Authors: Henry Cloud
When done poorly, bad outcomes happen, good opportunities are lost, and misery either remains or is repeated. So let’s get empowered to choose the necessary endings, execute them wel , and get to the better results we al desire.
Pruning: Growth Depends on Getting Rid of the Unwanted or the Superfluous
I
am not very good at growing plants. Somehow the gardener’s microchip did not get implanted when I was at the factory. But I have always had great admiration for those who are good at growing things. Especial y roses. If you have ever seen a healthy rosebush with its vibrant, ful y mature blooms, you know the admiration that the one who nurtured that beauty deserves. So how do these people do it? Certainly there is talent and art behind every beautiful garden. But there is also a method behind the beauty. It is cal ed
pruning
. Pruning is a process of proactive endings. It turns out that a rosebush, like many other plants, cannot reach its ful potential without a very systematic process of pruning. The gardener intentional y and purposeful y cuts off branches and buds that fal into any of three categories: 1. Healthy buds or branches that are not the best ones,
2. Sick branches that are not going to get wel , and
3. Dead branches that are taking up space needed for the healthy ones to thrive.
Necessary Ending Type 1
Rosebushes and other plants produce more buds than the plant can sustain. The plant has enough life and resources to feed and nurture only so many buds to their ful potential; it can’t bring al of them to ful bloom. In order for the bush to thrive, a certain number of buds have to go. The caretaker constantly examines the bush to see which buds are worthy of the plant’s limited fuel and support and cuts the others away. He prunes them. Takes them away, never to return. He ends their role in the life of the bush and puts an end to the bush’s having to divert resources to them.
In doing so, the gardener frees those needed resources so the plant can redirect them to the buds with the greatest potential to become mature roses. Those buds get the best that the bush has to offer, and they thrive and grow to ful ness. But the rosebush could not do this without pruning. It is a necessity of life for rosebushes. Without the endings, you don’t get the best roses. That’s necessary ending type 1.
Necessary Ending Type 2
Some branches are sick or diseased and are not ever going to make it. For a while, the gardener may monitor them, fertilize and nurture them, or otherwise try to make them healthy.
But at some point
,
he realizes that more water
,
more fertilizer
,
or more care is just not going to help.
For whatever reason, they are not going to recover and become what he needs them to be to create the final picture of beauty he wants for the bush and the garden. These are next to go: necessary ending type 2.
As a result, the bush now has even
more
fuel and life to pour into the healthy buds. The plant is now ful y on mission, focusing its energy every day on feeding and growing the buds that are destined to reach ful bloom and maturity.
Necessary Ending Type 3
Then there are the branches and buds that are dead and taking up space. The healthy branches need that room to reach their ful length and height, but they cannot spread when dead branches force them to bend and turn corners; they should be growing straight for the goal. To give the healthy blooms and branches room and an unobstructed path to grow, the dead ones are cut away. This is an example of necessary ending type 3.
Pruning enables rosebushes and other plants to realize ful potential. Without it, they are just average at best and far less than they were designed to be. If you think about it, there should never be an average rosebush. By nature, there is nothing average about them at al . They are designed for incredible beauty and lushness. But if not adequately pruned, they never make it. And like rosebushes, your business and your life also need the same three types of pruning to be al that you desire.
Pruning Your Business and Your Life
Do a dictionary search on
pruning
and you’l discover phrases like this:
A function of cutting away to reduce the extent or reach of something by taking away unwanted or superfluous parts.
Wow, if only we would lead and live by definitions! In the simple word
pruning
is the central theme of what a necessary ending is al about:
Removing whatever it is in our business or life whose reach is unwanted or superfluous.
In business and in life, executing the three types of necessary endings described above is what characterizes people who get results. (1) If an initiative is siphoning off resources that could go to something with more promise, it is pruned. (2) If an endeavor is sick and is not going to get wel , it is pruned. (3) If it’s clear that something is already dead, it is pruned. This is the threefold formula for doing wel in almost every arena of life.
The areas of your business and life that require your limited resources—your time, energy, talent, emotions, money—but are not achieving the vision you have for them should be pruned. Just like an unpruned rosebush, your endeavors wil be merely average without pruning. And here is the key point: by average, I don’t mean on an absolute basis. There is nothing wrong with being in the middle of the bel curve in many aspects of life, as that may be what success is for that person or at least that dimension of life. I have friends who own smal businesses of less than average size in their industry or by other measurements, yet they have a ful y maximized, thriving enterprise for what it is and is supposed to be. Hundreds of employees and tens of mil ions of dol ars is a great rose of a business and a life for what their talents, dreams, and opportunities consist of. Not the size of Microsoft perhaps, but they have achieved
fullness of maturity for their company and/or life. Alive and thriving to the max.
But without
pruning
,
they would not have gotten there
. And by the same token, if Microsoft or a much bigger company with tens of bil ions in revenues is
not
pruning, just because they are large, they can stil be “average” relative to their own potential. They can truly be lagging behind where they should be.
So the question is more about this: are you only achieving average results in relation to
where
you or your business or team is supposed to be
?
In other words, given your abilities, resources, opportunities, etc., are you reaching your ful potential, or are you drifting toward a middle that is lower than where you should be if you were getting the most from who you are and what you have? When pruning is not happening, average or worse wil occur.
Too often, as bad as the results of not pruning can be, we stil persist in avoiding it because it involves fear, pain, and conflict. Yet in order to succeed, we
must
prune. How does that make you feel? Conflicted? Welcome to the inner turmoil of necessary endings.
Gut Check
In upcoming chapters, we wil look at what lies behind our tendency to avoid pruning and how to name and resolve those issues. But before we get to the specifics, I want to ask you to ask yourself a few questions. Real y ask. And if you are doing this with your team, ask these questions together:
•
What is your intellectual response to the idea of pruning?
Do you affirm or question the three kinds of pruning described above (too many buds, sick buds that wil never recover, dead buds taking up space)? If you are on a team, are you al in the same place on the issue?
If not, where is the misalignment? Ask around the table.
•
What is your emotional response to the idea of pruning
? Does it turn your stomach? Does it feel mean or uncaring when people are involved? Does it make you anxious in some way? Is it energizing? Al of the above? If you are on a team, how do your emotional responses differ? Ask around the table.
It’s vital to consider these questions because everything that fol ows is built on the premise that pruning is necessary, natural, and beneficial for anything that is alive. We need it developmental y (as we saw in chapter 1), and we need it in relationships and in business. We need it when things are going wel and when things are not going wel ; it is a natural part of life’s seasons and a requirement for growth.
If we accept the premise that pruning is necessary but stil notice that we have an emotional misalignment with that premise, we wil struggle to realize our vision of the future and our potential. But if you can become aware of your resistances and internal conflicts now, then you can begin to face them and work them through. If you have an intel ectual antipathy to the concept of pruning, then I ask that you acknowledge that and agree to withhold judgment until you have read further.
Write down your answers to those questions. We wil revisit them later when we look at the specifics of how our resistance to endings works.
Suffice it to say at this point, though, that we al have them, and becoming aware of them and facing them is an important step to getting where you want to go.
Here is a recent example I encountered in a coaching session with El en, a high-level executive in a multibil ion-dol ar company. She had recently earned a significant promotion that moved her from the ranks of management into a senior leadership position. As a result, she was now responsible for creating the organizational strategy she had previously just implemented. El en knew she faced some chal enges in making the transition.
“If I am going to make this work, if we are going to get from here to there, some people who have had leader roles are going to have to be moved out, because they are just not leaders. And in the new structure we real y need true leaders. We won’t reach our goals if we don’t make that change,” she said.
“Yes, and that wil be your role. So where are you out of alignment with that?” I asked.
“Finding out that they don’t have leadership roles in the new structure wil be devastating to many of them,” she said. “For my entire career, I have had a practice . . . I always think about the people I manage and see them in their cars driving home from work. I picture the kind of mood they are in and want them to be up and enthusiastic about their day at the company, and I work hard to make those rides home as positive as I can. But if I do what is needed, there are going to be some very negative rides home. I hit a wal when I think about it. It’s like it makes me go in two different directions inside,” she explained.
“Sounds like you think that ‘negative’ is bad,” I reflected.
“Wel , of course it is. I would not want them having that kind of day,” she said.
“Have you ever had an infected tooth pul ed?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Did you have a nice ride home?” I asked.
(
Laughing
) “No, it was awful.”
“Wel , that was negative, . . . or was it?” I asked. “If you define
negative
as feeling crummy, I agree it was. But if you define
negative
as ‘harmful,’ I would not cal it negative but positive. It was not harmful at al for the dentist to inflict that pain. In fact, it was a very positive event, right? A healing event?” I asked.
“Yes, sure it was,” she said.
“There is a big difference between
hurt
and
harm
,” I said. “We al hurt sometimes in facing hard truths, but it makes us grow. It can be the source of huge growth. That is not harmful. Harm is when you damage someone. Facing reality is usual y not a damaging experience, even though it can hurt.”
I could see by El en’s expression that the implications of what I was saying were starting to sink in. “
As a leader
,
you have got to redefine what
positive and negative is
. Positive is doing what is best and right for the business and for the people. And nearly always, letting someone know that they are not right for a position is one of the biggest favors that you can do for them. There are only three possible results of doing that, and two of them are good. The other is good also, in that if it happens, you for sure had the wrong kind of person in the job,” I said.
“What are they?” she asked.
“First, if they find out that they were not performing, they may get better at their performance and turn into someone who can achieve. Your intervention helped them face the reality about themselves and moved them further along. If you had not done it, their next boss would have had to do it, and they would have lost another year or five. And go through al of that pain again. So you helped them face the truth about themselves and get better.
“Second, it may be that they are just miscast. And they need to find that out. Many, many times, when someone is removed, it is not because they are not talented but because they are in the wrong job or even business. The removal makes them face that; they find themselves, and they have a great next forty years. You helped them get off a road of failure and onto one of success. That is another great favor you are doing them.
“The third possible result—and the one that is diagnostic—is that they do not see that they need to improve or that they are trying to do something they are not cut out for, and they blame you or the company for their failure and go away bitter. They cannot see the truth and use it. They hate you and see themselves as a victim of your leadership. If that happens, you find out that you had someone in a key position who was probably not a learner (we wil talk about diagnosing people later), and you have protected the company and yourself from their effects going forward.
“It is sad but true that some people just cannot face the truth when it causes them discomfort,
but that cannot be a reason that guides your
decisions
. So in that case, you are lucky to find it out and be done with that person’s lack of performance, but moreover, done with their entrenched attitude about feedback,” I said. “And remember, the big result of al of this is that you have moved the company and yourself toward the vision becoming a reality. That is your big responsibility.”