Necessary Endings (14 page)

Similarly, they must see that they have a need for help and that they cannot trust their own efforts to make anything different. Remember the analogy of the broken car: even if it is motivated, the engine is stil broken and needs a mechanic. What you want to hear from someone is not only

“I have a problem and need to change,” but also “I need help and am looking for it.” Taken together, these statements are hopeful, but one without the other is not. Someone who admits to a problem and is not getting help is stuck, and someone who is getting help but then always tries to convince the helper or the coach that she real y doesn’t have an issue is equal y hopeless, at least for the time being. Change requires both.

The Presence of Support

In a change process, support is essential. Change takes place when we are surrounded by people who support our desire for change and growth, whether in our personal or our professional lives. Recent research has shown that a lot of what people desire in life, such as healthy lifestyles, is actual y “contagious.” If they are surrounded by overweight people, for example, they have a much higher chance of being overweight. But if they are surrounded by people who are healthy, that is contagious as wel . Their efforts are supported and not thwarted.

In addition, those who are working toward change need people who are committed to their growth other than the assigned change agents or coaches. Besides the professional helpers, they need friends, family, or co-workers who are on their side and encourage them. That is a big force for change to reverse entropy. We need the energy of outside support to sustain an uphil battle. Al successful systems of change involve a strong social-support component.

Conversely, if someone desires change but is stil hanging around people who work against that change, the risk is much greater. An addict must, for example, lose the phone numbers of his addict friends. A nonperformer must shun other nonperformers. In the same ways that we worry about whom our kids hang around with, we need to worry about it in the change process for adults as wel . This is another good reason to prune the nonperformers out of a company, as other people “catch” the sickness. And it is a good reason for leaders to make sure that the people they are trying to develop spend a lot of time around high-performers.

Skilled Help

Usual y, for there to be real hope for the future, there must be someone in the circle of help who knows what he is doing. I have seen a lot of situations where someone is holding out hope for an executive or a loved one and they say, “It’s going to be good. He’s meeting with so-and-so.”

But so-and-so is not real y bringing a lot to the table, and nothing changes. But at other times, I hear that they are meeting with a different so-and-so, and immediately I get hopeful because I know that “so-and-so number 2” is good.

I am al for peer-to-peer help, coaching, mentoring, and the like. It is usual y an essential part of any change process. But the question is always What is that peer bringing to the party? The mere fact that someone has offered to help doesn’t mean much. What matters is what kind of experience that person is bringing with them when they show up. How many such situations has she helped with before? What in his experience base would lead you to believe that he can help this person now? What kind of wisdom and knowledge does she offer?

In some situations, you just can’t find the kind of help that would cause us to have much hope unless you tap professional know-how. Some situations require it, and in my experience, it is also good to make sure that you ask the professional how many such situations he or she has had experience in. A classic example of that is the mental health professional who is cal ed to help an addict yet does not have much experience in treating addictions. In those instances, you want someone who has treated many addicts and knows al the tricks.

Executive coaching is similar. Depending on what kind of situation you find yourself needing help for, make sure that the coach has had experience in that kind of engagement, that size organization, or with that level of executive or team. Make sure that he is equipped to deal with someone like you or the one you are wanting to help. The bottom line is not someone’s degrees or title, but her expertise and experience.

Some Success

Change takes time. One of the most common comments I hear from those who are invested in someone’s changing is “I hope this happens fast.” In some situations, we
can
expect enormous change in a short time with specific interventions. For example, I recently worked with a VP who had a horrible track record with direct reports. What I found was that he simply had never been taught how to talk to people in difficult conversations, and with a few months of coaching, he had turned around some key relationships. But in other kinds of situations, especial y where long-standing personality issues are involved, change is a process. So, to have hope, you
must
have patience with people making significant changes.

But that does not mean that you should wait forever. There should be movement that can be seen, even if quite early in a process. Notice I did not say that you should see al of the
results
early on. What I said was “movement,” as in progress. In other words, you should be able to ascertain that
something
is happening. It may even appear to be getting worse, as in some people change does go backward before it goes forward. But at least that is movement. Talk to the helper so as to understand what proper expectations are, and then look for those expected things to be occurring.

Usual y it is good not to have hope if nothing is happening for a long period of time. Something should be happening somewhere along the way, even if it is not the end result yet. We are looking for some sort of movement, instead of ongoing stagnation.

What New Wisdom Is Being Added?

Years ago, I began a chain of psychiatric hospital treatment programs and treatment centers with a business partner, Dr. John Townsend. At the time we began it, we were young clinicians who wanted to take our treatment methods and programs and scale them up. We knew that they were effective and proved, and we were confident that we could implement them on a larger scale. So we began a company.

Al was going wel on the treatment side, as probably could have been expected. But not too long into the venture, we were amassing a sizable operation in the nuts and bolts of a health care business. It was no longer a couple of clinicians admitting patients to their units and treating them. It was now complicated managed-care contract negotiations and significant deals with public companies that owned hospitals; we needed to move from a private-practice model, in which the phone rings at the office when someone needs treatment, to a professional cal center that could take a cal from the initial inquiry for help al the way through the insurance utilization process to admission. Al of this was a lot different than we had first signed up for, a couple of excited, zealous “kids,” if you wil (I was twenty-nine), with a dream to help a bunch of people and build a sustainable business in the process.

As it grew and got more complicated, we began to get bogged down. In the beginning, the business was more clinical y weighted than health-care-operations weighted. So our expertise was enough. But it did not take long until we were over our heads in many of those areas where we had no experience, like “capitated coverage” and other complicated insurance and health care management issues. I remember the “bogged down”

moment clearly. We were at that point where we had built something sizable enough to have a weighty infrastructure, but not getting to critical mass fast enough to have it realize its ful potential. The costs of the infrastructure were adding more and more pressure, but they were not yet producing the top-line revenues that would sustain the business in the long term. We needed more knowledge regarding those growth curves than we had between the two of us or with our other partners.

There were times when I was beginning to lose hope that our original vision for the business could be realized. The cash burn rate of the infrastructure was scary enough to have my attention, and the stal was enough to get us to a potential pruning moment. We needed a necessary ending to the approach we’d been trying or a reason to hope that was not a wish.

The moment came when we decided to bring in some seasoned health care operational professionals. We hired a consultant with years of experience in treatment center chains to do an audit of al of our operations and make some suggestions. The audit took a month, and his finding was “You guys need to hire someone like me.” In other words, we needed expertise in the areas where we did not have it. He showed us that our focus on the clinical side was leaving a lot undone on the operations side of the equation. We needed someone from the industry to bring the wisdom we did not possess.

So we did just that. But we didn’t hire someone like him. We hired
him
. He was surprised at our suggestion that he come aboard, but we talked him into it. We fol owed that move by hiring several other seasoned health care industry pros, who brought knowledge that we did not have and fleshed out the right team. To paraphrase Jim Col ins, we final y got the right people on the bus in the right seats. From managed care to marketing to finance and media, we began to tap the knowledge base and build an organization much deeper in wisdom in those areas than we were.

It was not long before the entire picture began to take shape. Al that we had built with our own experience and expertise—the critical mass of networks, providers, market share, reputation for good treatment, incredible doctors and psychologists on our team—began to gel and operate successful y because the expertise we had been missing was final y on board. In the next few years, we experienced great growth and profitability while succeeding in our primary mission of extending help to scores of people throughout the western United States in about forty markets. So the truth was that there had been hope, but we just could not see it at the time.

But why? Why was there hope and not just a wish? The reason that our stal ed enterprise was able to gain steam was similar to a law of physics: entropy increases, or things get worse over time,
in a closed system
. But if you open the system up and bring in a new source of energy and a template or a structure of
truth
to give direction to the energy, things can turn around. Entropy can be reversed. That is what happened,
there was
new truth to give direction to the energy that we were pouring into the enterprise
. The wisdom of the highly experienced health-care industry professionals gave us direction, structure, and a path. Everything reversed course and got better. They added what we did not have.

So the lesson here is this: you can have objective hope if you are bringing some new knowledge, wisdom, or know-how to the situation.

Obviously if things are not working, you need a second opinion, some new ideas, some knowledge that is not present. Without that, you may only be wishing. But if you real y are bringing new wisdom to bear on a situation that is hopeless, you might have good reason to have true, objective hope.

Where Is the Energy for Change?

In a situation where you have decided that you don’t want more of the current or past performance and yet you don’t know whether or not to have hope, the third diagnostic test is this:
where is the energy for change going to come from?

If you have energy without intel igence, it wil be wasted and not go toward a direction or a path. But likewise, intel igence or a plan without energy is not going anywhere at al . Even the best-laid plans wil stagnate without a force driving them.

So the relevant diagnostic question regarding when to have hope is Where is the energy going to come from to change things? I have seen so many situations where there could be very real reasons for hope, where there is great wisdom, intel igence, and planning, but the energy component is under-resourced or not thought of at al . You need new infusions of energy toward the change process that you have decided upon.

You have to be able to answer the question Who is going to drive the change? Without a dedicated change agent, change usual y does not happen. So to have hope that is not a wish, that question must be asked and the duty assigned.

Someone who has been on the change project part time may have to go for 100 percent focus on the change. It may mean that more bodies must be brought to the task. It may mean outside consultants to bring new energy to the team. It may mean that a team is put together with that assignment, like the committee I spoke of earlier, whose mission was the development of the leader. That is energy focused on change.

I like to suggest that organizations begin to build “powerful coalitions” of influence within and throughout the company, people who wil own the change and drive it forward. You can do this with formal or informal structures, with matrix teams, or functional teams. The question is always Where is the force going to come from?

The same question applies to the personal arena as wel . A common question I get is from women who want to get their husbands into “growth.”

They might have experienced personal growth themselves, and want it for them, or they want it for their marriages. “How do I get him to read books, or care about growing?” women often ask.

Usual y the answer is
not
to leave the
How to Have an Intimate Marriage
book on the coffee table while he is on the couch watching ESPN, hoping that he is going to pick it up and read it. Instead, I like to suggest that the women stop trying to be the energy source themselves, and get their husbands in front of new sources of growth energy that he wil open up his “system” to and be influenced by, namely, other men. The best way is for a wife to get her husband in a smal couples group or retreat where there are other men who are talking about issues and growing. That wil have a greater chance of getting him energized than waiting on him to be his own spark plug. This outside group can be a “powerful coalition” for change, a new source of energy to add to the mix.