Why you’re just one event away from quitting your job

Below, Anthony Klotz shares five key insights from his new book, Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters.

Klotz is a professor of organizational behavior at UCL School of Management in London. He is best known for predicting the pandemic-related Great Resignation. He has written for the Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal, and his research is regularly published in leading academic journals in management.

What’s the big idea?

Even when quitting feels like a slow burn that dances around your mind for months—or even years—the truth is that finally leaving is caused by a sudden spark. Unexpected “jolts” drive us to rethink our work, often leading to impulsive exits, but we can respond more deliberately to make smarter career moves.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Klotz himself—in the Next Big Idea app, or buy the book.

1. We’re all one event away from quitting our jobs.

If you were to get enough money to live as comfortably as you would like for the rest of your life, would you continue to work or stop?

Every two years since 1972, the General Social Survey has asked a representative sample of Americans this very question. For most of that time, the results have steadily indicated that around 7 out of 10 people would keep working even if they didn’t need the paycheck. Global surveys indicate similar findings. But then the pandemic hit, and the number of people reporting they would keep working if they won the lottery dropped precipitously to an all-time low. This drop corresponded with a historic surge in people quitting their jobs: the Great Resignation.

When teaching and speaking, I ask the lottery question and always find similar results. However, one time, a professional in the audience asked me to rephrase the question so that instead of asking How many people would keep working, it asked How many people would quit their jobs if they won the lottery. I have asked it in this rephrased way many times since, and consistently find that only around 10% of people would keep working at their current job if they struck it rich.

“But then the pandemic hit, and the number of people reporting they would keep working if they won the lottery dropped precipitously to an all-time low.”

What do the changes in these lottery-question responses—before and after the pandemic, and between working in general versus working at your current job—tell us about our relationship with work? We are all just one event away from quitting our jobs. These events, called jolts, happen much more frequently than lottery wins or pandemics.

2. “Jolts” are the missing piece of the quitting puzzle.

In 2005, comedian Dave Chappelle abruptly quit his TV show at the height of its success. What led him to suddenly walk away?

Organizational psychologists have studied the causes of quitting for over a century, and for most of that time, the research could be boiled down to two main reasons for turnover:

• The negative parts of your job add up over time and push you toward quitting.
• When positive opportunities for other jobs or careers are appealing enough, they pull you away from your current job, toward the exit door.

Push and pull. These two forces are intuitive and powerful, and they do explain why people quit in many cases. The only problem is that they only explain around half of the quitting that happens in the workforce. What about the other half, like Chappelle’s sudden turn away from success?

In the early 1990s, organizational researchers Tom Lee and Terry Mitchell found the missing piece of the puzzle. They proposed, and then provided evidence, that quitting often stems from one single event that jolts employees, causing them to rethink their relationship with work. In explaining why he left, Chappelle described one such jolt, in which the bad behavior of a single colleague during a specific episode triggered reflection, and then a strong urge to walk away from the show.

If you think back over your own life, you can probably recall some of the jolts you’ve experienced—events, big and small, that stop you in your tracks, often leading you to make major career changes.

3. You will encounter six types of jolts in your life.

Over the past three decades, researchers, including myself, have catalogued the different types of jolts that spur employees to quit:

• Direct jolts stem from negative events that happen to us at work. They can range from major failures that make us question whether we are a good fit for our jobs, to minor slights like a rude comment from our boss.
• Sideways jolts come to us collaterally, stemming from events that befall our coworkers. These also include when our colleagues quit their jobs, and it affects us through a process called turnover contagion.
• External jolts reside outside of work, when negative events in our personal lives reveal that we need to rethink our relationship with work.
• Specialized jolts such as those that strike during what is, somewhat counterintuitively, the most common time for quitting across organizations: the first year on the job.
• Distant jolts don’t affect us directly, but still can jolt us. Science is increasingly revealing how and why events that happen in faraway places influence us.
• Positive jolts come from the bright side of life, emerging from both the big and the mundane positive events in our lives.

Jolts are everywhere! Because jolts are so prevalent, it can be difficult to determine when we should take action in response to them, versus simply carrying on. But figuring that out is critical, given the stakes involved.

4. The honeymoon-hangover effect is real, but avoidable.

In the years following the Great Resignation, dozens of news stories reported that some workers who quit during that period ultimately regretted their decision. Some went so far as to call it the Great Regret. For those of us who study turnover, however, a spike in regret following a spike in resignations is to be expected, due to what is known as the honeymoon-hangover effect.

One of the most common mistakes people make in response to jolts is quitting too soon. Although quick quitting is sometimes warranted, it is often a one-way ticket to regret. Discovered and coined by management scholar Wendy Boswell, the honeymoon-hangover effect describes the reality that many job and career changes lead to an immediate bump in happiness and well-being, followed by a crash that leaves many workers less happy in their new role than in the one they just quit.

This crash comes from two places. First, it comes from a jolt wherein you realize that one or more expectations that you had about your new job are not going to be met. Second, it comes from the realization that you could have taken action to fix the problem in your prior job before you called it quits.

“One of the most common mistakes people make in response to jolts is quitting too soon.”

While it’s normal to have some mixed feelings after quitting a job, regret needn’t be one of them. By developing a strategy for responding to jolts that goes beyond the binary options of carrying on or walking away, we can maximize the chances of either fixing our relationship with work without quitting or quitting in a way that avoids any hangovers in our next chapter.

5. You can learn to leave better.

In 2012, Greg Smith quit his job at Goldman Sachs by publishing an op-ed in The New York Times that cast the bank in an unfavorable light. Although bridge-burning resignations remain rare, thanks to social media, examples of them are more prevalent than ever.

However, instead of actively harming their relationship with a soon-to-be former employer, most workers try to quit in a way that preserves or strengthens it. And yet, people often resign in ways that unnecessarily harm their connection to the company or don’t set them up for success in their next role. Quitting is complicated and doesn’t come with a guidebook, and you often can’t ask for help from the most useful sources of information—your current coworkers and boss. Still, we can quit better.

The pre-resignation period is critical because it’s when we decide on the reason we’ll give for our departure, who we’ll confide in (if anyone) before we put in our notice, and how we will say goodbye.

“The pre-resignation period is critical.”

Next comes the actual resignation. In my research, I’ve found that there are seven different ways people quit, and each has different consequences for their final days on the job and future relationship with their former employer.

Finally, there’s that awkward time after you’ve announced your departure but before you’ve left. When navigated well, the notice period can provide a satisfying close to one chapter of your life and a smooth transition to the next.

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This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.

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