Strong Teams S1 E1 - The Quiet Phenomenon In the Workplace

If you’ve perused social media or news websites lately you’ve likely run across many new buzzwords used to describe the changing workplace environment. Lately, two labels are getting more discussion than all others combined—Quiet Quitting and Quiet Firing.  Although the media represents these concepts as new, the practices they describe have been a pattern in organizations for a long time.

Join Rodney Cox and Steve NeSmith as they discuss this phenomenon in the workplace.

Host: Rodney Cox

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Transcript

Steve NeSmith  0:01  
Welcome, welcome to the strong teams.com podcast. My name is Steve Naismith. And I'm going to be your co host today.

Rodney Cox  0:09  
And I'm Rodney Cox, a host of strong teams.com podcast.

Steve NeSmith  0:14  
And today we're going to be digging into a topic that we talked about on a recent episode, the quiet phenomenon happening in the workplace today, but we're gonna dig into it a little bit more, and give you some instruction along the way, Rodney, are you ready?

Rodney Cox  0:27  
I'm

So Steve, I wanted to go a lot deeper in this quiet phenomena, because I tend to see inside of organizations kind of a lifecycle happening with employees from the day in which we hire them until the day in which they potentially walk out of our organization, they quit, or we fire them. And I'd like to talk a little bit about those life cycles with you and kind of do some role playing to see if they can help our listeners today you gain for that I am game for that? j

Steve NeSmith  1:00  
Rodney just before we get into the meat of the topic and start role playing. Just if you are joining us for the first time and did not catch our last episode, we spent a little bit of time talking about quiet quitting and quiet firing in the workplace. That was a result of an article that we recently posted at ministry insights.com. And so today, we're just we felt like it deserved, really just a lot more. A lot more discussion. And so quiet quitting, as we talked about last time is when a an employee does really the bare minimum, just to get by, in an effort to really kind of quietly send a message that there they are done at the organization. But they still want to stay and pick up a paycheck and quiet hiring is coming from the leadership perspective where the leader has realized that maybe a department or an individual is not performing to standard and starts to make the environment so uncomfortable, that employee or maybe even entire team just feels almost forced to leave. Both of these are really unhealthy practices. And they're really common these days. And so, so that's just a little bit of context for folks that may be listening for the first time. Yeah, and I think the key word here is quiet. You know, anytime things go quiet, it ought to really draw a few red flags, quite frankly. And so that's really what we want to press in here today.

Rodney Cox  2:35  
When individuals join your organization, most individuals come into that organization on fire. Really, they're motivated, extremely motivated, and they're excited to get started. Would you agree with that, Steve? Always I refer to it as the honeymoon period. Yeah, the honeymoon period, everybody enjoys that period. Deca is a leader you enjoy just as much because you've got new fresh talent inside the organization. Yeah, absolutely. But the reality is, is that they might be excited, but they're not yet competent. They really don't know how we do business and what makes us unique, and so on, so forth. And through on the job training, and maybe even formal education that happens inside the organization, people kind of move to a second phase in the lifecycle that we see. And it's actually the place in which we'd want most employees to stay. And that's where they're really excited about the mission, they're really excited about the purpose of the organization, they're excited about who they're working with. And they now have a high level of competence. And these individuals, when they come in every day, they're putting their hand to the plow, and they're making things happen and, and so that's where we want the majority of our employees to land. But over time, what we tend to see is individuals move to this place of the lifecycle that we call lifecycle, stage three. And then lifecycle stage three, this is where people grow quiet. And they are actually quietly quitting. They're no longer putting their hand to the plow quite the way they were. Their efficiency and effectiveness is going down, you can see it as a leader, you're not having the conversations with them any longer. And I would say it's more not only out of maybe a lack of trust in the organization, but the lack of relational capital. So I'd like to camp on this thing called relational capital for just a few minutes. Steve, if you're willing to go a little deeper with that. 

Steve NeSmith  4:33  
I think it's a great place to pause. Rodney, I think that what a lot of and I'll just this has been my experience. What a lot of leaders don't understand is that people don't just work for organizations, people work for people. You're never going to be able to change that no matter how fantastic the organization is, no matter how many Friday afternoon parties you throw for somebody's birthday. You know, even hitting a milestone, that that relational capital is important. I think even more so for those introverted leaders out there, I can raise my hand and say I fall into that category. But, but absolutely relational capital is, is more important than I think a lot of leaders realize, yeah, and I think post pandemic more more than ever, right? 

Rodney Cox  5:23  
I mean, think about all the relational capital that was, you know, lost in individuals working from home, have we we've been hiring and onboarding people, things have changed dramatically. And, you know, I hate to bring our products into this conversation. But it's bound to happen. And we released a product last year called Quick strings. And it's just a one page document designed around about a 30 minute interaction with your team that's really designed in order to help teammates increase their relational capital, as well as me and you relate, increase our relational capital, in other words, maybe leader to subordinate. And I would really encourage you, if you're listening to this, and you've got people on your team that are quietly quitting. In other words, you really aren't having the same conversations you used to have with them. And maybe you have moved to the place to where you're quietly firing them, you have actually made assumptions about why they're not putting their hand to the plow any longer. And you've made the decision just to let them go. And you're putting them in situations and giving them tasks and things of that nature that just really don't fit their strengths fit who they are. And if you're honest with yourself, maybe even trying to make them miserable enough to exit the organization. And so I would really challenge you to think about are you quietly firing the people that are quietly quitting on you? And maybe what is the different strategy you could take? 

Steve NeSmith  6:50  
Well, I caught that word assumption in there earlier, Rodney, and you know, what they say about assumptions? Right? Absolutely. And just remember, assumption is the lowest form of knowledge, but yet we treated as white. By Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All too often. All too often. And, you know, I think that it's worth also camping on just for a moment Irani about, you know, how does that relational capital, you know, weaken? How does it fall apart? Well, we know there's 100 different ways that that can happen. But, but it happens, you know, easier, it's easier to happen than I think we realize in the sense that leaders are often busy, they may be traveling, they may be in more meetings than the average team member. And so what you find is, these team members start to really question whether or not the leader is on their team or not, or whether they're on their own team. And, and so, you know, I think it's something that you always have to be, you always have to be prioritizing. 

Yeah. And it's harder as a leader to find those things in which in your conversations with individuals that might not be in the office any longer or are just recently back in the office, and you don't have that strong relational capital, you know, find those things in which, you know, you want to give them an attaboy about and encourage them, and, and, and so on. So I just like to, I call it closing the gap, you just need to keep that gap fairly well closed. Yeah, you know, there's an easy trap. As a leader myself, there's an easy trap you can fall into, when you're in lots of senior leadership meetings, which is starting to believe your own press, if you will, starting to believe the things that you're doing are the most important things in the organization. And if you don't dedicate a disproportionately large amount of your time to those things as a senior leader, well, you know, that everybody else really should understand that, including the folks that work with you and for you. And the reality is, is that if you're not in the business of building strong teams, then you're not a strong leader. And and I think that, you know, just a finding that balance, and it looks different for every organization. But finding that balance between, you know, dedicating time to those very important projects and meetings, and balancing that with, with really keeping closing the gap between you and your team on a daily basis, not a weekly basis, you know, you shouldn't I know that it was easy for me to fall into the trap that well, I've got a weekly got a weekly check in meeting with my team. So I'll you know, build relational capital for that one hour. And then I'll go back to the things that are very important to do. And the fact that you really need to be in building relational capital every single day. Yep. So you know, let us really encourage you as a leader to lean in, if you have people that are quietly quitting on you, or if you've actually moved to the place where you quietly firing someone and do four things for us. The first thing we want you to do is stop, take a deep breath, humble yourself and be willing to say, You know what, I'm probably the problem here, but I'm also

Rodney Cox  10:00  
The solution. So as a leader, I'm going to increase my relational capital, I'm going to take the time to document the issues in advance of my conversation with this employee, I want to try and include the details in the dates of when I'm experiencing their low performance or productivity, or where maybe they aren't putting their hand to the plow. I'd like I'd like for you to set a meeting with that individual. And I'd like for you to address the issue. And once again, do that in a spirit of humility, being willing to esteem the other person higher than yourself. We we know that God gives grace to the humble, but he resists the proud. And during your meeting, why don't you think about seeking to understand and clarify your assumptions, because what you assumed a true, be true might not be true. And and it's in that place of discovering truth that we can find the clarity we need in order to do the fourth thing, and that's document what we both agree on that we can do. In order to increase our relational capital, close the gap, as Steve has said, and actually increase our performance in the organization once again, and bring the joy back and what we do on a day to day basis.

Steve NeSmith  11:10  
Well, I think this has been a timely conversation. I know that we don't often dig specifically into one topic for a for a podcast episode, but with hybrid offices and remote teams, and really the headlines being full of articles, discussions about quiet firing and quiet quitting. I'm really glad we spent the time today and as always, I just I always benefit from sitting down with you Rodney and hearing hearing you teach and, and it's been a pleasure today.

Rodney Cox  11:44  
Yeah, likewise, Steven, I always enjoy my time with you. And until we meet again, God bless

Transcribed by https://otter.ai