Necessary Endings (21 page)

And they did it. The issue to keep before you is this: “They could have taken more time to
get a little more out of what they did not want
.” Think about that sentence. If you understand the absurdity of that statement, it wil get you to create deadlines. If we always want more out of what we don’t want or what is not working, we don’t understand pruning at al .

Set a deadline for someone to hear what your expectations and demands are and for her to respond, and let her know that if the date passes without action,
you
wil create an ending. Set a deadline for a person’s performance to improve, and tel him that if it does not, he is gone. Set a deadline for a business unit to turn around, and let the people running know that if it doesn’t by then, you’l shut it down. Set a deadline by which an initiative wil get done, or the people in charge won’t be in charge. Set a deadline for whatever it is that you need to change, and you focus energy and time together.

I recently heard a leader put it this way: “If I have someone who is not getting on board for a change we need to make, I meet with him or her first and try to understand their concerns. I hear them out and honestly try to take what they say to heart, and if it has merit, take the necessary steps, even if that means canning my plans. But, if it doesn’t, and the team has worked on it as wel , and that person is stil dragging, I go back to them and have a conversation. I tel them that I understand that they have some real reservations, and I can respect that.
But I cannot have them putting their
foot on the brake while I am putting mine on the accelerator
. So I tel them they have thirty days to figure out if they can get with it or not, and if not, I understand and wish them wel . But they wil have to leave if they can’t get on board, because I can’t have their foot on the brake on an ongoing basis.”

Thirty days. Deadlines focus energy like a laser. They make movement happen, if they are real. Which brings up a point.

Remember, a deadline without consequences is not much of a deadline. So promise consequences for making and missing the deadline, and deliver them. If the deadline is for yourself, get someone involved who has the power to execute those consequences for you. It is the old, “Here is a check for a big amount. If I have not done
x
by this date, you are free to give it to someone I do not like.” Ouch.

Question for you or your team: What endings do you need to set a deadline for?

Create Structure

Endings happen when we create the structure that drives them. Structure consists of time, plans, critical paths, milestones, deadlines, meetings, al ocation and release of resources according to milestones, consequences for not meeting milestones, and other elements. The more years that I spend in leadership consulting, the more I value the role of creating structure that aligns with urgency around the vital, as wel as getting rid of structure that keeps the nonvital going.

So when you want to end something and you have had difficulty doing it on your own, set up a structure. As in the process of change I talked about earlier, get an outside coach, accountability partner, peer, management team, or someone to sign up for a process, and put it into place: a structured process, not one in which “We’l do it when we get time.” That won’t happen.

Then add time structures to the process to help you execute your ending. Like the woman I talked about above who had a weekly group that she attended to help her through the breakup, get your regular meeting around change happening, so that you won’t continue to “get to it when you can.”

You wil never get to it that way, because you have internal and external forces working against getting to it at al . The external structure creates the rails for the train to run on.

For one executive I worked with, I created a meeting around a particular ending once a week, with specific milestones that his team had to meet each week. We aligned people, business initiatives, strategy, and other resources around this one agenda, and the structure of having a plan with a timetable got it done. But without this structure, as they would tel you, change had floundered for some time.

How bad do you want to change? Bad enough to create a structured plan to get it done? If so, your chances of ending whatever you need to end just went up. Ask any spouse who struggled for years with an addict who final y went to Al-Anon in a structured meeting, regularly, a few times a week, and they wil tel you that that is what made the necessary ending happen.

This need for structure is satisfied in four tactics used by those who create urgency, listed by John Kotter in
A Sense of Urgency
. Such people, he writes, “behave with true urgency themselves
every single day.
They
do not
just say the right words daily, but more importantly, they make their deeds consistent with their words. They do so as visibly as possible, to as many people as possible, al in ways designed to reduce contentment with the status quo and the anxiety or anger that comes so easily with failures.”

Kotter is correct in noting that this behavior must be consistent “every single day.” Otherwise an ending won’t happen, because the time-and-energy quotient we talked about earlier won’t be strong enough. The question is how to do that “every day” thing. It is more likely to happen when it is in the schedule, with some structure and peer pressure and teeth to it, than when we are relying on the ones who are already resisting, even if they are we ourselves.

Q
uestion: What structure—time, plans, and other factors—do you need to create in order to make sure your endings happen?

Stay Close to the Misery

Your brain doesn’t move you toward pain, and yet the pain is one of your biggest and best motivators. If you are dentist phobic, even though you want healthy teeth, you avoid going as long as you can chomp on food without wincing. But when it starts to hurt at three A.M., you go the next day.

Endings are like that. We tend to execute them when we get a tummy ful of the misery. To the degree that we can stay distant from it, we don’t get moving.

I once worked with a CEO in technology who had a significant need for an ending to an ongoing quality problem in his company. It was so significant that he had prioritized it as the number-one issue for their next five years’ growth and competitive position. When I came on the scene, it had been a “focus” of his for about three years, yet no progress had been made. It had to do with some disconnects between the manufacturing side of the business and the service-delivery and customer-facing side, with the usual rock throwing that happens in those kinds of divides. Part of the problem was that the geographical homes of the departments were a thousand miles apart, and the two sides did not get together often enough.

The strategy had been for him to get together with the executives to whom he was delegating the issue, explaining to them how important it was and letting them work on it. In the interim, he would focus on the things that gave
him
energy, and this was not one of them. But they were not getting it done, and at various intervals, he would become aware al over again of its importance and get amped up about it. At that point, he would cal them in and beat them up over it, but not much would happen until next time. It was classic “ignore and zap” leadership.

There was no sense of urgency for
them
to get it done, and he was not leading them through the time intervals, devoting the necessary time and energy. He was comfortably distant. Nor was he creating urgency around the need for the stal to be over with and progress to begin, other than his twice-a-year temper tantrums. But it was absolutely vital to the overal mission that this change happen. So we diagnosed his issue as exactly that:
he needed to create his own urgency around it and end the stall.
But how?

The main problem here was that he was too far away from the misery
. He was focused on the revenue side of the business and heavily involved in acquisitions of new companies and marketing. So day to day, which turned into month to month, he would have virtual y no interface with the one infected tooth that could bring the whole company down. He was just “chewing on the other side of his mouth.” So I decided that we needed to make a rule to force him to chew on the side that hurt, so he would final y go to the dentist and get this tooth pul ed.

I got him directly involved in experiencing the service problems for himself. He sat in on customer help lines. He spent some time visiting and talking to the service centers in the retail stores and outlets, as wel as time in workgroups hearing the kinds of problems that they were encountering with customers. Then he had to hear the kinds of responses that the service people were getting when they tried to take it to the product side and get the changes done. It was maddening. When he did that and final y experienced some of the wal s that were in the way of getting changes made, he got religion.

First he got mad, so I gave him a time-out, as anger doesn’t achieve much lasting change. But after he cooled off, he then began to pul them al together, break down the wal s between the two divisions, and get them real y understanding the issues from both sides. Final y the sales team understood some of the issues that the developers would run into when sales would request a “simple fix.” And the developers understood better that their fixes were not working a lot of the time and that their answer on the phone of “Wel , it should work” did not make it so. And they final y got the kinds of heartburn that those delays were causing the people who actual y had to deal with customers, and the pain that customers themselves were experiencing. This stuff
really
mattered, but it had been stal ed for three years.
And one of the reasons was that the ones who could change it
were too isolated from the pain of it all
. When developers have to leave the science building and talk to a customer, it helps.

Then the breakthrough real y happened. In getting close to the pain himself, the CEO found the beaver dam that was clogging up the river. It was an executive who was real y standing in the way of change and had al owed a lot of these logjams to remain. After a short process of addressing it with him and getting little movement, the CEO made one of those Drucker “life and death” decisions for the business. He removed the executive from his position. And everything turned around. The necessary ending to the false hope that it was “going to get better” because he had told someone to go fix it final y died. He got to the good hopelessness we discussed, and he executed a necessary ending to the problem. But it would have never happened if he had continued to
allow himself to remain detached from the problem.
I had to get him face-to-face with it, every day, until he got sick of it and what it was doing to his vision. Then he final y did something about it.

Q
uestion: What issue are you shielding yourself from so that you are not close enough to the pain that you need to motivate you to change?

Measure, Measure, Measure

Closely related to staying close to the misery is the need for ongoing measurement. I continue to be surprised by how easy it is for any of us to ignore the passage of so much time between the times that we assess and measure the things that are most important to us. We think we did it yesterday, but it was months ago. I think it may have something to do with how fast-paced al of work and life is now, and the overwhelming amount of work that flies at us each day, with e-mail and the speed of information flow. We literal y have too much to process and work on. With high-level leaders, this is an issue that I see increasingly as time moves on. They are overwhelmed. How is your inbox?

Whether that is a reason or just an excuse, often more time than we realize goes by since the last time we took the vital signs of what is most important to us. That creates a lack of urgency energy. When I was in the psychiatric treatment-center business, we would have to gear up in staffing and other resources for an increase in our adolescent services when the first school report cards were sent out to parents in the fal . For many parents, it was the first time in a long time that they got a picture of how their kids were real y doing, and final y it created some urgency to put an end to the slide. They cal ed for help. I am grateful for the daily and weekly reports that my daughters’ school sends home for that reason. It keeps me “urgent” over their studies and other needs. Taking vital signs is a good thing.

It is likely that seasons are going by or branches need pruning and you don’t know it, because of a lack of measurement. That is the nature of not being omniscient. But it is also the reason that we measure the things that are important to us, so that if there is disease or something that is not the best but is taking up resources, we can “fix, close, or sel .” If we aren’t measuring, we don’t know.

Sam Walton was known for his measuring and monitoring systems, which kept a close watch on vital signs. If you use this kind of discipline, your brain wil soon internalize this awareness, and you wil feel more urgent around ongoing performance. Research shows that one of the important aspects of getting to the highest level of performance is the degree that someone gets immediate feedback. As a rule, the more immediate the feedback, the better the performance. Feedback helps create what wel -known researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as
flow
.

So measure and evaluate what you want to make grow. Be the inspecting gardener, and you wil get healthy urgency to create quick endings before the problems get too big. Think teeth cleaning versus root canals. Planned deficits and slow growth are fine, and al the numbers don’t always have to be happy. Sometimes bad numbers are in the plan. But in those instances, you are on an intentional plan, not headed for a train wreck. And you know the difference by diligent measuring.