Authors: Henry Cloud
Validate the Person and the Relationship
Let the other person know that you care about her and your relationship. Say it clearly. “I hope you know how much I value you and our relationship, and I hope this won’t come between us forever. That’s important to me.” Just let her know that you care about her and that the issues at hand are the reasons for the ending, not her as a person.
Likewise, be clear about the issue itself. Stay on message about why you are doing this, and stay objective about why the ending has to occur.
That way, both of you wil have a greater chance of keeping the issues and the person separate.
Get Agreement
In a difficult conversation or ending, emotions are often felt strongly by the person on the receiving end. As a result, what just happened might get fuzzy or even lost. So, at the end of the conversation, get agreement on what has happened and what is to fol ow, if any further steps are required.
“What have you heard me say?” is a good clarifying way to do this. “I want to make sure that we are going away with a good understanding of each other.” If he comes back with a distortion, you can clarify at that point. “No, I am not saying that you are bad in some way. I am just saying that I need to make this change for the reasons I have said. I hope you can hear it that way and not as an attack on you. Are you clear on that?”
There are a lot of different ways to do this, and helping the person correct his distortions can benefit him and also prevent a misinterpretation of what was said.
Leave the conversation with hope and encouragement as wel . “I hope that you can do wel in the future and that you can take this experience in a way that wil help you and not hurt you. That is my wish for you.”
Deal with Defensiveness and Reactions
If you are dealing with a difficult person who gets defensive or argumentative, do not let that get you off message. The best formula I know for this is a combination of empathy and returning to the issue: “I understand that this is frustrating to you and that it is hard to hear. But I want you to understand what I am saying here, and need to make myself perfectly clear. This real y is an issue, and it is not going away, and I need you to hear that.”
Many times, as we saw in the section on fools in chapter 7, the person wil not like hearing what you are saying and may not even get it. But the only person you can control in the conversation is yourself, so stay on message. Whether or not she gets it is not in your control. But remaining empathetic and clear
is
in your control. She cannot take that away from you unless you let her. So don’t let that happen. Hold on to your power, the power of self-control.
You May Need Others
Sometimes there is so much danger of distortion by some personalities that you should make sure that you have someone in the conversation with you—especial y if there is danger of litigation or other bad outcomes. A good HR person, a friend, an attorney, or another manager can al be good backup, depending on the situation or context. Do not feel that that is overkil , as sometimes to not have it is underkil . You may need that witness if you end up in court or even to help handle the conversation itself. “Don’t take a knife to a gunfight” is good advice. In extreme cases, you might want your attorney to have the conversation for you, especial y if evil is present in the situation.
Related to this is the need for good notes and immediate documentation of what occurred. Many times when someone comes after you later, he wil be fuzzy with the facts. The better the documentation you have, especial y of the path that led to the ending, the better off you wil be. Judges and juries wil be impressed with the one who has a clear, provable record of the facts. Again, consult your legal help if you are in a situation that is in this league.
Often, the Outcome Is Good
My friend was stuck in her dating life, and it was time to do one right. She was ready to end another short-term dating relationship by just disappearing and dropping out of sight, off of his radar. I told her that if she ever wanted to get where she wanted to be in life and in dating, she had to learn to be more forthright about endings and delivering bad news to people. And I told her that if she wanted my help anymore, she had to cal this guy and tel him that she had enjoyed going out with him but that she did not see a future with him and wanted to let him know that she did not want to go out anymore.
She resisted, but she final y made the cal . When she did, she was jolted. Expecting the worst, she got the opposite. He said, “I just want to thank you for tel ing me this in a straightforward manner. You have restored my faith in women and also saved me a lot of time and effort by not continuing to go out with me if it were not going to go anywhere. I wish al women would do what you just did.”
She could not believe it, but I just gave her a “told you so” coach’s nod. It not only helped him, but it also took her to a whole new level of functioning in her relationships with men. Not long after that, she final y attracted the kind of guy she had been looking for: honest, responsible, and kind. Why? She had to become that sort of person first before she was going to attract one. That is one of the reasons I had her make that cal in the first place. It was not just for him, but also for her development. She had to become what she was looking for before she would ever find it.
You wil find the same thing. The clearer and kinder you are in your communication of endings and bad news to people, the better the people you wil find yourself surrounded by in life and work. You attract what you are. So do this for them but also for you. You’l be glad you did.
Except in Rare Cases, Don’t Burn Bridges
With evil people, as I have said, burn the bridge. But with everyone else, make the ending one that leaves an impression and a real understanding that you are someone who is kind, honest, and respectful. Even though in this situation things did not work out, you never know when you might cross paths with that person again. Next time, it may be in a deal that wil work, or he may be a different person a few years from now. If you leave things in good shape, you wil be able to pick up where you left off, in a good place, and have a good outcome next time if the situation or opportunity is right. You always win by treating people wel . “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is good not only for them but for you, as wel . You never know when you wil see them again or when life or business may take an unexpected turn and bring you back together.
Who knows? The person you’ve just ended something with may be your boss or lender or investor one day. Make sure you do this wel !
Above All, Don’t Be Squishy
Remember, at this point, you have decided on an ending. So end it and leave it clearly over. Many times people leave a little wiggle room or false hope just to soften the bad news. Do not do that if an ending is what you desire. Otherwise, you are just going to have to do it again. If it is over, make sure that at the end of the conversation, it is over. Don’t leave an open door or window if you don’t want one. Close it now, so you wil not have to do it again.
Embrace the Grief: The Importance of Metabolizing Necessary Endings
M
oe Girkins, a former AT&T executive, is the CEO of Zondervan Publishers, a division of HarperCol ins (my publisher). When I told her I was writing a book on necessary endings and how difficult but important they are, she told me a story.
“I know exactly what you mean,” she said. “I saw this at AT&T when I was there. I had to oversee the closing of a company we owned. It had been there for decades, and the people had invested their lives there. When we had to shut it down, I knew we had to do it right.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“Wel , I had a funeral,” she said.
“A funeral?” I asked.
“Yes, exactly,” she said. “A real ceremony to say good-bye.”
“What did that look like?”
“Wel , we got everyone together and told stories, reminisced, and cried. We celebrated the past and said good-bye to it. And we buried a time capsule.”
“A time capsule?”
“Yes. We asked everyone to put something in the time capsule and told them that we would bury it on the site. The building was going away, and we wanted them to feel that although the business was ending, we would celebrate what they had al done over the years and preserve it for the future. It was real y healthy, and it al owed them to say good-bye, leave it behind, and move on to the next stage.
“I knew that they had had so much invested in it that if we did not al ow them to have a proper good-bye, they would not be able to move on.
People can’t real y disinvest themselves and move on unless they say good-bye to what has been. They need that sense of closure. And once they had that, it was amazing how they were able to go through the transition. But without it, I don’t think it would have happened as wel . It was very important.”
Smart move, I thought. Pretty good for a nonpsychologist, and certainly a sign of a good leader. Why? The reason is basic physics. If you have emotional and other energy invested in something, when you pul that out, and let go, you are going to feel it. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so if you make a move to end something you are invested in, there wil be an impact. And if you do not deal with those feelings, you are going to have to do some funny things to get around them.
So why does that matter?
Pure and simple:
energy and investment
. Whatever you are going to build in your life or your business, it is going to come through investment of energy by you and your people in the new
fill-in-the-blank
. And the only energy you can invest is available energy. To make it available, you have to withdraw it from something else. The technical word for that in psychology is to decathect.
Cathexis
is the investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, an object, or an idea. So
decathexis
is the process of taking it back. The only way to do that is to grieve for what has been invested in before so you can move forward.
The grieving process is a mental and emotional letting go. What that means is to face the reality that it is over, whatever
it
is, and to feel the feelings involved in facing that reality. It means to come out of the denial and numbness emotional y and feel whatever you feel. The reason that helps, though, is that grief has movement to it. It goes somewhere. It goes forward. Feeling the anger helps get the protest out of the way, and feeling the sadness helps move the letting go further along. It gets people unstuck. When people do not feel their feelings, positive and negative, about something significant that has ended, they wil remain tethered to it in some way.
That is why the feelings involved in grief are unique. Unlike emotions that do not take us anywhere and in fact can keep us stuck, the feelings of grief have
forward motion
to them. When you feel grief, you are saying, “I am looking this reality right in the face and dealing with it, the reality that this [whatever
this
is] is
over. Finished.
Grief also means I am getting ready for what is next, because I am finishing what is over.”
The danger when people do not face their grief is twofold. First, to keep from facing it, they sometimes continue to beat a dead horse, hanging on to false hope or staying angry at what is past. They get stuck in protesting reality. Second, denying the grief often leads people to do strange things on the rebound, which are real y attempts to keep from feeling the grief involved in letting go. It is a defense mechanism.
I once was in a consulting session with an executive team whose members were confused as they were charting their future. They were particularly troubled by the rabbit trails they felt their CEO had taken them down several times.
“What were those?” I asked. They said that he had come up with these “big visions” a few times and steered the bil ion-dol ar enterprise in a direction that got them off mission and diverted a lot of resources that they real y needed.
“There was project,” they said. “And then there was the whole debacle. And after that, there was the strategy.”
Each one had been a disaster and had taken a lot of money, time, and people. Then I had a thought.
“When were these, and what else was going on?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” they asked me back.
I elaborated. “What years did these happen in and what was going on in between, before, and after?”
What we found was amazing. On the big whiteboard in the boardroom, I constructed a chart that was more than revealing. We did a timeline over fifteen years, and an astounding pattern emerged. Each time something did not go wel that the CEO was real y emotional y invested in,
immediately thereafter he would launch one of the initiatives that had been a big problem.
In other words, to deal with a downturn in normal operations, disappointing results, or failure, instead of dealing with that loss and the grief involved in it, the CEO would grasp a “rebound relationship” with a new vision. It is the business version of the person who loses a lover, and instead of processing the grief, immediately jumps into a rebound relationship. You have seen how that works out, usual y not good.
The reason is that the new whatever is chosen out of need, not merit. The person rushes to something new to avoid feeling the grief, disappointment, and loss. He idealizes the new but seldom thinks about the long term in those instances. He is just thinking,
What can I do that
feels better than I feel right now?
The discussion led to some important coaching with the executive team as to how to identify this tendency in their leader and how to work with it when it emerged. It also underscored to them, as it should to us, the necessity of “metabolizing” our losses, including endings. The truth is that to the degree we were invested in something that’s ending, we wil have to work the grief through our system in order to be ready for whatever is next. In this instance, to avoid that working-through process, the CEO was just getting active for no truly good reason.