Necessary Endings (18 page)

• “Dave, I want to live in a sober house, and since you have chosen to not do anything about your addiction, I won’t be living with you anymore until you get treatment and get sober.”

• “Barbara, I wish that I could continue to have you as a client, but I have talked to you about the problems that make this difficult for me. Since you have chosen to not change those issues, I can no longer do work for you. If something changes, feel free to let me know.”

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 col ateral damage of their refusal to change, and where appropriate, give consequences that wil 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.

The key here is to see that holding out hope for someone who is resistant to feedback is not grounded in a lot of reality. It is hard enough to fix some problems when someone owns them. But if they are in denial about them, then they are not even working on them, and there is not much reason to have hope until they do.
This is why it is so important for you to recognize foolish behavior
. Once you see it, you know that an ending is nigh—if not an ending with the person, then at least an end to al owing their unchanging pattern to affect you or things you care about. Otherwise, you cannot have hope that tomorrow is going to be different from today.

The Key to Changing a Foolish Person’s Behavior

As we have seen, there is a big difference between ending a wise person’s problem behavior and ending a foolish person’s. With the wise, if you talk about it, resource them, and help them, you usual y get improvement. With the foolish, talking usual y does nothing, and only consequences matter. Let’s talk about that for a moment, so you see how essential this point is and why you sometimes have to bring consequences into the picture.

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 “col ateral damage” of his addiction. There are certainly consequences, but he is not the one who is suffering them. Others are.

On the job, when someone is not owning her issues, it is usual y the company, the team, or co-workers who are suffering the consequences—a toxic culture, being held up, not meeting deadlines, not getting deals done, losing potential profits, losing customers, not accomplishing the mission, et cetera. They are suffering, as they are al working hard, taking responsibility for themselves, and yet paying for the results of her denial.

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. It is exactly why a necessary ending is often the right thing to do.

I frequently hear bosses, co-workers, and others say to a person in this kind of denial, “You
need
to begin getting your reports in on time so we can move forward and hit our deadlines.” Then they say to me, “I told him he needs to do it, but he stil doesn’t.”

I usual y say it is not true that he needs to do it. “Apparently he does not need to at al , or he would be doing it. It sounds as though
you
need him to do it and that
you
are the only one who feels the need for him to perform. He obviously feels no need at al . I think what we have to talk about is how to
transfer the need for him to perform
from your shoulders onto his
,
as he is the only person who can do anything about it.
” Consequences are the way to do that. When people begin to feel consequences for their behavior or performance, al of a sudden they realize that “I need to perform, or I am going to get fired.” The need has final y been transferred from the shoulders of the people who should not be experiencing it to the shoulders of the one who should.

When a spouse says to the alcoholic, “You need to go to AA,” that is obviously not true. The addict feels no need to do that at al , and isn’t. But when she says, “I am moving out and wil be open to getting back together when you are getting treatment for your addiction,” then al of a sudden the addict feels “
I need
to get some help or I am going to lose my marriage.” The need has been transferred. It is the same with any kind of problematic behavior of a person who is not taking feedback and ownership. The need and drive to do something about it must be transferred to that person, and that is done through having consequences that final y make him feel the pain instead of others. When he feels the pain, he wil feel the need to change.

So, in terms of when to have hope and when not to, if you are hoping that someone in denial is going to get it and change, but there is nothing in the picture to force that change other than your desire, that is probably a wish and not real, objective hope. If you are dealing with this kind of person, it is probably time for a necessary ending to the pattern of not listening and the beginning of a different plan. 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.

Evil People

Sometimes in a workshop or in leadership training, in teaching about these three categories of people, I wil summarize the methods of dealing with them like this in order to introduce the concept of the evil person:

1. With wise people, talk to them, give them resources, and you wil 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.

Lawyers, guns, and money usual y get their attention. That introduction is not only for effect. The truth is that I am not kidding.

Lawyers, Guns, and Money: A Tough Pill to Swallow

For some people, it is a big step to realize that there are people in the world who hurt you—not unintentional y the way a foolish person does but because they
want
to
. But it is true. There are some people whose desire it is to hurt others and do destructive things. And with them, you have to protect yourself, your company, your loved ones, and anything that matters to you. They actual y want to bring you down.

This is difficult for some leaders to come to grips with; they think that they can reason with anyone and final y 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 intentional y divisive, enjoys it when someone fails, and tries to create the downfal of others or of the company is to be protected against at al costs. The longer that you have hope for this kind of person, the more vulnerable you are.

Many women have to get restraining orders, as they are in relationships with destructive men and their very lives are in danger. They need to create a very firm, necessary ending with no contact and be protected by their attorneys, police, and others: ergo, lawyers, guns (police), and money.

But this is true in business, as wel . Rarely is there physical danger; more often it is an individual’s career or the company that is in danger. There are people who do want to bring you down and destroy whatever you have built—for many reasons. They envy you and want your position, or they think they were slighted and want to sue you to get back at you. I have seen some ugly things happen in the business world, and some of it could have been avoided if people had not held out false hope for dealing with a person who engaged in a lot of evil behavior. Do not hope for the evil persons to change. It could happen, and it does,
but it does not happen by giving in to them
,
reasoning with them
,
or giving them another chance
to hurt you
. It happens when they final y are subject to limits that force them to change. Jail does some people good.

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 wil 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 al , period. “You can communicate with me through my attorney” is a phrase that exists for a reason.

Problems versus Patterns

Another thing to consider when you are trying to figure out if you are going to go forward with a person is the issue of problems versus patterns. A problem is something in someone’s performance or behavior that you need to end; it is specific and objective and isolated. For example, a big project is blown because of a specific mistake or because an interpersonal conflict is not handled wel .

A pattern exists when there are problems but they do not stand alone as isolated issues or occurrences. Instead, you can link many occurrences together to see that this person made a mistake on the big project because she didn’t get organized or do her research. And this is just one more example of many times when she has done the same or similar things. It is not a specific, one-time problem. It is a pattern that we can recognize and now almost count on. It is recurring.

When you are dealing with a recurring pattern, there is less hope that just a conversation or a little correction is going to help. Patterns, many times (though not al ), are tendencies that people have less conscious control over, and the process of change is more difficult. Change certainly can happen, but if you are depending on it in any significant way and need to have hope for long-standing patterns to change, then look at the ingredients of the change process that I listed in Chapter 6 in the section entitled “When to Suspend Hopelessness.”

Hope and the Strengths Movement

One of the great emphases of recent management literature has been the strengths movement. Championed by the Gal up Organization, organizational researcher Marcus Buckingham, and others, the message is a good one: 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.

This finding is relevant to our discussion about hope in two ways. The first is that sometimes a person’s performance is not going to get better if you continue to have her doing something for which she has very little giftedness, ability, or inclination. You are swimming upstream to try to hold on to the hope that it is going to get better. A better move is to see what happens if you move that person to an area that uses her strengths. Then you might have a lot more hope for better performance.

This is true in personal life, as wel . I have seen marriages turn around when a long-standing conflict over one spouse’s nonperformance gets reversed because the couple decides to change roles in that area. I remember one marriage in which the wife was continual y disappointed in her husband’s handling of the finances, an area that he had zero inclination for but that both of them thought was “the man’s role” in the family. She was much more organized, better at dealing with numbers, time lines, details, and so on, and she actual y enjoyed it. So they got over their thinking that the man should handle the money, turned it over to her, gave him some of the other responsibilities that she was carrying, and they did very wel .

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

There is another way strengths matter when it comes to hope: sometimes people are indeed operating in their area of strength, but their character issues are so formidable that their strengths are neutralized. They may be very creative but so disorganized and such procrastinators that you can’t get a project done. Or so combative that they can’t be a member of a team. In those cases, it is not a matter of getting them to focus on their strengths, as they already are. It is a matter of seeing if they wil deal with their basic character problems, in the manner we talked about in the last chapter. If they wil , there is hope. If they won’t, then looking for other areas of gifts may not matter. There is a difference between
strengths
and
character
. See my book
Integrity
:
The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality
(HarperCol ins, 2006) for more on this issue.