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

by Henry Cloud

You want enough energy to get the change moving and to keep it moving until the next infusion of energy, yet not so much that everyone gets overfed and has to take a nap. For example, I worked with a particularly high-performing business unit whose leader was renowned for driving hope and sustained movement in his troops. He did it through a daily, fifteen-minute morning meeting to cast vision, give information, share stories of success, and infuse strategy, thus giving a daily dose of energy that kept it all moving. He used these short meetings to make sure everyone was aligned around the goal, to catch problems early, and to give his team a space in which to share lessons and acknowledge progress. This daily infusion of energy kept the team and the process moving. It’s worth noting that the meetings were short, and they didn’t require preparation, so they weren’t distractions from the real work of change; instead, they became moments to mark forward progress and even to celebrate those incremental steps in the right direction.

The truth is that not everyone on planet Earth is like you. Not all take responsibility for themselves or care about how their actions are affecting other people or the mission. Moreover, some are even worse than that. Some people are actually out to do you harm. If you do not accept this reality, then you are going to spend a lot of time wasting time, money, energy, love, resources, your heart, and everything else that matters to you on people who will either squander it or destroy it. That is why this chapter may be the most important one that you read. It is essential to understand that not everyone is going to be open or even desirous of the change that you are trying to bring about.

wise people learn from experience and make adjustments.

When truth presents itself, the wise person sees the light, takes it in, and makes adjustments.

You have heard it said of people that they “saw the light.” Wisdom is a stance that people take wherein they are open to hearing the truth, so when it comes, they listen to it and make the necessary changes to be aligned with that truth. Such people take feedback, correction, and training well. When you tell them something about their performance that is accurate, they hear it. They respond to it positively, and they apply it. You don’t get resistance or a fight. In fact, they see it as a gift. The result? They learn and they get better as a result of feedback. Wise people will always grow and get better, and as a result, when you are dealing with one, you have good reason to hope. If something is wrong, they can learn. They don’t resist the truth that they have to align with. As the phrase goes, they “take it to heart.” No defensiveness.

this diagnostic is about one thing and one thing only: a person’s ability to take feedback and make the adjustment. With people who can respond to feedback, given that they have the gifts and abilities that you need in your context, there is always hope.

The mature person meets the demands of life, while the immature person demands that life meet her demands.

Here are some traits of the wise: • When you give them feedback, they listen, take it in, and adjust their behavior accordingly. • When you give them feedback, they embrace it positively. They say things like, “Thank you for telling me that. It helps me to know I come across that way. I didn’t know that.” Or “I really took what you said to heart, and here is what I did.” Or “Thanks for caring enough to bring this to my attention. I needed to hear this.” There is some sort of appreciation for the feedback, as they see it as something of value, even if it is hard to hear. You might hear them offer a response like, “Well, this was tough to hear, but it is good. It will help me even if it hurts.” • They own their performance, problems, and issues and take responsibility for them without excuses or blame. • Your relationship is strengthened as a result of giving them feedback. They thank you for it, and see you as someone who cares enough about them to have a hard conversation. They experience you as being for their betterment. • They empathize and express concern about the results of their behavior on others. If you tell them that something they are doing hurts you, you get a response that shows that it matters to them. “Wow, I didn’t realize I had hurt you like that. I never would want to do that. I am sorry.” Or they are concerned about how their performance is affecting the company or the team. “I am sad that I have been letting us down. I want to do better.” Or “I will not...

I have said that the pruning moment happens when we get to a good state of hopelessness, in which we know that more time is not going to help.

what does knowing if you are dealing with a wise person have to do with hopelessness? It tells you whether or not more time is justified in finding out if someone can get better. If you have a performance problem with a person or in some way he is not being the best, which you know is demanded for the position, then you have an important question: do I fix or do I replace?

You cannot fix people who will not take feedback, because from their perspective, they do not have a problem. So as far as they are concerned, there is nothing to fix. That is why they do not change.

The bottom line with a wise person is that talking helps. Feedback helps. They use it, so keep on talking until there is nothing left to discuss.

And that is the problem with the fool. Whereas the chief descriptor of the wise person is that when the light shows up, he looks at it, receives it, joins it, and adjusts his behavior to align with the light, the fool does the opposite: he rejects the feedback, resists it, explains it away, and does nothing to adjust to meet its requirements. In short, The fool tries to adjust the truth so he does not have to adjust to it.

The reason is that Kyle was taking no ownership of the problem. Giving feedback was hopeless. Therefore, as we shall see, it makes no sense to keep giving it, but more about that in a moment.

You probably know this experience. It is the gnawing feeling that you get when you have the same conversation with someone about the same issue over and over, and slowly sink into the frustration and despair of hope deferred. You wish that the person would hear what you are saying, as your intent is not to persecute but to solve a problem so that something will work or that your relationship will get better. But you get nowhere and mostly feel stuck. You try over and over, and yet nothing ever happens. The point to understand here is that that is exactly what someone engaged in the foolishness of defending against seeing the truth is trying to accomplish. She is in a stance that is designed not to see the truth or grasp it or in any way adjust to it. Her goal is to avoid ownership of the feedback, which would require her to take responsibility and change. As a result, she constantly produces collateral damage for others, does harm to the cause, and everyone but her feels the effects. So, the frustration all around her grows.

Unlike the wise person, with whom talking through issues strengthens your relationship, with the foolish person, attempts to talk about problems create conflict, alienation, or a breach in the relationship.

Sometimes, they immediately shift the blame to you, as they “shoot the messenger” and make it somehow your fault. “Well, if you had given me more resources, I could have gotten it done. But you cut my budget.” Or “That’s because you told me to make sure that I focused on the other project.” Or “You never told me that you wanted it that way.” The energy shifts, and suddenly you find yourself the object of correction.

They have little or no awareness or concern for the pain or frustration that they are causing others or the mission. While their behavior or performance creates a lot of collateral damage for others, they seem oblivious to it and see others as the problem for thinking that there is an issue. • Their emotional stance toward getting corrected is opposite to that of the wise person, who embraces the feedback and shows appreciation for your taking the effort to share it. Instead, their stance is one of anger, disdain, or some other fight-or-flight response. They either move against you or move away from you as a result. I have heard many people say that after they confronted someone with something, the person never talked to them again if they did not have to.

The important theme to recognize in all of these traits is a lack of ownership of the issue and a refusal to take responsibility and change behavior to meet the demands of life. Instead, fools want reality to change for them. They always want the outside world to change instead of them.

set limits on yourself in terms of what you will allow yourself to be exposed to in terms of the fool’s collateral damage: • “Susie, at this point, I have tried to get you to see the issue and change it, and that has not helped. So I have to make sure that at least it is not affecting me [or the team, or the company, or the results, or the family] any more. I can’t afford to miss another quarter’s numbers because you are unwilling to do what I have asked. So I am taking this responsibility away from you. I have to give it to someone who will do what I need.” • “Sam, I cannot allow myself to continue to be hurt or endangered by your drinking. So the next time it happens, I will leave the event or the house and go somewhere where I am not affected by it.” • “Keith, your anger is hurtful to me, and I can’t allow myself to be yelled at anymore, so the next time it happens, I will leave.” • “Roger, this team and the environment we want to have around here are important to me, so I can’t allow your abusive behavior to ruin it anymore.”

The strategy for foolish people is simple: Quit talking about the problem and clearly communicate that because talking is not helping, you are going to take steps to protect what is important to you, the mission, or other people. Give limits that stop the collateral damage of their refusal to change, and where appropriate, give consequences that will cause them to feel the pain of their choice to not listen. The necessary ending that you have to initiate with people caught in their own foolishness is to end the pattern. You cannot control them or get them to change. What you can do is create an ending to the effects their refusal to take responsibility is having on you or others. By so doing, you have accomplished two things that nagging did not do. You have limited the effects of their behavior on you and others, thus quarantining their ownership disease from further infecting your life, the team, or the mission, and you may have done the one thing that can influence them to change. Talking will not help, but doing something that causes them to feel the consequences of their behavior may be what finally turns them around.

Whenever someone is not taking responsibility, there are always consequences. The question is, Who is suffering the consequences? Most times, with someone who is not responsive to feedback, their company, team, boss, co-workers, or loved ones are the ones who are suffering the consequences of their behavior. An addict, for example, is not trying to ruin anyone’s life; he is just trying to avoid responsibility for his problems. But as a result of not taking responsibility, he ruins many people’s lives with the “collateral damage” of his addiction. There are certainly consequences, but he is not the one who is suffering them. Others are.

So as long as you are not creating a necessary ending to this pattern, there is no force driving change, because the person has no consequences. With these kinds of people, the only time they get it is when it begins to cost them. That is the only time they feel any need to listen and change.

A plan that has hope is one that limits your exposure to the foolish person’s issues and forces him to feel the consequences of his performance so that he might have hope of waking up and changing.

With wise people, talk to them, give them resources, and you will get a return. 2. With foolish people, stop talking to them about problems; they are not listening. And stop supplying resources; they squander them. Instead, give them limits and consequences. 3. With evil people, to quote a Warren Zevon song, the strategy is “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” The reason? You have to go into protection mode, not helping mode, when dealing with evil people.

This is difficult for some leaders to come to grips with; they think that they can reason with anyone and finally get through. But evil people are not reasonable. They seek to destroy. So you have to protect yourself—ergo, lawyers, guns, and money. I use that phrase to symbolize resources that you use to protect yourself. Sometimes you must see people for who they truly are, protect yourself, create a very necessary ending, and have nothing more to do with them. The kind of person who likes to bring others down, is intentionally divisive, enjoys it when someone fails, and tries to create the downfall of others or of the company is to be protected against at all costs. The longer that you have hope for this kind of person, the more vulnerable you are.

The bottom line with evil is to stay away, create the firmest protective ending that you can, and get real help to do it. Use your lawyers, law enforcement (that is the guns part), and your financial resources to make sure that you will not be hurt by someone who is trying to destroy you or the things that matter to you. Whereas you talk to wise people about problems and you talk to fools about consequences, do not talk to evil people at all, period. “You can communicate with me through my attorney” is a phrase that exists for a reason.

people do better when operating from their strengths than from their weaknesses, and companies do better when they are making sure that people spend their time and energy doing what they are good at rather than what they are not.

Strengths matter, so base some of your hope on them.

I know I live in hell, but I know the names of all the streets.” This is exactly the response one woman made to a group of friends who were trying to get her to take some positive steps in her life. I will never forget her words, as they epitomize one of the biggest problems in creating necessary endings in all of our lives. Endings, no matter how needed, are hard. They involve change, and for many reasons that we have seen, we resist the changes that we need to make, even when they would be good for us personally or for our business. Your brain’s hard wiring can resist change, as we have seen. But at the same time, you know you must change if you are going to end the misery of the present and get to the future that you desire. Both the resistance and the imperative are real, and both require attention.

You have heard it said that people resist change. That is not always true. It is more true that people resist change that they feel no real need to make. For example, if I said, “Get up and go outside,” but you were relatively comfortable where you are, you would resist my suggestion. But if I said, “The building is on fire! Get out now!” we would see little resistance to change. We will quickly make changes that we feel will make pain stop or help us avoid it. On the positive side, we will do the same thing. If I asked you to stop shopping where you shop but you were pretty comfortable at your present store, then you would not go out of your way to change. But if I told you that another store, even a few miles farther down the road was offering three for one, you would be more likely to go. So getting your brain to move to create an ending, and getting the people around you to do the same, is going to take both: the fear of the negative and the draw of the positive.

Remember, you were not designed to cope but to thrive. But just like a rosebush, you can’t thrive without pruning, which means your necessary endings truly are urgent.

Playing the movie forward is one of the best known motivators in human behavior, as it gets your brain aligned with what you want and can create new patterns of behavior.

We get comfortable with our misery, as we find ways to medicate ourselves, delude ourselves, disassociate our feelings, or get enough distance from the problem that it does not touch us directly.

then sit down and think of all of the realities of the situation that you have been avoiding:

You are living it right now. I just want you to picture yourself living it for real five years from now. Is that what you want?

But the reality was that I was sick of dealing with the poor performance in the areas where it was poor, and what put me over the edge was seeing that the future was going to be just like today.

We have an incredible tolerance for pain, especially if we think it “might get better.” So, we tell ourselves little lies like “It will turn around” or “It’s not always like this.” So we make it through the day, and another, until the days turn into years. But the truth is that there is no ending or better time coming unless we do something. So we have to get our mind to see that “hazard,” as Kotter terms it, and stop the lies.

So play

Who are your change agents, either for yourself or your company, for the endings that you need to make happen?

So make it real. Write it down. Talk about it and create reminders in your personal life and your organization. Line your company’s walls with pictures of the new reality. When you do that, the one they are living in every day won’t be as welcome anymore.

But in the areas where we find that harder to do, like creating some difficult or painful endings, we need external deadlines. We need to “do the ending by January 1, period.” Such a deadline forces urgency and gets us moving.

Getting the best price for what you do not value is not the issue. Getting to what you do value is the issue. So, do it, no matter what, by a certain date. Time is the most important issue.

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 will 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 all.

“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.

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.

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

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 full of the misery. To the degree that we can stay distant from it, we don’t get moving.

As a rule, the more immediate the feedback, the better the performance. Feedback helps create what well-known researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as flow. So measure and evaluate what you want to make grow. Be the inspecting gardener, and you will 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 all 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.

At some point, if you are a leader, sometimes you have to lead, even when no one wants to follow. Alignment and other issues notwithstanding, there are those instances when you sometimes have to grab the wheel and exercise the authority that you have. Sometimes urgency is created when the sheriff rides into town.