Break Your Resistance to Change Before It Breaks You
The better things go, the less likely entrepreneurs are to
change--even if the market demands it. That's what leads to bad behaviors, bad
management and a lot of grief.
BY HOWARD
TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH
INVESTORS@TULLMAN
One of the greatest impediments to progress is success. It’s
very difficult for anyone to willingly part with what’s worked well for them.
Why try to change things that aren’t broken, that are getting the job done?
We’re all creatures of habit, custom, and comfort; change is always
challenging, uncertain, and complicated. But there’s really no choice - other
than perhaps the timing. The one certainty today is that we live in a time of
constantly accelerating change. So, if someone’s going to eat your lunch, it
might as well be you.
Sadly, entrepreneurs are
some of the world’s best talkers and among the world’s worst listeners. They’re
also horrible procrastinators because as often as they talk about shooting for
the stars, they’re always the last to actually acknowledge in their own lives
that things could be better. This “sometimes
wrong, but never in doubt” attitude is another corollary to the “fake it” doctrine. Too many
entrepreneurs believe in their hearts that, if you can fool yourself and work
hard enough, you may have a shot at becoming what you were pretending to be.
Eventually, even the most stubborn or deluded players come to
understand the inevitability of change. They’re realistic enough to embrace
certain changes, but only within narrow boundaries and to the extent that it
basically comes without real costs to them personally. The ones who are
actively succeeding are rarely excited about doing anything that might rock
their boat. In occasional instances of honesty and clarity, most realistic and
self-aware entrepreneurs will talk frankly about ways their own businesses
could be better run and managed - sometimes even by someone other than themselves--
although those kinds of outré and hypothetical suggestions are mainly offered
as invitations for any given audience to reassure the CEO that he or she is
clearly indispensable and irreplaceable.
But it’s those very personal actions, pathologies, and excesses
that eventually bring some of the highest-flying firms crashing down. New
business builders are under plenty of stress all the time and - in addition to
wondering whether they’re up to the task - they believe that they’re carrying
the whole business on their backs. Everyone’s looking to them for decisions and
results and, not surprisingly, the pressure sometimes becomes too much, and
they act out. It’s hard to excuse, but easy to explain if you’ve been there, as
every good entrepreneur has.
Boorish and bossy behaviors, aggressive attitudes, demands
bordering on abuse and an overall approach that takes no prisoners and does
anything needed to get the business built are all par for the course and
readily tolerated in the early stages of a startup by employees, peers,
directors, and investors. Until the day they aren’t. In retrospect, the
postmortem conversations always end up the same: it worked until it didn’t.
But things don’t have to end up this way - slamming into
the wall with no skid marks - if someone can get the CEO to sit down, slow
down, think about why things are consistently and repeatedly heading in the
wrong direction. Then talk honestly about how to interrupt the recurring
processes, understand what’s causing issues, and put everything and everyone on
a smarter, safer, and more successful path forward.
And, if you’re a CEO, now’s a great time to stop and ask
yourself if the shoe fits. You’ll know the answer. It’s just a question of what
you admit to yourself. Being honest with yourself is the start and often the
hardest step because it’s difficult and scary for a young leader to ask anyone
for help or to admit - even to themselves - that they don’t have all the
answers. No one does. Too often, leaders behave in ways to deflect, disguise,
or avoid admitting that they’re just as much in the dark about some things as
anyone else.
The trick is to get some help before you totally drop the ball,
and they take you out of the game. The cruelest disappointments are when you
let yourself down. Andy Warhol said: “they say time changes things, but you
actually have to change them yourself.” Phone a friend or find someone you
trust to tell you the truth. It takes guts to believe you can open yourself to
someone else and share your feelings with them without losing their respect.
Being tough sometimes means making yourself vulnerable and expressing things
that are really hard to say.
Good partners protect you from others; great partners
protect you from yourself. The most crucial thing that you can do is to
surround yourself with other bright people who will argue with you and tell you
the truth.
First, you all need to agree that these kinds of bad and
destructive behaviors aren’t one-off instances or the results of unique
situations or unexpected circumstances. They happen too often to be driven by
anything other than specific, painful, and inappropriate behaviors on the CEO’s
part and the avoidance, feigned ignorance, or grudging acceptance by those
around him or her.
The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves and
pretending that these kinds of eruptions and incidents are normal or will just
eventually stop or are just “the boss being the boss” is unhealthy for the team
and for the business. They serve some clear need on the CEO’s part that needs
to be satisfied.
The second step, having identified the need (angst, fear,
imposter syndrome, too much too soon, blame, or biting off more than anyone can chew), is to
work out a plan and a program to address and satisfy that need in another
productive and helpful way since it’s a given that the need isn’t going to
disappear by itself.
Three preemptive actions are central to success:
(1) Distribute and delegate the ownership of certain key tasks. Not every buck
has to stop with the CEO.
(2) Diminish the “crisis” mindset and the FedEx culture of indiscriminate
urgency. Not everything has to be done yesterday.
(3) Demonstrate and reinforce that not even the CEO is a superhero. It’s a team
sport. No one today accomplishes anything really important all by themselves.
The final step is a small and frank, but not necessarily easy,
conversation with the boss.
The main message is simple. What’s gone on to date wasn’t great,
but it may have been necessary to get the business to this point. But that
behavior isn’t working anymore for anyone, including you. It’s burning out
critical employees, infecting, and impairing the constructive and collaborative
culture we’re trying to build. And it’s stifling important honest
communication, necessary improvements and innovations, and critical changes.
Because no one wants to be yelled at or have their head bitten off because they
made a sincere suggestion, regardless of its merits.
Nothing headed downhill changes direction by itself. You can
blame it on gravity or simply on inertia, but some positive action and
effective intervention is essential to course correct and save your CEO from
him or herself. The future success of your business depends on it.