Henry Cloud - Necessary endings: the employees, businesses, and relationships that all of us have to give up in order to move forward

Necessary Endings

The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward

Dr. Henry Cloud

The stories and examples that appear in this book come from the authors interviews and consulting. The names of individuals, companies, and other identifying facts have been changed to protect the identities of those who provided them. Therefore, any identifying resemblance to actual individuals is merely coincidental.

This book is dedicated to the leaders

who have allowed me to walk with them

through their necessary endings.

Your courage, conviction, and faith are inspiring.

Great is the art of the beginning, but greater is the art of ending.

H ENRY W ADSWORTH L ONGFELLOW

Contents

Endings: The Good Cannot Begin Until the BadEnds

Pruning: Growth Depends on Getting Rid of the Unwanted or the Superfluous

Normalizing Necessary Endings: Welcome the Seasonsof Life into Your Worldview

When Stuck Is the New Normal: The DifferenceBetween Pain with a Purpose and Pain for No Good Reason

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

Hoping Versus Wishing: The Difference BetweenWhats Worth Fixing and What Should End

The Wise, the Foolish, and the Evil: IdentifyingWhich Kinds of People Deserve Your Trust

Creating Urgency: Stay Motivated and Energized forChange

Resistance: How to Tackle Internal and ExternalBarriers

No More Mr. Bad Guy: The Magic ofSelf-Selection

Having the Conversation: Strategies for EndingThings Well

Embrace the Grief: The Importance of MetabolizingNecessary Endings

Sustainability: Taking Inventory of What IsDepleting Your Resources

Conclusion: Its All About the Future

The People Are the Plan

T oday may be the enemy of your tomorrow.

In your business and perhaps your life, the tomorrow that you desire and envision may never come to pass if you do not end some things you are doing today. For some people, that is clear and easy to execute. They end the things that are holding them back. For others, it is more difficult. This book is about that problem and how to get the results you desire by ending the things whose time has passed.

In it you will see that endings are a natural part of the universe, and your life and business must face them, stagnate, or die. They are an inherent reality. You will also see that there are different kinds of endings and that learning how to tell one from the other will ensure some successes and prevent many failures and much misery, ending substantial pain and turmoil that you or your business may now be encountering.

You will learn that there are reasons why you may not see the endings that are right in front of you, and reasons why you have been unable to execute the ones that you do see but feel paralyzed to deal with. But more than learning to see them, you will also find successful strategies for dealing with them.

And you will find that there is hope for some people and some business problems that seem hopeless to you now, but the problem has been in misdiagnosing what theres hope for and where theres none, and in mistaking which tactics will not help realize that hope and which ones will.

All in all, my hope is that you will be comfortable and confident in seeing, negotiating, and even celebrating some endings that may be the door to a future even brighter than you could have imagined.

Endings: The Good Cannot Begin Until the Bad Ends

T here it was again, that sinking feeling in his gut. He was noticing it more and more, at the same time each morning. It was happening each time he pulled into his parking spot at corporate headquarters and turned the ignition off, in that moment of silence when the radio shut down and he hadnt yet opened his car door to go into the building. He could no longer deny that it was real nor that it had become consistent: he didnt want to go into the office.

He felt a heaviness inside that was the opposite of his natural drive. Stephen was the type who was always pushing ahead. As a kid, he was the first one to run onto the field; in a group, the one to say, Lets go do this; in a business crisis, the one to pick up the ball and move it forward, no matter what the obstacle. He was passionate by nature and had no problem engaging with life. But now, each morning in his car, he had to admit that he felt no strong drive to go into that building and gear up for another day of making it work. That drive had been replaced by this heaviness, which was anything but motivating. This was not a feeling that he was used to.

So on this particular morning he didnt do what he normally did, which was to reach into the well of his natural optimism and make himself dive in. Instead, he restarted his car and drove to a park he passed each day on the way to work. He spotted a bench that would do fine. He just wanted to think.

As he sat down, he realized two things. First, he had not really let himself do much of this: thinking. He had been too busy and caught up in the events of the last few years since he took the helm of the company, and he had not taken enough time to reflect. He had just worked hard , because it was needed. The company that he loved and had felt would be his home forever was not going where he thought it would go. It had stalled out more than a year ago, and it still wasnt turning around. Life seemed to be draining out of the business, and now it felt more like a task and a duty to run it than the love affair it had been in the beginning. The honeymoon was over, but he had treated that as just another challenge to immerse himself in. That was who he was.

But what he realized at this moment was that the activity level had kept him from thinking too deeply, and when he did allow himself to pause, he realized the second thing: if he did think deeply, he would run into some thoughts that he did not want to have.

But, on this morning, he allowed himself to go there. He asked himself questions: What is this heaviness inside really about? What is it that drains me?

When he got out of his own way and allowed himself to be honest with himself, it did not take long for his gut to speak to him.

First, there was the strategy of the whole thing. He had taken the CEO job because profits were good but not great. To him, that seemed like an opportunity. He was a performer, and throughout his career, hed demonstrated that he truly could get more out of things than other people had gotten out of them before. He was smart, and he could execute. Using sheer horsepower and efficiency alone, he knew that there was growth in the existing numbers, not to mention in what new revenue he could realize through introducing new products and adding new sales territories.

But in the last year, with all of his talents and efforts applied as diligently as he knew how, the growth was not happening. That had to mean something else, and the something else was scary. It meant that the world was changing, the market was changing, but the company had not really changed with it. His team had just tried to do what they were already doing but do it better. And when he let himself realize the truth, he had to admit that the bright future he had imagined wasnt going to materialize until he made some big changes in direction.

To do that, though, would mean a lot of things to him that he didnt want to go through. It meant going to his board of directors and having a battle. It meant admitting that he had not been able to make the old way work, and to him that was admitting failure. Few things were worse.