Necessary Endings (9 page)

But then, the student grew past the teacher, and it was time for a launch. He had great opportunities before him and needed to take a step, but the mentor relationship was holding him back. He had formed a rule in his head that said to grow up and move on was being disloyal and ungrateful. He could not see how he could separate his business from his mentor and be anything other than a real jerk. So he stal ed. He missed opportunity after opportunity. His misplaced loyalty had put a ceiling on his personal potential as wel as his business potential. He felt he owed his mentor so much that he could never leave him.

After a lot of awareness, focus, and internal “remapping” he got to a place where he was conflict-free enough to move forward. He could final y see how leaving, moving on, and becoming al that he was meant to be was real y a validation of his mentor and that he could be loyal and keep a good relationship with him even if they were not partners. It was rocky for a bit, as most endings are, but with the new map, he could negotiate it wel . As a result, he became enormously successful, but about three years later than he should have. One wonders how much he left on the table in those stuck years in terms of money, achievement, growth, and even contentment.

In other instances, the map about the other person can have different content. As we have said, some people, like El en, often feel that they wil harm people if they hurt them. Or such a person may feel that she wil destroy someone’s life if she makes a decision that is good for her but requires the other person to take some responsibility for the outcome. This is common in both business and personal lives. It is just one of the truths about life: sometimes we need to do something for ourselves or our business that is not good for someone else, at least not in the short term.

Our decisions might take business away from others or force them to deal with some rejection or loss. But ultimately they are responsible for their own lives, as adults have to be. But if your map says that you are responsible for other adults as if they were your children, then something is wrong with your map, and no doubt some wel -needed endings are not taking place.

The map that makes people feel responsible for other people is one of the most ending-delaying maps there is. It usual y comes from having been parented in a way that makes the child feel guilty for choices that did not make parents or other members of the family happy. As adults, such people need to learn a new map that says, “I am not doing this ‘to you.’ I am doing it ‘for me.’ ” There is a big difference.

Loyalty is important, one of the most important character traits we can have. But loyal love does not mean infinite and/or misplaced responsibility for another’s life, nor does it mean that one forever puts up with mistreatment out of inappropriate loyalty.

Codependent Mapping

Another relational map is feeling responsible for another person’s pain when the enabling is ended. This topic has been so wel discussed in addiction and self-help literature that I almost did not include it. But I can’t ignore it, as it is one of the deepest, almost pathological y archetypal behavior patterns in the human race. It is as though we are “enabling” as a species. It seems it goes that deep into our imperfect DNA, and rampant in business.

Actual y “imperfect DNA” is a good way of looking at this one,
as it is a form of caring gone awry
. People enable others because they care. But this kind of caring is not caring at al and is destructive to the person being helped. It is a toxic dependency. It keeps adult kids dependent on parents long after they should have been independent adults. It keeps addicted spouses and friends addicted long after they should have been al owed to hit bottom and wake up (see chapter 7 on the wise, the foolish, and the evil). It keeps employers stuck with dead weight and paralyzes people’s professional growth. It is horrible. And yet it is one of the strongest maps that people have in their heads. So make this distinction in your mind firmly:

There is a difference between helping someone who is disabled, incapable, or otherwise infirm versus helping someone who is resisting
growing up and taking care of what every adult (or child, for that matter) has to be responsible for: herself or himself. When you find yourself
in any way paying for someone else’s responsibilities, not only are you stuck with a delayed ending, but you are probably harming that
person.

I do not see this mental map in the DNA of al companies, but I do see it in three instances quite often: (a) private companies that profess “we are family” cultures, (b) family-owned companies, and (c) many nonprofits. In my experience, enabling behaviors happen in these settings to a greater degree than in companies with performance-oriented cultures. A few comments about the pros and cons of these kinds of maps: First, I love it when a company has a “family feel.” It is so great to see a business actual y care for its people and create a culture in which people feel they belong to the “family of Acme Inc.” It connotes so many good things: loyalty, commitment, community, values, belonging, taking care of each other, et cetera. But sometimes the commitment to being a family gets interpreted in two destructive ways that often remain unspoken. The first one is that “we wil put up with you no matter how you perform, and you always have a place here.” That should not even be true in a biological family! I tel my own kids that everyone who lives in this house has to contribute. “We wil divide up al the chores, and the cost for living here is that everyone has their own chores. OK, first item on the list: mortgage. Who wants that one?” No hands go up. “OK, I’l take that one. What about feeding the dog?” I get more hands for that one, since they know I am serious. But some companies with the “family mantra” don’t even act like a normal family that requires everyone who lives in the house to have chores and contribute. So if you are going to be a “family” culture, which is great, then at least don’t be a dysfunctional one!

Second, in these companies, it can also be implied that “if you give yourself to us, we wil take care of you, almost for life. You have a place here no matter what.” That is not implied by the business but by the overal philosophy. Again, not to sound like slumlord Mr. Potter in
It’s a Wonderful
Life
, who hated “sentimental hogwash” that gave people breaks, this philosophy can be an infantilizing way of thinking, causing some employees to think that the business is responsible for their wel -being. They sometimes neglect their own growth, failing to recognize that they need to take responsibility for making themselves more valuable
to this business or any other.
Ironical y, this neglect may cause them to be even more dependent on the company.

But if they are developing themselves, their great performance then puts real and good pressure on the company to treat them better than any of the other thousand companies who would die to take them away. In that case, they have a great and healthy
mutual interdependency
that spawns a lot of life and a lot of value for both the employees and company. But to think that they are the company’s “children” who wil be taken care of no matter what is good for no one.

In the family-owned businesses, the failure-to-launch syndrome can become a business practice. If you are not familiar with that term, it is used to describe people in their twenties or older, who are living with parents and have not been able to successful y launch into adulthood. Certainly there are circumstances in which living with parents makes sense, and I am not decrying that. But sometimes the situation is not good and enables a childlike dependency in an adult. (In some situations, you cannot even cal it a
healthy
childlike dependency, as many times these twenty-somethings have no chores, requirements, or responsibilities, nor is their living with parents in service of anything else, like further education.) But when that dynamic becomes part of the business, then grown kids are al owed to “work” there and sometimes have big jobs because they are family, not because they are performing. It is destructive to the ones who
do
perform, to the one who is not performing, to the business, to the culture, to the family, and
especially to the other employees who work hard and see the nepotism.

In a similar way, sometimes in these companies, the family feel can also be extended to employees as the same dysfunctional family dynamics become corporate practice. These maps can also be hurtful to al concerned and prevent some significant necessary endings.

Check in with yourself and see if you have any of these relational maps that may be hurting you, your business, or your employees.

Past Experiences

Our psychological makeup is a col ection of past experiences, and these determine how we think about endings. As we have noted, you were designed to do proactive endings, developmental y, throughout life. But if you had many painful endings or dysfunctional maps of endings in your formative years, you might have difficulty with them now.

I worked with one CEO in the travel industry whose personal history included more than her fair share of early losses. As a result, she could not end almost anything, either personal y or professional y. Each time she would think about an ending, she would get a sick feeling inside and back away. When we examined the issue and traced this pattern through her client list, it looked a lot like her dating life. There were clients and companies that she had long since outgrown, strategical y, qualitatively, and quantitatively. But she stayed entangled with them for way too long, unable to “break it off.”

In other cases, people’s development has not provided them with the skil s to do endings wel . They have never been shown how to have a difficult conversation or to communicate in a way that might even fix a problem so an ending would not have to occur. Their remapping includes fil ing the holes in that developmental gap, and then they can execute as the conflict or feeling of helplessness diminishes. (We wil cover skil s building in a later chapter.)

Then, there is the above-mentioned feeling of learned helplessness that many people have from their formative years. Early experiences taught them that when they were in a situation that was causing them misery, there real y was nothing that they could do about it other than adapt to it and stay stuck. So that is what they do. That is exactly the opposite of the kind of decision that great leaders make. The great ones step up and make broad, sweeping changes to end some kind of misery and create a new day. People with learned helplessness have more of a “wel , I guess we just have to ride it out” mentality that they learned in formative experiences.

But once they become aware that this is an old map in their heads and not the reality that exists around them, they can begin to take action and make the endings needed to construct an entirely new reality, quite different from the one they thought they were stuck with.

Peter Drucker used to say that the great leaders make “life and death decisions,” which, as he pointed out, were usual y about people. Those are the decisions that cause big directional changes in businesses, where the life or death of the vision depends on someone stepping up and acting. If you have a sense of powerlessness in your situation or a map that doesn’t let you act, you won’t make life-or-death decisions. Instead, you wil tend to accept the slow death of morale, initiative, and sometimes even the business itself. And on the personal side of life, you wil miss out on al things vital.

While you cannot control the reactions of the people, the seasons, or the markets, you can always control your response to them—if your internal map shows you that you can.

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

I
n
Good to Great
, Jim Col ins describes what he cal s the level 5 leader, a person who possesses the duality of “professional wil ” and “personal humility.” In one description, he describes the level 5 leader as “humble and fearless,” a seeming paradox. While we wil get to the humility needed to do necessary endings wel , let’s first look at the “fearless wil ” required to step up and make them in the first place. Where does it come from?

Are you born with it? Or do you learn it? Most important, can you find it when you don’t have it?

Leadership scholars have argued for a long time about whether leaders are born or made. The reality is that the answer is both, as in most nature-nurture debates. Some have fearless genes, it seems. Plus, their experiences make them what they are as wel . Peyton Manning is a great quarterback, obviously physical y and temperamental y gifted to play footbal ,
and
he and his brother Eli had a great mentor/father to help develop them along the way. Genes, and experiences.

Plus, we also know there is a third major component:
a person’s own choices
. That is good news, especial y for people who find that necessary endings do not come natural y for them.

But either way, whether born, grown, or pul ed up by their own bootstraps via choices, successful people and successful leaders al have one thing in common:

They get in touch with reality.

If you are looking for the formula that can get you motivated and fearless, here it is:
you must finally see reality for what it is
—in other words, that
what is not working is not going to magically begin working
. If something isn’t working, you must admit that what you are doing to get it to work is hopeless.

This chapter is about the lifesaving virtue of hopelessness.

The awareness of hopelessness is what final y brings people to the reality of the pruning moment. It is the moment when they wake up, realize that an ending must occur, and final y feel energized to do it. Nothing mobilizes us like a firm dose of reality. Whether it is final y getting an addict to hit bottom and end a destructive pattern or getting a CEO in front of a bankruptcy judge to force the restructuring that he has been avoiding, only reality gets us to do difficult things.