pause this episode, this part of our interview. We will come back with part four and wrap up our interview with Greg Offner. I promise we start with listening to him and get his take in a continued look at how do you develop, how an organization develops their team and making sure those people stick around? We get into sort of the sort of wrapping up the meat of this a little bit. And it does get back to some things we've talked about the idea of approach avoidance or. Trying to get away from something and the idea of once you start running, you're going to probably keep running. But Greg's got a lot of great insights and we really get into the meat of his of what he offers and what his message is next episode around. And then we will move on. We'll continue. We are not done yet. So for now, we'll wrap it up. Go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Develop-a-Noor. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Develop-a-Noor site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Brodhead or Source Code of Happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week. And this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time we talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at DevelopaNoor.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.