December 2012 Management Minute

“Letting Go”

by Chris Reinhardt, feedlot specialist

In Dr. Henry Cloud’s book Necessary Endings, he discusses “pruning” of activities in our professional or personal life which may be using up precious resources that may better be implemented on higher impact activities—those very activities that we’d really like to be “about”.

But that pruning process is easier said than done. We develop significant emotional attachment to those activities in which we invest greatly of ourselves. When we come to the point of eliminating that activity from our lives or our business, there needs to be acknowledgement of the very real sense of loss that will accompany cessation of that activity.

This may seem completely off-base—a little too “touchy-feely”—but it actually makes sense if we consider it at a deeper level. We always hope our employees will “take ownership” of their portion of the business, so that they will conserve inputs and care about the outcomes. So why should we expect those who have “taken ownership” of an activity to somehow not feel like they’ve lost something when it goes away?

Dr. Cloud discusses one interesting example: when the management team decided they needed to shut down a given business unit, they actually reserved a day when the group working in that unit could celebrate the successes of their efforts, but also openly “mourn” the loss of that to which they had invested countless hours and their creative energy, and to which they had grown attached—they had “taken ownership”.

This process serves 2 valuable purposes. First, it is a somewhat formalized, structured, and acceptable form of the “mourning” process which would happen for the employees in private or in small groups anyway— after all, they’ve lost something they care about. But more importantly, by putting this formalized final punctuation mark at the end of this terminated activity, all of those involved can more quickly move forward with and immerse themselves in the next proposed activity because they know that the old activity is officially gone and is not coming back.

This is true of business ventures, personal activities, and even of interpersonal relationships. Once we make the (hopefully well-informed and wise) decision to intentionally move away from something, from some activity, or from someone, we need to recognize that our sense of loss is real and normal; we should feel o.k. to grieve what we’ve lost; we need to re-iterate why we must move in the new direction; and then we need to deliberately move forward.