Sunday Pick: How to quit (and why it matters) with Anthony Klotz | from Fixable

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
Happy Sunday, y'all, Elise Hue here. Today, we're bringing you a Sunday Pick, where we share an episode of another podcast from TED, handpicked by us for you.
During the pandemic, organizational psychologist and professor Anthony Klotz predicted the Great Resignation, a mass exodus of unhappy workers leaving their jobs after COVID epiphanies. Now, he's seeing a different pattern emerge, as people opt to hunker down in current jobs until they can find a better option. In this recent episode of Fixable, Anthony, whose work explores how we make decisions in our jobs and careers, hosts Anne and Frances talk with him on the patterns developing right now in the world of quitting. He offers practical advice for how to make measured decisions in a fickle job market and explains the phenomenon he calls Jolt, when a person experiences something that causes them to suddenly reevaluate their position. Together, they also work through a listener's dilemma as she navigates a relationship with collaborators who mistrust each other and offers tips for leaders who suspect a team member may be considering quitting.
Whatever you're dealing with at work, Fixable is there to help, offering actionable insights to create meaningful change in your life and workplace. Listen to Fixable wherever you get your podcasts, and if you have a problem you want fixed, call their hotline anytime at 234-FIXABLE, that's 234-349-2253 to leave Anne and Frances a voicemail with your workplace problem. That's coming up right after a short break.

**Anthony Klotz** (1:46)
I think right now in the world of quitting, people are making fast quitting decisions more than they ever have.
Which allows some people to get out of bad situations and access the career they dream more quickly. It also leads to higher levels of regret around quitting than we've seen before.

**Anne Morris** (2:10)
This is Fixable, a show where we take the problems at work that feel unfixable and prove that they're not. I'm Anne Morris.

**Frances Frey** (2:18)
And I'm Frances Frey.

**Anne Morris** (2:20)
Frances, it feels like so many of us are holding our breath and just gripping the steering wheel of work right now.
And I get it. We were just starting to deal with all of the pandemic era change to the workplace. And then AI arrived in the group chat alongside all kinds of macro uncertainty and change.

**Frances Frey** (2:41)
Yeah, it does seem like the theme of the show recently is, how do we manage this?

**Anne Morris** (2:49)
Yeah, I know. We keep inviting people to the show to make us feel better about this and help us manage and better understand this period of massive change.

**Frances Frey** (3:01)
Then quite honestly, to help us find a rigorous and an optimistic way forward and both of those are necessary.

**Anne Morris** (3:06)
Absolutely. Today, we're going to keep going. And we're bringing on a really fascinating guest who studies quitting as a window into our experience of work.
His research went viral during the pandemic when he coined the phrase, the great resignation. At the time, he predicted that we'd see a wave of people quitting their jobs after pandemic-related epiphanies.

**Frances Frey** (3:32)
It must be so cool to be right.

**Anne Morris** (3:37)
You pretended so rare for you.
I'm talking about Anthony Klotz. Anthony is an organizational psychologist and professor at the London School of Management. He's the author of the recent book, Jolted, Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters. In this book, he's also exploring a larger question, which is how we actually make decisions in our jobs and careers.

**Frances Frey** (4:02)
I'm so curious about jolts. I want to understand jolts. I want to understand how to endure them, how to create them, all thing jolts. So I'm really excited about that.
I also, to the earlier point where he got the prediction right, I want to understand how he sees around corners. Yeah. I think he does and I'd love to learn from it.

**Anne Morris** (4:22)
Yes, me too. So let's bring him in. Anthony Klotz, welcome to Fixable.

**Anthony Klotz** (4:36)
Thanks for having me.

**Anne Morris** (4:38)
So if we may be so bold as to describe you to you as a way to get this party started, you seem to be very good at making sense of larger forces and patterns that are impacting our experience of work.
So much is shifting right now in the workplace. What do you think are the major patterns we should be paying attention to right now? What do you think is signal versus noise for most people?

**Anthony Klotz** (5:06)
Yeah. So there are a few interesting patterns and trends I think going on in the world of work right now. And a lot of it has to do with AI. But I think before we get into that, like a lot of it has to do with where we were five years ago.