c o s h r i n k

Faith. Is that a weird word to use in a business context? I can just hear the venture capital clients I work with screaming “I don’t want my CEO’s having faith! I want them getting results!”

But what if you need faith to get results?

This has been such a hard time for people. I see and feel their fear, their reluctance to take risks or try new things or step outside the comfort zone of what they are used to and can predict the outcome of (even if the outcome is the same old thing they don’t like). And if people are “in trouble” — if they think they are failing, or are in conflict, or have been told they haven’t been performing well — they really go into “hunker down” mode and try to avoid feedback and experimentation and opening up (all the things they need to do in order for things to get better).

I saw the movie Eat Pray Love over the weekend. (Yes, I know it was a chick flick, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a source of inspiration). A line from the movie said “Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the path to transformation”. Sure, a year off traveling in Italy, India and Indonesia doesn’t seem like ruin to me, but I understand her feelings about the “dismantling” of her life that led to the trip.

Sometimes we just can’t seem to “give up” — our image, our safety, our predictable lives — until we have no other choice. Also in Eat Pray Love, one of the characters describes the “ego” ( the identity we create to deal with the outside world): “That’s just your ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what your ego does. It keeps you feeling separate…tries to convince you that you’re flawed and broken and alone instead of whole….Your ego’s job isn’t to serve you. It’s only job is to keep itself in power. And right now your ego is scared to death cuz it’s about to be downsized.” Our ego fights pretty hard when it feels us becoming strong enough to dump it.

So, if you are one of the people in fear, one who is trying to hold on and hold out..ask yourself whether you would be willing to get on the path to transformation. See if maybe it is time to let some of what you have been clinging to fall away…and see what new, healthy, creative part of you will be revealed. It is time to pay less attention to fear, and more attention to faith. As Sharon Salzberg says in Faith “It means feeling our fear and still remaining in touch with our heart, so that fear does not define our entire world”

We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face… we must do that which we think we cannot. — Eleanor Roosevelt

I am helping a client prepare for the staff retreat in which they will present their strategic plan. As for many of my clients, the last 2 years has been challenging for this group — they had to do layoffs, have had several management changes, have felt the stress of financial uncertainty.

In presenting the strategic plan I wanted us to honor where the group has been while building confidence and optimism about where the organization is going. I wasn’t quite sure how to do that…so I decided to talk individually to members of the staff about their feelings.

After each call I was in tears. Almost universally the people talked about the surprising rewards they have obtained on the journey, the ways they have grown, the talents they have discovered, the experiences they have had (and learned from) because they couldn’t just thrown money at the issue or move on to something that wasn’t quite so hard. As several people explained, “I found out I was really good at something I would have been afraid to try if I hadn’t had to”.

This is the reward from our journey. It’s as if life refuses to let us be less than we can be. It drags us (sometimes kicking and screaming) into the very areas we are most afraid of or least confident in…and leaves us there until we HAVE to figure it out.

So…we can look at how hard the last few years have been…or we can look at how we have grown. You decide…

Acceptance — I used to hate that word. For me it seemed to mean being a passive victim, letting life happen TO you. That is one of the reasons I was drawn to work with start ups — those were people who were willing to take on the hard challenges, to fight for what they wanted, to do the things others thought were impossible.

In recent years I personally have had cause to look back at all the times I “fought” and wonder — was I really just prolonging the pain? Was there a clear, easier path to getting what I wanted but it required me to do or face something I wasn’t ready to? Did getting what I want actually take LONGER because I fought to do it “my way”?

I have begun to see the same issue with my clients. These are really smart people, and most of the time at least someone in the organization has seen what I see when I come in to help. It seems like it should be an easy fix — share the observations, suggest some actions, fix the problem, move on.

But it is seldom that easy. Usually I have to fight first the CEO’s tendency to deny what I see. Especially in most cases where the CEO (and the VP’s and the Board members) are high Dominance, they are very used to moving into a right/wrong battle — and they need to be the one that is right. If it wasn’t so serious it would be funny to think they really believe I stayed up all night trying to think of the problem that would most piss them off (and that there was no evidence of). We have to argue about what the problem is, what the root cause really is, why the fix I suggest won’t work….etc.

When I probe below the initial resistance I find…fear. That someone will think the CEO was wrong, or doesn’t know what he is doing, or that he made a mistake. Or he (or she) is worried about looking weak or unfit for the job. Or maybe my “fix” requires the CEO to do something uncomfortable, or scary. So it is easier to think I am wrong than to face any of these deeper fears…even if that means the company continues to struggle.

That’s what I mean about acceptance. Jon Kabat Zinn says ” We so often attempt to force things to be a certain way, “my way”, without regard for the ‘violence’ that such a break in the rhythm of things carries with it”. Ignoring a problem, calling it something else, doesn’t make it go away. Usually to any outside observer, the problem is common, no big deal, nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing that will kill the company…unless it is ignored.

So I am trying to practice an acceptance than means “seeing what IS”, recognizing the true state of things and moving through my reaction to focus on what can be done to solve it. And trying to teach my clients that acceptance can be a strength.

“The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become”
Charles du Bois

I have always loved this quote — and never does it mean more to me than it does this week. It seems, as usual, my clients are giving me a gift — making me look at my own mental state so that I can help them.

It has been a long, hard 18 months. Seems like so many of us are craving safety, security, the restoration of what we had in the past. But perhaps this is getting in the way of us being willing to take the risks to become what we need to be for the future…

One of my new clients is a large foundation that has done ground-breaking work for the first 10 years of it’s life. However, the area of need it is addressing has changed and other agencies now offer the same programs. In order to continue to be a leader, the foundation needs to perhaps give up the established programs (and their guaranteed funding) and help the world press forward into new service areas…

Another potential new client in a founding CEO. He has taken his company through the first 5 years of its life, taking a very hands on role in establishing and implementing technology direction, However, he has now hired in very experienced VP’s — and perhaps he now needs to define a more strategic, less hands on role for himself…

And finally, a personal friend is finding less and less joy in the job he has done for the last 25 years. However, he is good at it and doesn’t have to work very hard and makes good money. But every day it takes a little more effort to get up and go to work…and every day he finds more reason to take long lunches. What he really wants to do is consult…but is it really the time in his life (and the economy) to take that kind of risk?

It can be difficult to put your organization, and yourself, through more stress and uncertainty and challenge when you have all just endured the hard times of the last 2 years. It can be tempting to believe that all we have to do is wait until the economy improves and then we can all go back to the happy days from before. But maybe not. Maybe the old days are gone and our best chance to shine, to succeed, is to risk what we were…for what we can become.

Ok, it’s Spring, which may be why the image of a tree came up when I was working with a client last week. The presenting problem was that they weren’t seeing the growth they had hoped would result from some recent activities.

I asked them to imagine their company as a tree
- look at the roots — were they drawing enough nutrients from the soil to fuel growth?
- examine the truck — was it supporting the weight of the branches/efforts?
- reflect on the branches — were they all healthy and growing, or were some blocked or no longer healthy?
- look at the leaves — were they growing equally across all the branches?

Ok, I can see some of you gagging, but the results of this reflection were actually quite helpful. It became clear that one of the partners was responsible for all the “grounding” and the “soul” of the organization — and she wasn’t having enough time to reflect and nurture herself to come up with new ideas. Meanwhile, the other partner had no roots and was madly loading more “leaves/activities” on the tree and then wondering why they weren’t sticking (and why the effort was feeling heavy).

The plan going forward required them both to look at how to reinforce the root structure to both be able to bring depth to the work, to clean up some of the “deadwood” that had developed in the “trunk” of their relationship, to evaluate and focus on fewer “branches” so that their effort went in to 2-3 focused initiatives…and to let the leaves sprout rather than frantically throw effort at a million different “projects”. Although this last point was tough to get agreement around (we so often confuse effort and activity with results) but seemed key to “lightening up” the work so that more organic growth could occur.

Might this kind of reflection inform your thinking about the health — and the direction for growth — of your organization?

Some days I feel like I have the same conversation with client after client — today it was about focus. All came to me with a variation on the story “I/my team/my organization are exhausted — we have been keeping up an extraordinary effort and feeling like we are making no progress”. As they described to me all the priorities and activities and programs they were trying to implement my head hurt — and much of what they described had no “life” to it.

I began to explore with each why they were doing so much. Each activity seemed to be justified by one of the following criteria
- we are funded to do it
- we have always done it
- I have hired people to do it
- our managers expect us to do it
- people have become used to getting it from us
- it might look bad if we stopped doing it
Unfortunately, very few of the explanations involved excitement or passion or because the effort was critical to the mission of the organization. More it seemed like people were just too afraid to deal with the consequences of stopping.

This is not a recipe for success!

I encouraged each of them to undergo some variation of the following process:
1) List everything you (your organization) is doing. Then “editorialize” for each, describing why you started doing it, why you are now doing it, how you feel about doing it, etc.)
2) Put your list away.
3) Describe, with as much detail as you can, your “desired future” — what you would like to be doing, feeling, what impact you would like to have — in 3-5 years.
4) Now look back at the list of current activities. Which, if any of these, will directly make a strong (4 or 5 on a 1-5 scale) contribution to your desired future? Why? Don’t choose more than 5 items.
5) What gaps does that leave? what major areas need to be addressed (in addition to the activities listed in #4) to attain your desired future?
6) Combine your answers to #4 and 5 into a list of “key initiatives”. These should be the activities you (or your organization) put the most energy into to ensure you make progress toward.

Now look at everything else on your list of current activities. Force yourself to classify each as
- an activity I should discontinue
- an activity I should hand off or outsource
- an activity I should do differently so that it doesn’t take much of my energy

Look at your new list of focus areas. How do you feel about spending your time here? Don’t be surprised if there is some anxiety — part of the reason you are still doing those things is because they are “comfortable”, familiar, easy…they represent the path of least resistance. But your new list represents the path to success.