Necessary Endings

Necessary Endings

The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move
Forward

Dr. Henry Cloud

Disclaimer

The stories and examples that appear in this book come from the author’s interviews and consulting. The names of individuals, companies, and other identifying facts have been changed to protect the identities of those who provided them. Therefore, any identifying resemblance to actual individuals is merely coincidental.

This book is dedicated to the leaders

who have allowed me to walk with them

through their necessary endings.

Your courage, conviction, and faith are inspiring.

Epigraph

Great is the art of the beginning, but greater is the art of ending.

—HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Contents

Disclaimer

Preface

Endings: The Good Cannot Begin Until the Bad Ends

Pruning: Growth Depends on Getting Rid of the Unwanted or the Superfluous

Normalizing Necessary Endings: Welcome the Seasons of Life into Your Worldview

When Stuck Is the New Normal: The Difference Between Pain with a Purpose and Pain for No Good Reason Chapter 5

Getting to the Pruning Moment: Realistic, Hopeless, and Motivated

Hoping Versus Wishing: The Difference Between What’s Worth Fixing and What Should End Chapter 7

The Wise, the Foolish, and the Evil: Identifying Which Kinds of People Deserve Your Trust Chapter 8

Creating Urgency: Stay Motivated and Energized for Change

Resistance: How to Tackle Internal and External Barriers

No More Mr. Bad Guy: The Magic of Self-Selection

Having the Conversation: Strategies for Ending Things Wel

Embrace the Grief: The Importance of Metabolizing Necessary Endings

Sustainability: Taking Inventory of What Is Depleting Your Resources

Conclusion: It’s Al About the Future

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Also by Dr. Henry Cloud

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

T
oday may be the enemy of your tomorrow.

In your business and perhaps your life, the tomorrow that you desire and envision may never come to pass if you do not end some things you are doing today. For some people, that is clear and easy to execute. They end the things that are holding them back. For others, it is more difficult. This book is about that problem and how to get the results you desire by ending the things whose time has passed.

In it you wil see that endings are a natural part of the universe, and your life and business must face them, stagnate, or die. They are an inherent reality. You wil also see that there are different kinds of endings and that learning how to tel one from the other wil ensure some successes and prevent many failures and much misery, ending substantial pain and turmoil that you or your business may now be encountering.

You wil learn that there are reasons why you may not see the endings that are right in front of you, and reasons why you have been unable to execute the ones that you do see but feel paralyzed to deal with. But more than learning to see them, you wil also find successful strategies for dealing with them.

And you wil find that there is hope for some people and some business problems that seem hopeless to you now, but the problem has been in misdiagnosing what there’s hope for and where there’s none, and in mistaking which tactics wil not help realize that hope and which ones wil .

Al in al ,
my
hope is that you wil be comfortable and confident in seeing, negotiating, and even celebrating some endings that may be the door to a future even brighter than you could have imagined.

Endings: The Good Cannot Begin Until the Bad Ends

T
here it was again, that sinking feeling in his gut. He was noticing it more and more, at the same time each morning. It was happening each time he pul ed into his parking spot at corporate headquarters and turned the ignition off, in that moment of silence when the radio shut down and he hadn’t yet opened his car door to go into the building. He could no longer deny that it was real nor that it had become consistent: he didn’t want to go into the office.

He felt a heaviness inside that was the opposite of his natural drive. Stephen was the type who was always pushing ahead. As a kid, he was the first one to run onto the field; in a group, the one to say, “Let’s go do this”; in a business crisis, the one to pick up the bal and move it forward, no matter what the obstacle. He was passionate by nature and had no problem engaging with life. But now, each morning in his car, he had to admit that he felt no strong drive to go into that building and gear up for another day of making it work. That drive had been replaced by this heaviness, which was anything but motivating. This was not a feeling that he was used to.

So on this particular morning he didn’t do what he normal y did, which was to reach into the wel of his natural optimism and make himself dive in.

Instead, he restarted his car and drove to a park he passed each day on the way to work. He spotted a bench that would do fine. He just wanted to think.

As he sat down, he realized two things. First, he had not real y let himself do much of this: thinking. He had been too busy and caught up in the events of the last few years since he took the helm of the company, and he had not taken enough time to reflect. He had just worked
hard
, because it was needed. The company that he loved and had felt would be his home forever was not going where he thought it would go. It had stal ed out more than a year ago, and it stil wasn’t turning around. Life seemed to be draining out of the business, and now it felt more like a task and a duty to run it than the love affair it had been in the beginning. The honeymoon was over, but he had treated that as just another chal enge to immerse himself in. That was who he was.

But what he realized at this moment was that the activity level had kept him from thinking too deeply, and when he did al ow himself to pause, he realized the second thing: if he did think deeply, he would run into some thoughts that he did not want to have.

But, on this morning, he al owed himself to go there. He asked himself questions: What is this heaviness inside real y about? What is it that drains me?

When he got out of his own way and al owed himself to be honest with himself, it did not take long for his gut to speak to him.

First, there was the strategy of the whole thing. He had taken the CEO job because profits were good but not great. To him, that seemed like an opportunity. He was a performer, and throughout his career, he’d demonstrated that he truly could get more out of things than other people had gotten out of them before. He was smart, and he could execute. Using sheer horsepower and efficiency alone, he knew that there was growth in the existing numbers, not to mention in what new revenue he could realize through introducing new products and adding new sales territories.

But in the last year, with al of his talents and efforts applied as diligently as he knew how, the growth was not happening. That had to mean something else, and the something else was scary. It meant that the world was changing, the market was changing, but the company had not real y changed with it. His team had just tried to do what they were already doing but do it better. And when he let himself realize the truth, he had to admit that the bright future he had imagined wasn’t going to materialize until he made some big changes in direction.

To do that, though, would mean a lot of things to him that he didn’t want to go through. It meant going to his board of directors and having a battle.

It meant admitting that he had not been able to make the old way work, and to him that was admitting failure. Few things were worse.

But even worse than that, it meant some very hard decisions about people. A new direction that involved more technology and trickier financing would not work with many of the people he had in key positions. How would he remove them? Where would he put them? And even worse, would he have to get rid of them?

Related to that was one of the most difficult truths in this face-the-facts session. Although Stephen was the CEO, and “in charge,” there was a crack in the foundation of his role that he had never ful y addressed, and that was one of the biggest causes for his heavy gut: Chris. Chris was the son of the founder, put into his position of VP of Marketing by Stephen’s predecessor, the founder’s brother and Chris’s uncle. Their hope at the time was that Chris would one day be the CEO, and they had placed him in this role as part of that succession plan.

But the truth was that not only was Chris not CEO material, he was not even the right stuff for an executive team. Stephen felt that he was carrying extra weight around with Chris in the way, and everything would be better if Chris were gone. To go there, however, would mean that he would be asking the company to make a huge choice: family or business? Every time he thought of that, he did not like either outcome. If he forced the question of Chris’s future but lost, Stephen knew his plans for the future would be forever held back, and he would then be resented by the pro-Chris camp, not to mention by Chris himself. On the other hand, if the board al owed him to get rid of Chris, Stephen would be free of the obstacle but would live in the relational aftermath of it al . The cure might be worse than the disease.

But another part of him said that that is what real leaders have to do—make the hard decisions. When he thought about that, he took inventory.

Could he deal with a complete overhaul, going to the board, and retooling the whole thing? Could he let go of people whom he truly cared about?

And the big questions: Could he force the board to decide whether or not they would al ow him to pick his own team? And if they said no, was he ready to leave and do something else where he wouldn’t be shackled by an unsolvable problem?

As Stephen went through each of these questions, he felt two opposing emotions. The first was exhilaration, the kind of energy that he knew related to building a future that had life in it. The second emotion was fear, related to what would happen if he actual y went through those doors to the future. But he also noticed something else:
the heaviness was gone
. It had been replaced with another feeling, a new kind of determination to face reality, which was simultaneously motivating and scary.

He knew that to cross that divide, to face the fear and jump over that canyon, would require doing some hard things, relational y and emotional y.

And he also knew that crossing it was going to require him to learn some new skil s, as he had never quite gone through a doorway as big as this one. But he also knew that in spite of al that, he could not keep going the way he was going. Stephen was ready to act, to give up on what wasn’t working and to start focusing his attention on the changes that needed to be made. He got back in the car, started the engine, and headed back to the office—this time a little faster. He was ready. Nothing had changed in the business yet, but something had changed in Stephen.

What happened on that park bench and where he went from there is the subject of this book.

Stephen was at a moment that we al come to, or should come to, more regularly than we think. How we deal with those moments wil determine much about the direction of not only our work but also our lives. Whether or not Stephen would fol ow through, what that fol ow-through would look like, and what it would require from him to do it and get to the future that either the company needs or he himself desires—al that is the subject of this book.