Introduction: Breaking Up with Two Weeks’ Notice
Rethinking Two Weeks’ Notice is also available as a eBook from Amazon, Barnes and Noble or wherever you get your eBooks.
I’d like for you to imagine that you are in a happy long-term relationship where everything is going well. If you already are, you don’t have to imagine. Good for you.
Now, imagine that your partner in this relationship summarily informs you that in two weeks, they will move to a new city to live with a new partner.
Would you think this was normal? Of course not. You’d probably be shocked and shaken. Your friends and family would be apoplectic. And the first thing you’d likely ask your partner is why they never gave you any indication that they were unhappy.
This behavior, unimaginable in a personal relationship, happens every single day in the professional world. Right now, as you read these words, someone somewhere is abruptly severing ties with their company. Ideally, employers would like these transitions to be handled carefully and transparently, ensuring that both parties part on good terms and with mutual respect and that no one feels blindsided. However, most organizations struggle to achieve this ideal for a variety of reasons ranging from culture to poor tactics and historically entrenched behaviors. Understanding and addressing these challenges is crucial if we are to have any chance of achieving the seamless and constructive transitions that I believe most leaders and companies and employees would genuinely prefer.
Conversations about role termination play out every day in workplaces all over the world. In many cases, an employee who has never expressed frustration or unhappiness in their job suddenly announces they’re moving on, leaving managers with barely any time to fill the hole they leave in the company. In the United States, the typical standard is to give just two weeks’ notice, which is more of a courtesy than a requirement. Even then, many employees don’t feel safe enough or inclined to give any notice at all.
The inverse happens just as often: a manager tells an underperforming employee that they’re being let go, sometimes immediately. The employee is completely blindsided by the news and dismayed that they are out of a job. I had no idea they thought so poorly of me or my work, the employee thinks, reeling with uncertainty and panicking over how they’ll stay afloat.
Both scenarios tend to produce the same outcome: a strained farewell, lingering resentment, and a loss of trust on both sides. While it’s a shame to let a bad ending spoil a good professional relationship, at least some degree of bad feeling is inevitable. Endings are seared into our memory. When a professional relationship ends suddenly and unpleasantly, the negativity can linger in both parties’ memories like a storm cloud, sometimes obscuring many years of great work and collaboration.
For the employee, leaving a job abruptly or on bad terms can create lasting resentment from their former colleagues that hinders their career progress. Negative back-channel references from former employers can act like an invisible barrier, blocking future opportunities without the employee even realizing it. For the manager and employer, an abrupt departure is almost always disruptive. Two weeks’ notice is rarely enough time to create a smooth transition; in client services companies in particular, the unexpected loss of an employee can put key client relationships at risk. Plus, if the employee is well liked and respected, their exit can impact company morale.
When professional breakups occur so suddenly and acrimoniously, no one wins. Why then do we accept them as normal?
There’s a growing group of leaders who believe the end of a business relationship doesn’t need to be so disruptive. That’s why I wrote this book.
This journey started for me over a decade ago as I grew my company, a marketing agency called Acceleration Partners. We were a high-growth business, yet we differentiated ourselves with a culture built on respectful authenticity and transparency. We made an effort to always let our employees know where they stood, encouraging our managers to proactively engage in difficult conversations and accept direct feedback from their teams. Many of our employees built strong friendships with their teammates and even with their managers.
I thought our culture was noticeably distinct from the churn-and-burn approach pursued by a lot of high-growth companies, both inside and outside our industry. The two weeks’ notice paradigm, however, was one notable way in which we were the same as everyone else, and that bothered me.
I knew this long-held practice wasn’t aligned with our culture, but it seemed like the only widely known playbook for many employees, followed largely by default. Leaving a job is never easy, and telling someone to their face that you don’t want to work with them anymore can be the most difficult part of that process. Partly to avoid these uncomfortable conversations, both managers and employees weren’t voicing their dissatisfaction early enough to create better outcomes.
The two weeks’ notice paradigm was detrimental to our culture, our people, and our clients. Sudden turnover on our delivery teams often frustrated clients and placed increased strain on the remaining team members, who had to reassure the client while taking on additional work. Plus, recruiters had to rush to find a replacement. We found that there was an overall erosion of trust throughout every facet of the business. Without a clearly defined alternative, however, I knew it would persist. And to create that alternative, I eventually realized we needed to flip the whole topic of employee departure on its head.
I posed the question to my leadership team: What if we made it okay for an employee to leave? What if we encouraged our people to discuss any problems or dissatisfaction openly, even if that conversation leads to a decision to transition to another job at another company? Most businesses, especially growing ones, will naturally outgrow employees; likewise, high-performing employees will often end up outgrowing their companies. There’s no reason this perfectly normal evolution should be such a taboo topic that people are afraid to discuss it openly. The natural solution was to strip away that taboo and replace it with a trusting, open, respectful, and mutually beneficial experience for everyone involved. In essence, this new system meant giving everyone the ability to call a timeout when it became clear something wasn’t working as intended.
After some discussion, development, and implementation—and a fair dose of trial and error—we developed what we called an open transition program (OTP). While the chapters ahead will go into this program in granular detail, the high-level principles are as follows:
An employee is encouraged to speak up to their manager if they are unhappy, dissatisfied, or interested in exploring other opportunities.
The company commits to never immediately dismiss someone who admits they are considering leaving and instead attempt to address the root cause of their dissatisfaction.
If the employee or company decides the best option is for the employee to move on, they set a departure timeline together and collaborate to plan for the employee’s replacement.
The company agrees to support an employee departure through a paid transition period with career services, warm references, and more.
Once we implemented this program at Acceleration Partners and saw positive results, I began to share our OTP playbook with the wider professional world. It started to gain traction, especially through a 2019 article in Harvard Business Review and a TEDx talk on the topic that recently topped one hundred thousand views. It soon became clear to me that other leaders also saw the standard process of employee departures as a real pain point in their organizations and wanted something new.
Leaning into the momentum, I wrote this book in 2019 with plans to pitch it to publishers in 2020. The world, of course, had other plans: the COVID-19 pandemic, the Great Resignation, the quiet quitting revolution, and the roiling macroeconomic environment of 2022 and 2023. While rethinking employee departures was more needed than ever during that roller-coaster ride, it was hard to get leaders to think about their long-term strategy when they were just trying to get through the crisis of the week.
It’s clear that even as so many things about the way we work have changed, the two weeks’ notice paradigm has stubbornly persisted. It wreaked havoc on companies during the Great Resignation, as even as little as twenty-four hours’ notice became a common practice. Predictably, many businesses then returned the favor with waves of sudden terminations and layoffs, delivered without care or respect.
The result is an environment where engagement, trust, and satisfaction continue to be near all-time lows, and many businesses, employees, and customers are worse off as a result.1
It’s not too late to fix this problem, and now is as good a time as any to break this paradigm through a broader adoption of OTPs.
This book will take you through the why, what, and how of implementing an OTP in your organization. First, we’ll explain why this framework is effective and share some of the positive outcomes. Next, we’ll talk about how to know whether an OTP is right for your company and what cultural elements are necessary to make the program a success. Finally, we’ll walk through the specifics of implementing an OTP—how employees should express dissatisfaction, how companies should respond, how leaders should manage under- performers in a respectful way, and how a well-timed exit should be executed.
By the end of the book, you’ll have a playbook to build a successful OTP and begin to change how people leave your organization. In turn, this may change the entire culture of your workplace for the better by instilling greater trust, respect, and continuity, helping your organization achieve its ambitious goals and objectives.
Companies that hire well, onboard well, and manage well ought to be able to end things well too. Let’s talk about how.
Up Next - Chapter One: Do You Have A Minute?
Jim Harter, “U.S. Engagement Hits 11-Year Low,” Gallup, April 10, 2024, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/643286/engagement-hits-11-year-low.aspx.