Necessary Endings (5 page)

• What ways are we spending time in these meetings that are good and helpful but not the best use of our time together?

For example, “Let’s cut out going around the table and reporting in from each department on the status of every project. We need these updates, but we can get that information in an e-mail. Let’s use our time to focus on what can only happen if we are al together.”

• What do we do here that is sick and not getting wel ?

For example, “We have tried repeatedly to use these times for forecasting, and it just never works. We can’t get the information we need as the discussion progresses, and even though we have tried, it is confusing and a waste. Let’s stop using this meeting to do that.”

• What is dead and just taking up space?

For example, “Al of the reviews we go through on operations from the previous time period don’t add value to our purpose here. It is not moving anything forward. Let’s stop doing that.”

The idea here is that it is not just an entire company or life that needs pruning; the devil is in the details as wel . If people could learn to say things like, “We only have a little time, let’s stay away from certain issues and focus on what we can do something about,” or “Let’s use our time in a good way,” the resources of time and energy would be better spent.

In the personal realm, I have also taught this method to couples, and they see immediate changes. One couple reported back that they changed their weekly “date night” as a result:

“We used to take the time to have a date night every week, get a babysitter to spend time together apart from the kids. But, we would go out and end up talking about the kids, running the house, and al the things that we were trying to get away from. We lost the benefit of date night and were coming back not feeling very refreshed or renewed with each other and our relationship.

“So, we asked ourselves about the three categories and decided that there were good but not best ways to spend our time, things that we talked about that got us into conflicts that were not getting wel , and some ways of spending our evenings that added nothing.

“Then we decided to make those off-limits. We started having real dates again, like when we were first dating, before kids and the chal enges of running a household took most of our attention. We remembered what it was like when we first met and every minute gave more life to our relationship. And we did the things we used to do. Now we are looking forward to that night . . . it kind of grounds us now through the week. I know that no matter what is going on, that night is going to bring me energy.”

Al of your precious resources—time, energy, talent, passion, money—should only go to the buds of your life or your business that are the best, are fixable, and are indispensable. Otherwise,
average
sets in and a meeting or even a date night does not become the rose it was designed to be. How many times have you heard someone walk out of a meeting and ask, “Why do we have these meetings?” Pruning might help that, or it might keep a couple from going to sleep after a date night a little more discouraged about their marriage. Pruning can bring health into the smal branches of business or life as wel as the big.

In Life as Well

One last reminder about pruning and necessary endings. The concepts apply to al of life, business and personal. Although this is a book contextualized in business and leadership, the concepts here wil apply in every area of your life where you are spending yourself and your resources. And I say that not only as a helpful hint for you to look at al of life as a place for endings, but for another reason as wel .

The bigger issue is that your character as a person works best when you are “integrated.” In my book
Integrity
, I talked about how the word
integrity
comes from the Latin word meaning “whole,” and how business and leadership work best when a person has an
integrated
or whole character.
They are then running on all cylinders and are the same person on the job as they are at home
. They are able to use al of their capacities in both places and accomplish their vision.

I have seen leaders who are not facing the personal issues that they need to face, and as a result, their performance in both business and their personal lives is being held back. You are one person, and as you integrate al of what it means to be a whole person, you wil do better in every area of life. And learning to prune and execute necessary endings are important aspects of being a whole person.

For this reason, I recommend that as you go through this book, you see it as not just about business or leadership but about your whole life. In that way, it is about
you
. You are the one who is doing business and also doing life, and if you change and become a person capable of executing necessary endings, you wil not only have better business performance, but you wil also be less likely to raise failure-to-launch kids or be stuck in some other area of life.

So, with that, let’s get oriented to the idea of seeing necessary endings as a normal part of life instead of as a problem and find out how to execute them.

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

I
was introduced to Blair by a friend of mine on a golfing trip. “So what do you do, Blair?” I asked.

“I am in bonds!” he said, with an upbeat kind of energy sparked by the question. I remember thinking,
Must like it
,
that bond work
.

“It’s more than that,” our mutual friend said. “He is one of the top guys in the country right now.”

“Wow, that’s cool,” I said. “Have you been in bonds for a long time?”

“No, not too long,” he said. “It’s a second career for me. I was in chemical manufacturing for a long time, and then made a switch a couple of years ago.”

“And you got to the top in a second career that fast?”

“Yep, it just al worked,” he said, an answer that seemed to have a lot of drop-down menus behind the headline. So the performance coach part of me had to hear the rest of the story, as I know that those sorts of changes don’t happen without a lot of good things occurring in a person.

“How did you go from manufacturing to bonds? What was that move like?” I inquired.

“Wel , I owned a company that sold a chemical process that had the writing on the wal , so I got out just in time,” he said. “Or after it was time, depending on how you look at it.”

“What do you mean the ‘writing on the wal ’?” I asked. “What kind?”

“The process that we sold looked like it was becoming less and less needed because of other changes in technology, and our sales were reflecting that. It was becoming obsolete. As I looked into the future, it was not looking good. So, I sold it. Got out, did some classwork, studied, got a securities license, and here I am.”

“OK, but you aren’t twenty-five with a backpack and a bike going to class. Wasn’t that a big deal?” I wondered out loud as I pictured what kind of disruption this must have been in the middle of life.

“Yeah, it was. Mortgage, kids headed for col ege, and I had sunk a
lot
[
heavy sigh
,
eyes closed
] of money into the company. To make the change and to watch al of that go away was not easy. But, I knew, after a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of effort, going over it and over it trying to find a way to make it work, that it had no life in it. As hard as I had tried to make a go of it, I had to get out and do something different.”

And he did. And he had found life again in his new career.

He told me, though, there had been many temptations to keep believing that the old business could turn around, and many times he kept investing good money after bad—second mortgages on the house, outside money, the whole thing. But he final y came to what we wil examine later as “the moment.”
There was a moment in time where he knew that it was “time” to get out
. He had to end it and move on.

What impressed me was not only his courage to begin a whole new career at his stage in life, but also the contrast to another friend whom I was watching in a similar situation but with a much different outcome. Geoff was also in a business whose time had come and gone with changes in technology, but he was stil holding on. His company was tied to satel ite technology that enabled multiple locations of companies to communicate with each other, but Web technology was quickly closing in. Having made a fortune in another industry, he had bought this company with a lot of promise, but over the last few years, their niche and advantage were disappearing.

Instead of waving the white flag and morphing into something new, he was determined to make it work. He had convinced more than half of his board that it would, and they were continuing to look for money to keep it going. He stil maintained that undaunted sense of what he cal ed the leadership trait of “hope,” and he was steadfast. But in my mind and in the minds of the other members of his board—not to mention potential investors, who were increasingly not returning cal s—what he was cal ing hope was only an empty wish. He was headed for a crash, and it was just a matter of time.

What was the difference between Geoff and Blair? Was it brains? Was it experience? Was it market savvy? No, it was none of those. They both possessed equal amounts of talent and brains. It was something that goes deeper.

The difference was how comfortable they were with endings, which enabled Blair to see what needed to be done, and made Geoff keep the
blinders on.

Blair overcame his internal conflict and initiated an ending when he final y saw that it was time, and yet my friend Geoff had hit a wal . Even the most gifted people and leaders are subject to feeling conflicted about ending things, so they resist that moment of truth. And not only do they resist, they sometimes cannot even see. Thus they find themselves crosswise with the very nature of life itself.

Make Endings Normal

In the last chapter, I asked you to use a gut check to examine your feelings about pruning, to come to terms with your previous beliefs about endings, and to honestly assess where your internal resistances lie. This is the first step to moving forward. The second step is this:
Make the endings a normal occurrence and a normal part of business and life
,
instead of seeing it as a problem.

Then and only then can you align yourself wel with endings when they come. It has to do with your brain and how it works.

If a situation fal s within the range of normal, expected, and known, the human brain automatical y marshals al available resources and moves to engage it. But if the brain interprets the situation as negative, dangerous, wrong, or unknown, a fight-or-flight response kicks in that moves us
away
from the issue or begins to resist it. Execution stops or automatical y goes in the other direction. Put into the context of endings, if you see them as normal, expected, and
even a good thing
, you wil embrace them and take action to execute them. You wil see them as a painful gift. But if you see an ending as meaning “something is wrong if this has to happen,” you wil resist them or fight them long past when they should be fought. Endings have to be perceived as a normal part of work and life.

Unlike my friend Geoff, Blair had no conflict other than the need to work through the normal painful process that it takes to get to the “moment.” He had tried to make his business work, numbed himself at first to the reality, protested and fought it by trying other strategies, turning up the crank and tried even harder, looking for new customers, etc. etc.—real y ral ying and pushing. He, like any other good leader, was embracing the problem and tackling it head-on. That is perseverance and a good trait. It is essential and causes businesses to be rescued out of the jaws of defeat every day.

But,
he was also able to admit when more effort was not going to bring about a different result
. That is the
moment
, when someone real y gets it and knows that something is over. You have seen the scene in the movies when the patient dies, the doctor looks up at the clock, quotes the time of death, breathes a heavy sigh, pul s off her gloves, and walks out the door. The doctor has done everything in her power to avoid this outcome, but when the monitor goes to the steady beep, she accepts what is normal, albeit unwanted, and moves on to try to save the next life.

Likewise in business and life, there comes a moment when that reality must be seen and grasped. Blair was able to grasp it because it fit into his worldview, that sometimes things end. His view of normal included the fact that “this happens sometimes.” It is just as important a leadership and personal trait as perseverance. As a result of it, he could take the moment and move on. Now he is at the top of another field. If he could not have done that, he could stil be at the bottom of the old one, trying very, very hard and talking to the hundredth group of investors.

Geoff, on the other hand, does not view endings as a normal part of the way the world is. In his head, if something is not working, the only option is to “solve the problem” or “work on the strategy or sales.” His worldview does not enable him to ask,
Is this thing over?
He is blind to the fact that his business is in a product line whose time has passed; instead, he thinks the team just needs to work harder or better. The truth is that
there is no
problem to be solved
,
other than to get a new set of problems
.

This does not mean that Geoff’s company has to die completely, but it wil not survive if Geoff doesn’t end their current product emphasis and morph it into something new and different. But he cannot do that because he is in conflict with endings in general. He sees them as failure instead of sometimes a natural occurrence.