Necessary Endings (12 page)

It is the kind of hopelessness that can motivate a Julie Shimer to take the kind of action that real y can bring true hope, the kind of hope that is worth betting ninety-five years of success on. It is the kind of hopelessness that can cause people who are stuck in dead-end relationships to begin to make the changes that can turn the relationship around or help them to move on. While hope is a great virtue, hope in unreality is not. And sometimes hopeless is the best virtue you have, because it can final y get you to the pruning moment. Shimer saw it, and got hopeless. At that moment, everything changed for Welch Al yn.

Perhaps you are at that moment as wel . You have been having “hope” that something, or someone, would turn around. Maybe it, or the person, wil . To give up hope when there is victory in sight is a mistake. But to hang on to false hope is a fantasy that can end in dismal failure. The question is, how do you know the difference? Is there a key? A formula? Without a crystal bal , are there ways to know when to hold on to hope and when to give it up and have a necessary ending?

That is the subject of the next chapter: when to have hope, and when to get hopeless. What are the real, objective reasons that we can depend upon to have hope, without which we may need a necessary ending? We wil soon see, but for now, here is the question for you or your team:
What reason, other than the fact that I want this to work, do I have for believing that tomorrow is going to be different from today?

In the next chapter, we’l take a look at how to answer that question.

Hoping Versus Wishing: The Difference Between What’s Worth Fixing and What Should End
T
he last thing you would want to do is go through a major ending for no good reason. But another last thing you would want to do is to continue to hold on when an ending is needed. To hold on to “hope” when what you real y have is merely a wish is to fail to grasp reality. Whether it is the decision to stay in a business or to stick it out with a person, it is a big decision.

But what is worth keeping and fixing
,
and what should end
? How do you know the difference? When does it make sense to have hope, and when does it not? In the last chapter, we saw how one leader knew the difference because her eyes had been opened through her experience in a previous company. She had vowed that she would never let that happen again, so she got to hopelessness and made the necessary ending. She looked at the past and did not want more of it.

But what if you are not in the same situation as Julie Shimer? What if there is nothing in your past that would make your sniffer say, “I have seen this before and I know where it is headed.” If you have never faced the situation that you now find yourself in, is there another way to know? Are there ways to know when there is a reason to have hope and when there is not? When to think tomorrow may be better and when to execute an ending? Let’s look at some helpful signs that you can rely on to determine whether you have real hope and should carry on or just a wish that may need an ending.

The Past Is the Best Predictor

My friend told me that his daughter’s boyfriend had cal ed and asked him to go to dinner, and he expected the proverbial “asking for her hand”

conversation. He wanted some advice on how to handle that question, and I could understand his trepidation. Few thoughts are scarier to a father than wondering,
Will this guy love her
,
treat her well
,
and take good care of her?
As a father of two girls, as I look into the future, I could already feel what that must have felt like for my friend.

We talked about how to handle it, and then I said, “After al of that, tel him that you would like to see his credit report and his last two years’ tax returns.”

“What? You have got to be joking!” he exclaimed.

“Not at al . I am dead serious,” I said.

“Why? I can’t ask him how much money he makes. That’s so intrusive and the wrong message. Marriage is not about how much money he makes.”

“Exactly, and money has nothing to do with my suggestion. I don’t care about the numbers at al , how much he makes. Tel him to blot them out if he wants. I only care about two things. First, the credit report wil give you a peek into how he has fulfil ed other promises he has made to people who have entrusted things to him. If he can’t be trusted to fulfil the promises he makes with something such as money, which is not nearly as valuable as your daughter, how are you going to trust him with real treasure? I would see a big yel ow flag if he has a history of bailing out on commitments he has made to lenders or others.”

While my friend was stil trying to absorb the idea of asking for a credit report, I homed in on the tax return. “I don’t care what the numbers are.
I
just want to know if he has done them
. Does he take responsibility for his life and get things like taxes done? If he hasn’t, then that is a sign of what your daughter is signing up for in the future: chaos and uncertainty that come from his character. That would be another big warning. No matter what his financial situation is, I would want to know that he obeys the law, has his affairs in order, gets his taxes done, and sends them in.

“So, the message here has nothing to do with money. It has to do with looking at his past behavior in some areas that count: promises, commitments, and responsibility, and then seeing what the track record has been. That is important because
the best predictor of the future is the
past.
What he has done in the past wil be what he does in the future, unless there has been some big change. You can bet on it,” I told him.

I felt a little bit lecture-ish, and could feel myself getting a little amped up, probably because my own daughters were somewhere in my unconscious. My friend thought that asking for a credit report and tax returns somewhat destroyed the storybook nature of the “ask for the hand moment,” but I real y believed what I was saying. When my daughters’ suitors show up, they better be toting some documents.

Sometimes because of great “hope,” or desire, we fail to ask the first question that should be asked:
what has occurred before?
What is the history? I would rather his daughter get to the “hopeless moment” now than later, when the IRS or the bank cal s and she is liable for whatever they are demanding. Examining past performance could warn her of that kind of future.

What does this mean in your situation? It means that although you might not have dealt with exactly the same situation you are dealing with now and have no previous experience like this one to learn from, you
do
have some experience to learn from: What has happened so far in
this
situation? What you have experienced in this situation is plenty to learn from.

When you ask yourself if you should have hope for this person or business to get better, the first diagnostic is to see what has been happening up to this point. Unless something changes, that is exactly what you can expect to happen in the future. The best predictor of the future, without other variables, is the past.

I worked with a CEO who was in the middle of a significant acquisition of another company. To get it al up and integrated with the current business, he needed to fil the COO role for the new, blended, executive team. This person would be in charge of seeing the integration through. He went through a normal search process, and the headhunters turned up several candidates, and there were a handful of internal candidates as wel .

One of the internal candidates, Jonathan, had enormous strengths in certain areas, but one glaring weakness. In big projects, he had a tendency to micromanage certain details and lose the big picture. As a result, some big initiatives had languished, even though Jonathan had made progress in specific parts of the program; he was great on going deep in a smal circle, but weak on seeing the big circle.

Stil , the CEO loved Jonathan’s energy, his ability to connect with the employees, his loyalty, and a host of other qualities. This was the person he was most excited about. But it seemed to me that Jonathan’s particular weakness, the inability to stay focused on the big picture, was more than half of what this new role required. If Jonathan got bogged down in the details of any little piece of the whole, the big integration would fal apart. And his past behavior suggested that he would get bogged down in the details.

“I think he would be great at this integration,” he said. “He could real y pul the troops together and get them on the same page. He inspires so much loyalty. Everyone loves Jonathan.”

“It is your decision,” I said. “But let me remind you of something. Many, many times you have expressed frustration with Jonathan and his tendency to get bogged down and fail to move the big initiatives forward. You love his work with people, but you hate his lack of creating forward motion. You are always upset with the lack of speed, because he gets stuck in the details. That is what you have experienced. Over and over, you have said that to me. And that is a lot of what this job is going to be about. So without something changing in him that we have not seen, that is what you are looking at happening in the future if you put him in charge of this integration. Is that what you want? Because that is what you are going to get. I would bet on it.”

The CEO’s sudden look of hopelessness gave me hope. He had gotten it. He had gotten to the hopeless moment by looking at the past and projecting it into the future, which is exactly what we need to do to see if we should have hope or not.

When a credit card company decides whether or not to place hope in you and give you credit for another month, it doesn’t look at how hopeful or enthusiastic you are to pay them back, or go and visit a psychic. It looks at your past performance in paying people back, and then it knows what to expect you to do in the future. Sometimes it gets it wrong, but most times not. The past does not lie. Of course, you might immediately ask, “Can’t someone do better than their past?”
Of course!
As we are about to see. If that were not true, we would al be hopeless.
But the key is this
:
There
had better be good reason to believe that someone is going to do better.
Without any new information or actions, though, the past is the best predictor of the future. You can bet on it.

So here are the first questions to ask yourself about the anatomy of hope, no matter whether you are assessing a person or some aspect of business:

• What has the performance been so far?

• Is it good enough?

• Is there anything in place that would make it different?

• If not, am I wil ing to sign up for more of the same?

Those four questions may get you to see reality clearly and, if answered truthful y, could keep you from going down a road of certain failure—the failure of the past. They are also
great
questions for a team to ask itself about key people decisions, as wel as specific strategies or projects.

The Anatomy of Hope

When you consider the past and come to grips with the fact that it is hopeless to expect something different in the future, then you have the kind of hopelessness that wil motivate you to move from mere wishing to real hope. How do you get to this hopelessness? As we saw above, take the past performance of the person, business, or whatever, and project it into the future:

• Do I want this same reality, frustration, or problem six months from now?

• Do I want this same level of performance a year from now?

• Do I want to be having these same conversations two years from now?

If the answer to these is no, then it is time to ask some other questions that get you to the real anatomy of hope:

• What reason is there to have hope that tomorrow is going to be different?

• What in the picture is changing that I can believe in?

In the previous chapter, I said that the difference between hoping and wishing is that hope comes from real, objective reasons that the future is going to be different from the past. Anything other than that is simply a wish that comes from your desires. So what are the real objective reasons that we can use to diagnose when an ending may not be necessary and we can hang on to hope versus when it is time to get to hopelessness?

What is real hope made of? Let’s see.

Endings are necessary when there is no hope. But hope is not a virtue to throw away so easily. We want to have it when it is appropriate. It can ensure the next hundred years of success for a tech company or even save a failing marriage. But to know when to have hope, we need some diagnostics to guide us. Let’s look at those now.

Who Deserves My Trust?

I was talking to a wealthy friend one time about the ways that he invests his money, wondering how he made his investment decisions. What industries and businesses did he prefer, and so on? What he said applies to our discussion here. He told me that he does not invest in businesses, other than his own. When he said that, I disagreed, as I knew of several that he had invested in, and I said so.

“Not true,” he said. “I did not invest in those businesses at al . I don’t know anything about those industries. What I invested in was what I always invest in: the person. In al of those investments, I knew the leader and his or her team, their track record, and their character. That is what I was investing in, not the business. I would not have understood it if they had tried over and over to explain it. Surely I looked at it and tried to understand as best I could, but the real investment was in the people who were running it and whom I trusted.”

That is a good way to think about the role of character as we move forward. What kind of person deserves our trust, and when do we believe that someone can change?

What if the Martians invaded Earth and decided to turn us into a cosmic version of the Roman gladiators, only this time they created a golf tournament to see if they would al ow humans to continue to exist or not. Let’s say they set up a scenario with a four-foot, downhil , right-breaking putt on the fastest green that Augusta National has. They give the humans one chance to make the putt. If we make it, the earth is spared, but if we miss it, they vaporize us and al of our planet’s known life forms. We get one chance, and we get to pick anyone we want to hit that putt. What is the hope for mankind? Wil we make it to live another day? Are you hopeful? Wel , that depends.