Why People Really Quit - Bonnie Low-Kramen

0:00Bonnie Low-Kramen:Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest today is Bonnie Lowe-Craman. Bonnie is one of the most respected voices in the field of executive and personal assistant training, having taught in 14 countries and worked with organizations including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, the Wharton School, and even the British Parliament.

0:44Bonnie Low-Kramen:But what makes Bonnie's perspective so fascinating is where it all began. For 25 years, she served as the personal assistant to Academy Award winning actress, Olympia Dukakis, giving her a front row seat to leadership, human behavior, communication, trust, pressure, and what really makes people thrive at work or walk away from it. She's the author of the book, Staff Matters, People Focus Solutions for the Ultimate New Workplace and Be the Ultimate Assistant. Her TEDx talk is titled The Real Reason People Quit, and her insights have appeared in both Harvard Business Review and Forbes. But this is not just a conversation about assistance.

1:27Bonnie Low-Kramen:It's a conversation about leadership, about respect, about culture, about the people behind the people, and the invisible glue that holds organizations together while everyone else is busy chasing the next shiny AI headline. Amen to that. Body brings something we could all use a little more of, real world perspective from someone who understands that no technology will ever replace the value of deeply human work. Body, welcome to the show. Steve, thank you so much. I'm like, yeah, all of that. Everything you just said. Yeah. Exactly. It's very impressive. Okay, I want to jump in with the TEDx talk you did.

2:06Bonnie Low-Kramen:The title alone is so intriguing. The Real Reasons People Quit. Tell my audience about it. What's the inspiration for it? Everything. Yeah, thanks so much. I'm happy you found it so compelling. You know, when a TEDx talk came my way to do, I remember thinking, well, if I only get to do one in my whole life, what is it that I need to talk about? And what I landed on was to talk about the thing that I don't think is being talked about enough in the workplace. Because in my work with executive assistants, so many of them end up quitting their jobs because they're being treated disrespectfully or in some way not fairly in their view.

2:46And when they leave, they're either not invited to have an exit interview or they choose not to say because, you know, who wants to put themselves into the frying pan that way? And so in my mind, I'm thinking leaders in HR are walking around and they don't really know. I don't think all of them know why people are really walking out the door. And that's what I decided to say in this talk. And on the flip side, I shared with the audience the top four things that staff want. If leaders are interested in holding onto their people, rather than having them run for the exit, I mean, who doesn't remember the great resignation from the pandemic, right?

3:26If leaders want to hold onto their people, what they want most, number one is not money. Number one is respect. Number two is appreciation and a sense of belonging, that they matter, that it matters if they're there, that they're not just a number. I mean, that's the famous thing we all hear. You know, I just feel like a number. I feel like it doesn't, you know, if I'm here or not, it doesn't really matter. And so why should I care? The third thing people want is fair compensation. I'm not talking about greedy. People want to be able to pay their bills and put food on the table. Those are the people I talk to.

4:02And then the fourth thing that people want in the workplace is to be supported to keep learning and growing. Because I know everybody who's listening notices that this workplace is super complicated and it's changing by the minute. AI is changing things, but it's not only about AI. Leaders had better get on to the fact that they need to keep providing professional development opportunities for their teams.

4:25Bonnie Low-Kramen:Sorry, but why do so many still get it wrong? Why do so many get it wrong? I believe because leaders in HR are incentivized by money. They're incentivized by making the most profit possible. And that means really, you know, putting the thumb down on people to produce. They are not incentivized to have culture of respect that retains people. That script, I believe, has to flip. There are companies out there that do both. I have seen it. I have been inside companies that treat people respectfully, fairly, and they're killing it at the bottom line and profits. So, so many leaders get it wrong because they haven't been trained the right way to do it.

5:12Bonnie Low-Kramen:Okay, which is a good segue to my next question. And it's kind of a generic question, but do people quit companies or do they quit managers? Oh, 100 % they quit managers. Percent. It's all about the people. I'll remember when I'm in front of audiences, sometimes I'll ask, just think about the best boss you ever had. Tell me what those adjectives are. What does that look like? And it's instant. They start shouting that, you know, I had my voice. I had a seat at the table. You know, he was kind. He knew my name, that kind of thing. And then I say, tell me what the bad boss looked like that you had.

5:51And that is also instant. Most people have a very visceral reaction to those questions. And even leaders, what gets me, Steve, is have they forgotten what it was like to actually be a worker as opposed to a leader and a CEO? though they didn't just spring out of college, a CEO, that's what gets me is I need them to remember and be in touch with what it feels like to be working for and with somebody else who has supervisory control over you.

6:27Bonnie Low-Kramen:Yeah. I mean, it sounds, I use the word simple a lot in my life and it sounds simple, but that's the point. You know, we all came up the same way we did for the most part. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you're, you know, you were born with a silver spoon, Super rare. We all had to figure out how to make a living. So, you know, the world is moving so fast. Chapter one of Staff Matters is called empathy. And that is what I think is needed most. We need to imagine ourselves in your shoes, in somebody else's shoes. Once that happens, then we have a chance to work well together. I work in rooms of very diverse people, diverse ages, diverse gender, diverse ethnicity.

7:11And really, when it comes down to it, they have so much more in common than not. If only they had a chance to talk to each other. We've got a workplace that's hybrid and remote and feels fragmented and fractured and communicating over webcams. People were not prepared to communicate in this way. And I think people are still adapting to this new way of working. I don't know. Perhaps you have an opinion about that yourself.

7:39Bonnie Low-Kramen:I do. I do. And I agree with you. I mean, the pandemic, which is now going on, what, six years in the rearview mirror? but those impacts, a lot of them will never go away for one reason or another. Yeah. I agree with you. I mean, we've been through something and most people, they don't walk around with it, you know, advertise on the outside of themselves, but most people have experienced some kind of loss and illness and it was serious. You know, sometimes I wake up and I think, did that really happen? And it did. And what I advise assistants to do, because they're on the front lines of all the stress and anxiety that leaders feel in the workplace.

8:19I think there's a lot of residual stress and anxiety from the pandemic six years ago. I think it's a mistake to have the attitude, well, that's done. It's over. We're never going to see that again. I mean, now we're dealing with a new virus that's out there, thankfully not as serious as COVID. But I don't know that there's any human being walking around thinking, well, that will never happen again.

8:42Bonnie Low-Kramen:No, I want to, I want to hear about the, you said this to me, I think off when we first talked to her in an email about your aha moment at when you were eight, when you were 46. Tell us about that. Yeah. In the introduction to staff matters, I talk about a metric that I learned back in 2012 that blew my mind, that changed the way I teach because it seems to me You asked me earlier, why do so many leaders get it wrong? That's the question that would keep me up at night. And what I found was the study that was done by a credible organization of 7 ,000 leaders around the world. And they figured out the average age that a leader gets their very first formal training in managing people.

9:27And it is a shocking age 46. and you don't have to be a math genius to figure out that most leaders, if they went to college, which most of them did, they're out of college more than 20 years before they ever received their very first formal training in managing people. And that explained so much. It explained why so many assistants and staff felt poorly managed, that their leaders simply haven't learned how. They haven't learned how to have those difficult conversations. Steve, I know, I believe you'll trust me when I tell you that assistants report that their executives avoid tough conversations.

10:11They just don't want to have them. And why is that? They don't have any practice or training in it. It's hard enough having a difficult conversation, period, but it's hard to do it over a webcam. It's hard to do it when you have no context, when you have no training. So, you know, I've, I spent a lot of time interviewing psychologists and leadership experts to help me figure out what's in play here, what, and, and that age 46 thing really made sense to me that, okay, then that it's not that these leaders are trying to be mean or nasty necessarily they just they're suffering from lack of education they don't know what they don't know

10:54Bonnie Low-Kramen:ignorance is the hard truth and i don't i think it's i think it's equally important to to note that by that age the majority of us have bought houses gotten married had kids so there's all that personal life and i you know i can see you shaking your head going those pressures the pressures A lot of role modeling has happened. A lot of influence has happened. And so I remember learning that metric and thinking to myself, this is not okay. So we're leaving it to luck? We're leaving it to luck that a leader has had a good role, that was raised right, whoever raised him or her, and that whoever they were managed by figured it out and they had a good role model.

11:43So it just feels like we should be doing this so much better.

11:48Bonnie Low-Kramen:Yeah. For leaders who are listening who right now are struggling with things like communication and empathy, what advice would you give them? They must seek out quality training. And there's a lot out there. And there's so many books and so many courses. The message, though, is it needs to be a willingness to be open, to understand that you're great at a lot of things, but you're not necessarily great at this. And one way to tell you're not necessarily great at this, number one is to look at your employee retention rates. That's a really good metric. And the second way to do it is to ask your people, is to ask them, is to give them psychological safety to tell you the truth.

12:32And that requires high EQ. It requires emotional intelligence and a real maturity for me to come to you, Steve, and say, you know what, Steve, I think I'm not doing a few things well. I really value your honest feedback about what you see. And I promise you, there will not be backlash. There will not be repercussions. You will not have to pay a price for being the messenger to me.

13:00Bonnie Low-Kramen:Yep. That requires also humility and just a level of confidence in your own abilities to kind of expose yourself in a matter of speaking. Right. True. I did it when I was, you know, when I've had people report to me, you got it's like, it's literally, you got to take the good with the bad. Right. And be prepared to hear a hard thing. Yep. And be prepared to understand the source, because you want to ask people who really do have an insight and to know that you may not end up agreeing with everything they say. Just because they say a hard thing doesn't mean it's necessarily true because everyone is coming to the workplace with their own baggage, with their own history, with their own mortgages, with their own experience with other leaders and other peers.

13:52So it's a complicated, messy situation, this mix of personalities. That's why I love personality assessments. We give that at our workshop, the DISC assessment. it's valuable to have some insights, your own way of working, your own personality, because we're not all alike, and then to get some insight to the people around you. And that takes time and energy. It's hard work managing people. And I try to give my students, these executive assistants and personal assistants, empathy for leaders. It's not easy to be a leader. And in fact, the data is showing that fewer and fewer people are applying for leadership positions And for good reason, it is really damned hard.

14:37Bonnie Low-Kramen:Oh, I completely agree. How would you say AI is changing leadership? Well, at this moment in 2026, it is still a pretty new technology on the scene. And therefore, the image that I come to a lot, and I speak with assistants pretty much every day who report what's going on inside their companies, that leaders are, strong words, frantically trying to decide which AI platforms to invest money in, time in, training in. So it's kind of like flying, building the plane as they're flying it. You know, what to do, chat GPT or clot or gamma or perplexity, like what? So it's not only the platforms themselves, how to use it.

15:25you don't magically know how to be a great prompter. And it's a new skill that we're all learning. AI is causing a whole other level of anxiety and stress inside workplaces. And I believe some companies who are the leaders who are making the decision to, you know, downsize and lay off hundreds, maybe thousands of people, I'm pretty sure they're going to discover that they've cut too close to the bone.

15:54Bonnie Low-Kramen:Yeah. Eventually. But at what price? There are too many stories about being let go in a mass email. I don't know if you've seen the new movie, Devil Wears Prada, but that's the opening scene where everyone is, is let go in an, in a text message. That's happening. That's not just movies. No, no, no. Oracle is the one that comes to most mind. Most recently, they did a mass layoff through an email. There has to be a better way. There has to be. And there is a better way. It's called being human. Yeah. You know, there's no working person who doesn't understand that sometimes people have to be laid off and downsized.

16:33And there's that thing, RIF, a RIF, a reduction in force. And there's all this, these justifications to let people go. OK, that's we know that's a reality of business. It doesn't have to be cruel and inhumane.

16:48Bonnie Low-Kramen:Right. Right. You know, a human hired this person. How about a human fires this person and hopefully provide some support to find new work? You know, there are a lot of people struggling to make a living right now. And I see just a lot of pain out there regarding the job search. And it feels unnecessary. I'm not a Pollyanna. I'm not thinking, oh, no, everybody should have a job. It just doesn't have to be mean-spirited or done so fast that we jump totally over the humanity of it all. I mean, everybody remembers how they're hired, and certainly everybody remembers how they're fired. I was fired one time in my career, and I will never forget it.

17:36I don't know if you, most people in my classes have been fired at least once.

17:40Bonnie Low-Kramen:Oh, I'm totally, I've been riffed and, oh yeah. Yeah. When you've had that experience, it really gives you empathy when it happens to other people. A thousand percent. And it just doesn't have to be that way. Nope. Nope. And I, you know, I know it, will it take longer? Yes. Is it easy to hit send and send out, you know, 9 ,000 emails? Sure. But there has to be a better way. So there has to be a town hall that happens to prep people for what's going on. Let's kind of flip it to, and then you've worked with Google, Amazon, Microsoft. Let's flip it from what leaders aren't doing right and what you've seen, what makes a great leader.

18:19Oh my goodness. What makes a great leader is when they put money and energy into those words that are on the careers tab on the website that say that we have a culture of respect, that we value everyone's contribution, that we believe in everyone's growth. When companies put money behind that and when the leadership makes it clear that the staff truly is the backbone of the company and they're shown appreciation, you know, spot bonuses, acknowledgement at meetings. I had an experience at a very large company where when I did a virtual presentation for them, my slide number two was a thank you slide to the two organizers of the event who happened to be executive assistants.

19:12So I, with approval, I wanted their photos, their headshots and title on the slide. Okay. Thank you. And it's not only just a nice to do, it's something I do at all my presentations. And what the feedback I received, though, was that me asking for that approval of the slide was the catalyst for a very big conversation, that they were so happy to be publicly acknowledged that the organizers admitted to me that what it did was it revealed that so many of the people on the team felt invisible. And that what they started talking about was how could we do more of this? How could we publicly acknowledge more people authentically and not in an organic way?

19:58And I was delighted that that happened. But I hear that very often is that the staff feels invisible. You know, Steve, my point of view is that the very best leaders out there are the ones who understand they've hired their people for a reason or probably many reasons. They looked at their resume and they had several talents and skills that they wanted to leverage. But then after they're there, how about we, so it's not only what they do in their job, but it's what they know and who they know. The best leaders out there tap their staff for their opinions, their thoughts, their ideas. I'm telling you, that is a missed opportunity for so many leaders who just rely on their C-suite direct reports and not going to the people who are in the lower levels, squarely in the middle of the organization.

20:53The beautiful thing about people in the middle of the organization is that they see everything. they're in a great seat you probably know the appliance store best buy sure right joli was the ceo of that company and he wrote a really great book called the heart of business now as the ceo best buy he used to put on a blue shirt that's what they call them the blue shirts and he used to make it a practice to go into the stores and just hang out with the sales people and feel what it felt like. Absolutely. That is a key to success to a successful leader is someone who really is in touch with the product, with what people are actually going through.

21:35And does it take time and energy? Absolutely. Is it totally worth it? I think it is. Assistants say, you know, they're so happy when, oh my gosh, the CEO knows my name. He called me by my name during the pandemic when, you know, a family member was sick stories that I would hear from assistants who said, Oh my gosh, I got a random call from the CEO who wanted to know how my husband was like, what?

22:00Bonnie Low-Kramen:And you think that person's ever going to leave the company? Never. That person is, would, would throw themselves in front of a truck for that CEO as I would have for Olympia. I'm getting goosebumps right now. That's what happens with actions like that. We're going to get to Olympia. You know that feeling. because I got we got it we got to talk about Olympia and pull take us behind the curtain of that life but I know the Hubert Jolie really well and and when I read I read the book and it's and it was something that literally could have been in and I know you know this book good to great the very famous book right by Jim Collins his Hubert Jolie he could have been you know if they did an updated version he could be profiled that's the mark of a great leader I believe so And Hubert gave me permission to quote him in my book in Staff Matters.

22:49I got an email from him.

22:51Bonnie Low-Kramen:You know, great leaders. I get it. Right back. So let's talk about Olympia. Okay. How did that come about, first of all? Oh my gosh. Right place, right time. I began working with Olympia as the PR director at the theater she was running in northern New Jersey called The Whole Theater. I began with her 10 months before she became famous, 10 months before she got cast in Moonstruck. Now, so when I went to work with her in 1980, I'm sure people listening were not even born in 1986, but that's the fact of it. She was not a household name. Nobody knew Olympia Dukakis. And I went to the library to do my research on her.

23:34And I found out that she was a very respected off-Broadway theater actress and a colleague of mine, like networking and helped me get that interview. And I met her and she was not famous. And we connected with each other like you and I would work with each other. We hung out and we, you know, she said, so tell me about you. What's your family like? And we just connected on a human level. I was an English major at Rutgers. I knew how to write. So I'd be writing press releases. And after a half an hour, she said, when can you start? So we began and we developed a great working relationship at work.

24:16And 10 months in, she came to me and said, we have a lot of work to do because I've been cast in a movie and I'm going to Canada to shoot for a month. So we have to do a lot of press releases. We have to really get clear on what's happening. And I asked her, I said, well, you know, I'm thinking I'm, I'm doing PR and I'm thinking, this is very exciting. What, what are you doing? What movie? And she started rattling off while I'm playing Cher's mother. And you know, these people, Danny Aiello and Nicholas, you know, uh, well, Nick, she called him Nicholas Gage. And I said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, are you talking about Nicholas Cage?