Authors: Henry Cloud
Successful business leaders face this truth al the time. Starbucks has had a lot of life in the past years. And what does anything that is alive do?
It creates more buds than it can sustain. So this year news came out that said they were closing down hundreds of stores. Who knows what al went into getting more stores than they or the market could nurture, but it sounds as though the decision to cut some of those buds may be getting in line with the way that things natural y fal out. Apparently, someone there has a worldview that includes the reality that sometimes you have more buds than you can grow. Often, when that occurs, the stock price goes up. As Anne Mulcahy, Xerox’s chairman and former CEO, recently remarked,
“One of the most important types of decision making is deciding what you are not going to do, what you need to eliminate in order to make room for strategic investments. This could mean shutting down a program. It could mean outsourcing part of the business. These are often the hardest decisions to make, and the ones that don’t get nearly enough focus” (
McKinsey Quarterly
, March 2010).
Come to grips with this truth, that your life and your business produce more buds than you can nurture, and you wil end some things more readily and easily. It won’t register as so traumatic, nor wil your brain resist as if something is wrong.
3. Accept That Incurable Sickness and Evil Exist
Your business and your life wil change when you real y, real y get it that some people are not going to change, no matter what you do, and that stil others have a vested interest in being destructive. Once you accept that, some very necessary endings get much easier to do. But until then, you might find yourself laboring much longer than you should, stil trying to get someone to change, thinking that one more coaching session wil do the trick—or one more bit of encouragement, or one more session of feedback or confrontation. Or worse, one more concession.
I have watched wel -meaning people literal y waste years and mil ions of dol ars trying to bring someone along who is not coming. And often the person may have lots of other talent that the leader doesn’t want to lose, or he likes the person so much that he is wil ing to try over and over again. I watched one COO have a breakthrough moment when, after the umpteenth time he’d attempted to get a marketing person to perform, he final y just scratched his head and admitted, “He just thinks the wrong thoughts.” The COO had final y given up and was able to end the misery soon thereafter.
But for about a year, he had been trying to get the marketing guy to “see.” The marketing guy was very gifted in his work with people but had grandiose ideas and plans that did not work, even while he ignored the diligent blocking and tackling that was needed. He was trying to throw the
“Hail Mary” pass when he should have been trying to consistently advance the bal a few yards. The COO tried over and over to get through but couldn’t. We don’t even have to explain the ways this happens in people’s personal lives. It is too obvious, if you just notice the lunchtime discussions.
In an upcoming chapter, we wil spend considerable time on how to diagnose the people who are worth your investment of time and trust, which ones may be wil ing and able to change and improve and which ones won’t. The ability to perform this diagnosis is one of the most valuable skil s you’l ever learn. So hold on. But for now, come to grips with the fact that some people—no matter how much you give them or how much you try to help them improve their performance in business or in their personal lives—are not going to change. At least not now, and not as a result of anything you are doing. Accept it, and it wil get easier to take the necessary steps to make an ending. You wil go from being in shock or in denial to asking yourself the right question: what am I dealing with here?
Similarly, as we have mentioned, some businesses, strategies, visions, tactics, or products are too sick to recover and need to be scrapped. We wil discuss that diagnostic path as wel , but again for now, accept terminal il ness and failure as a
valid
possibility. The best performers know how to fail wel . They see it, accept it, and move on. They do not keep beating the dead horse, or worse, riding the one with the broken leg. They can cal it quits, wave the white flag, and go forward.
A Different Universe
This chapter has been about getting in line with reality. Many people wish for a different universe than the one in which we live. They want one where every day is harvest time and there are no long laborious summer months to go through in order to get there. And when the harvest is ripe and they are thriving, they want no approaching winters where they see that the harvest is over and a cold death is looming.
Also, they want a world where they have no limits. They want to believe that they have enough time and energy to gather people, products, and activities infinitely and never have to end any of them. They do not want it to be true that at some point, they run out of time and energy and have to make hard choices. They want a limitless life where time and space are not realities.
And they want a world where every person is committed to being good and getting better. In this world, if they try to help someone long enough, that person wil improve, wake up, and get it. They do not want this universe, the one we real y live in, where some people just don’t change and stil others truly want to hurt you.
But this is the only universe we have, and in it al three of these realities exist. Successful leaders are very much at one with those realities, and when they come upon one of them, their brains do not send signals saying something is wrong. They are aligned and integrated people who are friends with reality. So when one of these realities appears, their brains see these situations as normal, although sometimes painful, and move toward them decisively and with courage and hope. And they are always wisely asking, “What kind of situation do I real y have here?”
They know that if they execute the ending of one season’s tasks and get on to the next one’s, good things can occur. They know that if they cut some relationships and activities away, others wil flourish. And they know that if they give up on trying to change someone who doesn’t want to change or is not ready, they wil have helped that person get one step closer to seeing reality, and they wil have freed themselves from the person’s negative patterns. So they take that step with love, certainty, and resolve. As we go forward, we wil look at some of the particulars of how to create these kinds of endings. But first, make sure you have accepted the real universe where you live and work. Reality is tough, but as Woody Al en said, reality is “stil the only place to get a good steak.” And have a good business, and life.
When Stuck Is the New Normal: The Difference Between Pain with a Purpose and Pain for No Good Reason
L
ife and business involve pain. Sometimes, as we have seen, creating an ending might cause a little hurt, like pul ing a tooth. But it is
good pain.
It gives life to you or to your business. Similarly, the rosebush snaps back when it gets pruned. This book is about taking bold steps to embrace that kind of pain.
But there is another kind of pain, one that should
not be embraced
, one that you want to do everything in your power to end. The pain I am referring to here is misery that goes nowhere. That is not normal, and when it happens, it is time to wake up. It is time to realize that anytime pain is going nowhere fast, a few things must be occurring.
First, you might have become acclimated to the misery in some way. You have gotten so used to it that you no longer feel it as pain but view it as normal. Pain by its nature is a signal that
something is wrong
,
and action is required.
So pain should be driving you to do something to end it. But if you are not making moves to end the dul misery of something going nowhere, then you may have told yourself nothing is real y “wrong”—
it is just
the way it is
. You are stuck with a chronic ache that has started to feel like the new normal.
Sometimes we are stuck for reasons that are truly outside of our control. But more times than we realize, we are not executing an ending because of
internal factors
,
not external ones.
Neuroscience research shows that your mind actual y develops something akin to hardwiring so that you think and behave automatical y. So when your hardwiring has adapted to accept some sort of “stuck reality,” you wil live out being stuck there. It has become “just normal” to be stuck and put up with a situation that awaits a necessary ending.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to stay that way. Neuroscience and experience have shown that we can change, and new pathways and maps can be built that change the way we think and the way we perform.
Internal Maps
When the recent global economic crisis hit, plummeting markets began to affect companies and individuals in ways over which they had no control whatsoever. Financing dried up, customers stopped buying, and the normal course of business completely changed for thousands of companies and for mil ions of workers. The crisis had a significant impact on how employees in those companies approached their work; it actual y changed their internal software. Their focus on the external factors over which they had no control began to change the way they thought about and perceived the world. Many got discouraged or even defeated.
We know from research that this kind of constant focus and attention can actual y change the way the brain works; people develop new mental maps or fal into old ones, which then direct their day-to-day activities, their thoughts, and their feelings. If you focus on al of the bad things that are happening that you have no control over, your map of what to do every day changes.
In several industries in which I worked during the economic crisis, particularly ones that were highly sales driven, I began to notice a syndrome very similar to what Martin Seligman termed learned helplessness. It is a condition in which the person adapts to the misery because
they feel that
there is nothing they can do about it
. It is total y out of their control. Bad market or bad economy equals bad results. That is their mental map, and they act accordingly. For instance, when the market was real y bad, one seasoned performer in the commercial real estate industry confessed to me that he would find himself just driving aimlessly around town instead of completing his trips to the office or the field. Other high performers told me that they had difficulty picking up the phone to make sales cal s in the months fol owing the crash.
But I saw something else going on as wel . In several of these situations, even when I saw stuckness and an adaptation to the misery as the new normal, I also observed some high performance occurring too, sometimes right down the hal . In other words, same market, same external conditions, yet a different set of behaviors and results.
Why?
The difference was in the brains, the mental models, of the ones who were performing versus the ones who weren’t.
First of al , those who were not stuck had a different map of the world. Some did not assume that “there are no buyers right now.” They thought instead that in the chaos, there were many, many potential customers who needed to be shepherded through the chal enging environment and were being ignored. So they got even busier and contacted them. This was true in several industries that I observed, even the “deadest” ones, like real estate.
Second, their focus was different. They did not spend their time and energy focusing on al of the things that were fal ing apart that they could do nothing about. Instead, they thought hard and fast about what they
could do.
In a learned-helplessness model, the brain begins to interpret events in a negative way, thus reinforcing its belief that “al is bad.” For instance, when someone doesn’t get a sale, it means “I am a loser, the whole business is bad, and it isn’t going to change.” These are cal ed by Seligman and others the three P’s. Events are processed in predictable, negative ways: first, as
personalized
(I am a bad salesperson); second, as
pervasive
(everything I do, or every aspect of the business, is bad); and third, as
permanent
(nothing is going to change). You can easily see why this leads to helplessness and inactivity.
But the productive people did not think in a learned-helplessness way. Their internal software was more optimistic, seeing a “nonsale” as just one more number to get past to get to the one that was going to buy and sustaining other such optimistic-thinking paradigms.
Besides the negative thinking of the three P’s in the learned-helplessness model, I also saw a troubling pattern in some individuals—
an even
deeper sense of loss of control over things that were
,
in fact
,
still in their control.
When someone with this vulnerability is put in a position where things that they cannot control, such as the economy, are affecting them, they shut down and do not execute
in the activities that they can control.
This is where it al begins to go downhil .
So one of the interventions that I have found helpful is to have people and teams get at the root of the problem: feeling out of control. I give them this assignment:
•
Take a piece of paper and divide it into two columns.
•
In column one, write down all the things you cannot control that are affecting you
. For example, bad market conditions, credit and financing stagnation, customer freezes on spending, and so on. Now, worry about al of that. Hard! For about ten minutes. Then stop for the day. You can worry about it again tomorrow. It won’t have changed much.
•
In column two, write down all of the things you do have control over.
For example, making cal s, getting prospects, getting potential buyers into financing conversations and relationships, recal ing customers who did not buy at last year’s high prices but could buy now that prices have dropped, and so on.