Transcript

Episode: The Pruning Principle

Dr. Henry Cloud:
I went to Tuscany and I visited with a number one wine grower in the world, and he walked me through the science of pruning, and then I went to a botany university and all this stuff. And here’s what they told me-

Joel Miller:
That’s Dr. Henry Cloud, a psychologist in New York Times bestselling author, and he’s not talking about horticulture, he’s talking about pruning in business and life in order to prompt the growth that we need to scale.

Dr. Henry Cloud:
This is key, Joel, that you don’t go just prune a tree or prune a bush or prune a vine because it looks overgrown. That’s the way we do it at my house. But what the experts tell you is, “You don’t start pruning. You start with the vision of what you want that wine or that or the vine or that bush to look like, and then you prune towards the vision.” And that is really, really key. We’re not just hacking away to hack away or to cut expenses or stuff like that. You start with what you want the place to look like, what you want a team to look like, what you want the organization to look like, and you start there and then you have to ask, “Okay, what doesn’t fit that vision?”

Joel Miller:
That question about vision, that’s a vital one. I’m Joel Miller, I’m the Chief Product officer here at Full Focus, and that’s what we’re wrestling with today on the Business Accelerator Podcast. And I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t this Lead to Win? We’ll come back to that in a second.
The problem of pruning is everywhere. Leidy Klotz is a professor at the University of Virginia. He’s been studying this challenge for years now. He studied the strategic planning process of his university and discovered, for one example, out of 750 ideas for improvements, fewer than 10% suggested removing, subtracting, or pruning anything. Every other change was additive. That’s typically our default, But very often this actually adds to our problems. Administering the fix requires more resources, more effort, more bandwidth, more time. Meanwhile, the quickest way to improvement is usually carving away the useless, the unproductive, and the unprofitable.
To help us unpack the pruning principle, we’re talking today with Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt Miller. They’ve got a full conversation about this, exploring four targets for pruning programs, processes, people, and even personal obligations. Then we’re going to backtrack and have a conversation with Dr. Henry Cloud.
Before we go any further, I want to address the elephant in the room. Where’s Lead to Win? Five years ago, almost to the day we launched Lead to Win. Ever since then, Michael and Megan have been helping business owners tackle their obstacles to growth. The good news is that these conversations are still going to happen. Michael, Megan and other voices from the Full Focus team will be here every week to talk about the challenges and opportunities that business owners face on a daily basis. The big difference is this, the new format of the Business Accelerator Podcast will allow us to include additional voices into the mix. We’ll feature interviews with thought leaders and conversations with coaches and coaching clients with one goal in mind: If you’re a business owner, I want to make a promise to you now, listen each week and we’ll deliver clarifying conversations and actionable insights you as business owners can put to work today.
We’ve already heard what’s on the docket this week, pruning. This is a tricky topic because this is one most of us recognize as necessary, but few feel great about doing. Pruning poses a ton of organizational and psychological challenges. Michael and Megan are going to help us sort those out.

Michael Hyatt:
So the second law of thermodynamics says that things tend toward disorder. So that’s the layman’s version of it. There’s got to be a law of physics that says things tend to accumulate. I experienced that this past weekend in my closet of all things. I’ve been stuffing things in there for years, and I finally got to the breaking point where I said, “You know what? It’s time to roll up my sleeves and clean this sucker out.” So I did it. It only took me about two hours, but you cannot believe the stack of stuff that I hauled out of my closet. And I’m going to tell you, I was proud of myself. And when I got up this morning, walked in the closet and I thought, “This feels so good.” Everything’s back in order. There’s less junk, less accumulation. Well, that also happens in business, right? Things tend to accumulate in business and periodically, and I’m going to mix the metaphor now, periodically things have to be pruned back.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Okay, so why do you think that this happens? Why do we tend toward accumulation instead of pruning? Because overwhelm is always the consequence, right? It’s either on a business side, it could be too much cost, it could be too much complexity, it could be we’re spread too thin, whatever it is, and at home, you look around and you have 25 pairs of jeans and you wear two, it’s a problem. But why do we do it?

Michael Hyatt:
I would refer to this as the problem of FOMO, FODO, FOCO.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Okay.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay. These are three acronyms, the fear of missing out, that if we get rid of that thing, maybe there’s going to be an opportunity to use it later, or maybe there’s going to be some opportunity that we don’t want to let go of right now that we can’t quite see. But just in case, we want to hold onto it. FODO is the fear of disappointing others. If I say no to this thing, somebody’s going to be disappointed, or if I call this thing out of my business, maybe my customers react. Maybe they’ll be disappointed. Maybe they’ll be up in arms. And then there’s FOCO, fear of conflict with others. If I do this, then people are going to be upset with me and I don’t want that. So I just let the status quo and stuff builds in the business, and specifically the things that build in the business, programs, processes, people, personal obligations, all those things build, and if we don’t periodically prune, we’re going to be overwhelmed by them.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
You know what I find, because we have been in a season of pruning now for a number of years, I think this is just a natural part of businesses maturing. And one of the things that I find gets in the way sometimes, either personally or somebody else on our team is that everything we have in our business, every decision that’s been made, every person that’s been hired, every process, every product is the result of someone’s hard work in most cases, right?
So it’s not like these are neutral things, these are things that people have invested in, they think are or have been their very best thinking at one time. And I hate to say it, but I think there can be some ego involved. And I say this as someone who has let go of things in the past and struggled to let go. As it’s like, “Yeah, but that’s our thing. That’s our baby.” We don’t want to let it go. And it gets in the way because it’s like we think that our best thinking and our best creativity is in the past and not the future. And it causes us to be rigid and inflexible with imagining how things might need to evolve going forward.

Michael Hyatt:
One of my favorite books of all times is Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud. And if you guys haven’t read that, I highly recommend it. I’ve read it about three different times and it’s always inspiring. It’s always inspiring for me to not just clean my closet, but to take care of all the other junk that’s accumulated too. And he has a quote in the book, and he says this, “In order to make the most of endings, you have to normalize them. It’s common to think of endings as negative occurrences. That’s why we tend to avoid them. But as soon as we see endings as normal, there’s no reason to be afraid and run away from them.” Isn’t that an awesome quote?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
That’s really helpful. I think the little lie that we tell ourselves is that if we do it right, then we won’t have to deal with those things. If we just make the right decisions in our business, if we just hire the right people, if we just create the best products we can create, then they’ll live forever. And that’s just not true because businesses just like people grow and change and we can make the very best decisions that we’re capable of making at one season or make the right decisions for a certain season of our business. But then as we grow and mature, we need different things. We need different products and processes and people and all the things that we’re going to talk about today, and that’s normal and natural and should be welcomed and not resisted.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, I think if you use Dr Cloud’s metaphor of pruning inside the book, there’s a sense in which if you want to make room for new growth, and if you want new growth to be healthy, and if you want to want it to be vigorous, you’ve got to cut out the old growth. And I’m staring here out my office window at some hydrangeas, we’re recording this in the middle of September, and so there’s still seven or eight feet tall, they’re beautiful, they’re big, but by the time we get to November and we’ve pruned them back, they’re going to be about 18 inches tall. So that’s necessary if we’re going to get beautiful hydrangeas that we’re going to enjoy all next summer and into the fall, that pruning is necessary.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And I think part of our work as leaders is to embrace the idea of pruning and to help our teams embrace the idea of pruning and normalize it so that it’s not something where we feel like we failed or where we feel like it’s bad. Sometimes there’s some discomfort involved, but it’s really necessary.

Michael Hyatt:
I like your language of seasons because I think it’s important that if we’re going to make a change and we’re going to prune something back, we’ve got to respect the past. You know what I’m saying?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah.

Michael Hyatt:
So in other words, to say, “Hey, look, that thing that we were doing that we’re about to prune, that thing that we were doing made perfectly good sense at that season in our business, right? Or that person, they did a great job that made perfect sense for that season in our business, but we’re moving into a new season and it requires different solutions.” So then I think that just doesn’t make people feel defensive, like they had a bad idea or they didn’t think it all the way through, or now we’re going to have to come up with a better fix because they had this crazy fix that didn’t really work. No, we’re just saying, “Yeah, no, that worked. And that worked frankly for a long time. But now it’s a different season and it’s time for a change.”

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yep.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, so let’s think of this in terms of, and I already mentioned this, but four targets for pruning. So Target number one is programs.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah. Gosh, this is one that we have really leaned into because when I look back at the beginning of our business and probably the first three to four years, every time we had a great idea, we created a product and that was fine. That was just the stage of business that we were at and we created a lot of great stuff. But over time, we started to realize we have way too many things. It’s too difficult for people to understand who we are and what we have to offer. And so we systematically went through a process of pruning our products back, We sunsetted some things, we sold a business in that process and we were grateful for all of the things that we ultimately cut, but we knew that they weren’t part of our future. And this is where a vision is really helpful because we were able to use our vision as a filter to help us determine what needed to be sorted out and what needed to go on with us into the future.
So I think the products piece is a really natural place for this. For example, one of the things most recently that we have cut is a lot of customization to various products that we have. So we used to, when we were doing training, corporate training with our products, we would customize our packages to whoever the organization was that we were going into. Well, that doesn’t really scale. Well, that works fine when you’re doing a few here and there, but when you start doing a lot of those, it doesn’t scale well and part of what I mean by that is that you don’t end up with efficiencies around the labor and the work attached to that. And you also don’t have the opportunity to optimize. Because every time you’re doing it it’s something new.
And so we just said, “We have to cut that out. That doesn’t have a place in our future. We need to decide what we’re doing with regard to training and do it really, really well and do just a few things.” And so that’s what we’ve done. And similarly with our promotions, we used to do tons of promotions throughout the year and we have scaled that way back because we have fewer products and we’re doing those in a different way than we have before. That really aligns with a more holistic vision for where we’re taking the company and our marketing efforts in general.

Michael Hyatt:
Something you said and past over quickly that I just want to camp on for a minute is this idea of working toward a vision script as you like to call it.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right. Yeah.

Michael Hyatt:
And I think that what that does is it lets people release a smaller present in the view of a bigger future.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right.

Michael Hyatt:
And so if you don’t have that bigger future, if you don’t have that thing we’re working toward, then first of all, the rationale isn’t as clear as to why are we getting rid of that thing? Because it served us so well. But if people can understand that they’re letting that go in order to get that next thing. For example, the closet example that I started with, part of the reason I’m doing this is I’m doing a photo shoot next month. I’m about to buy some new clothes and I didn’t have any place in my closet for the new clothes. And sometimes you have to get rid of what you’ve got to make room for what you want and that what you want is based on a bigger, better future. So in this case it was just clothes, but sometimes it’s more consequential in our businesses.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think that’s really, really important because sometimes the comfort zone is what we know and we feel validated by that. It’s already proven even if it’s not exactly what we want to do in the future. And it’s a risk to prune, you really have to be committed to something bigger in the future so that you could let go of things that don’t align with that in the present or in the past. And I think it takes some courage. So it’s helpful to think of it that way. We’ve got to have something worth taking the risk for.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, so that’s target number one, programs. Let’s talk about target number two, processes. And the first thing I think of is meetings. I’m not a big fan of meetings, which actually has served me well because I do, I think, a really good job of leading meetings and it’s partly because I don’t like them and I want them to be efficient and I want to get down to the business and I want to have the important conversations, but I don’t want to waste a lot of time by not having a clear purpose or an agenda. Wrote an entire book on it called No Fail Meetings. But there are some meetings that just have outlived their usefulness and meetings can accumulate in your life too. I can remember back in the publishing world when I was in that world that I started initially attending a production meeting every week because we had some production problems.
Honestly, it seemed like we could never get books out on time, they were always late and that would always tick off the retailers, it would upset the authors. And so I said, “Well, I’m going to be part of the production meeting for a while until we got it on track.” But there came a point at which I was sitting through a two hour meeting and had nothing to contribute. That was when I knew that needed to be pruned out of my life. So the question I think that we all have to ask periodically is, “Are there meetings that need to be pruned? And if not taken out entirely, could we shorten them?” Because there’s the law that says, “Basically activity expands to the time allotted for it.” And there’s nowhere that’s more true than in a meeting.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
It’s so true and I feel like tasks are the same way. And this is one that is very insidious and sneaky for business owners in particular. So there probably was a time in your business where it made sense to do certain things. You maybe didn’t have somebody in that position or you couldn’t afford it. But as time has gone on, hopefully you’re building a team, but sometimes we hang on to tasks that really, you shouldn’t do. For example, maybe you didn’t used to have an executive assistant, but now you do, but you’re still booking all of your own doctor’s appointments and as a result, you keep screwing up the calendar, you keep double booking things or forgetting to put it in the calender, whatever. In other words, you’re not a very good executive assistant, which you already knew, but you just add a habit, you just keep doing this thing that you’ve always done and it’s gunking up your time, you’re not very good at it and it’s probably making your assistants life miserable because they have to go clean up after you.
So there’s just so many things like that that we find ourselves in or maybe there’s some part of a job that you’ve now hired somebody to do that you’re still involved with, but you don’t need to. It’s too in the weeds for you so to speak, and you need to let it go. You need to prune that out of your life so you can go to the next level of your contribution, which is the whole point of hiring someone in the first place and we just don’t think about it and we don’t go through an analytical process and sort that out of our life and prune it over time.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, this is very personal too because when you talk about tasks and you talk about meetings, when we don’t prune, we feel overwhelmed.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right.

Michael Hyatt:
I can remember back when I was in the big corporate world, I felt like literally I was in meetings 40 to 45 hours a week. And maybe that would’ve been fine if that’s all I had to do is to show up. But in every meeting I was accumulating tasks and so then I had to find a time outside of my meeting week to get the tasks done. And that had to happen either before work or after work because it couldn’t happen during work because I took no effort to prune the meetings and make sure that it was a manageable load. And I think all of us have to come face to face with our own limitations, but those constraints are what forces us to prioritize and forces us to choose the best meetings, the best tasks and give our attention to that. And you know when you do that, it’s enough.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I was thinking about your book, dad, Free to Focus and in that book how you talk about the idea of eliminate, automate and delegate. And the first thing we want to do when we have more meetings or tasks or processes that are inefficient, we just want to get rid of them, right? We don’t want to optimize or make something more efficient that we shouldn’t be doing in the first place. And then, if we determine, well, we shouldn’t get rid of it, we actually need to keep it, then we want to automate it. And the last thing we want to do is delegate it. We want to save the humans, save the humans for the last, the highest and best work. If it can’t be eliminated, if it can’t be automated, then we’ll delegate it to somebody else.
And I think this is one of those areas that can be, it can be difficult for us and it’s something we have to go through and ask ourselves. This is why pruning is so important. If you think about gardening, it’s happening seasonally. We need to seasonally go through a process of pruning inside our businesses because there are things that made sense for a human to do or for you yourself to do as the business owner or the leader at one time that should be either eliminated automated or delegated.
For example, we have been in an optimization process for some of our client experience for our Business Accelerator coaching program and we used to require a lot more people to take care of our clients than we do now because we’ve gone through a whole audit process, we’ve optimized our onboarding, we’ve optimized the client care when clients are working with us in coaching and it now takes really less than half of the people that it used to because we’ve gone through that process of eliminating a bunch of stuff that was now inefficient, that didn’t make sense in this season, and then automating a whole bunch of stuff.
And that has reduced the overwhelm of the team dramatically, it has improved the quality of what our clients are experiencing. And this is one of the best things to do as a leader. When somebody comes to you with a capacity issue, they’re saying, “I’m so overwhelmed I don’t have enough time to get my work done.” As a leader, you should think to yourself, “You don’t have the time to get the work done in the way you’re doing it now. But the question is, how else could you do the work to be able to do it within the constraints of the resources you have?” And sometimes of course we have to hire more people, but going through this elimination, automation and delegation is a great way to triage somebody’s capacity, including your own, before you throw people at the problem.
One of the things that happens a lot when you’re a business owner is that you have people on your team who come to you and they share that they feel overwhelmed, they feel like they don’t have enough capacity, enough manpower or time to get done the things that are required for the results that they’re responsible for. And sometimes that person might be you. You may feel like you don’t have enough time to get done the things that you’re responsible for.
And one of the things that I like to do when this happens, because typically, how this gets presented is, I don’t have enough time to get all these things done. And what I have found is that that’s true if you do the work in the same way that you’re doing it now. So it’s hard for all of us to see that there’s a paradigm behind how we are doing the work that we’re doing. For example, we are making the assumption whether it’s you or somebody who works for you, that everything you’re doing has to be done in the way you’re currently doing it now. But in fact it could be that there are things that could be totally eliminated with little or no consequence that would free up a bunch of capacity for you and not necessitate hiring another person.
Of course, sometimes the right answer is, we do need, literally, more people and more capacity in the form of people, but there’s more than one way to free up capacity. So elimination is a really helpful way we want to first ask that question. Then automation. If you can’t eliminate it, could you automate it? Are there parts of your job that recur that you could create an automation for that would require a lot less work? Dad, I think about your email templates that you have talked about for as long as I can remember that save you a bunch of time, responding to frequent emails that you get. That’s an example of an automation for an individual. We think of automation’s process level for a whole company, but really this can happen for an individual as well.
And then lastly, delegation. This is one of those things that especially if you are or you have on your team, high achievers, people who are really responsible, they probably take on things or you take on things that could actually be delegated to free up capacity through pruning. So this is a great strategy for pruning to free up capacity on your team.

Michael Hyatt:
The thing about this is if we always go to increasing the capacity, we’re going to be chasing it forever.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right.

Michael Hyatt:
In my closet example, I could have said, “I think it’s time for a remodel of my bedroom because I needed another 500 square feet to put my clothes in.” Then I’d fill that up and then I’d need another 500 square feet or whatever the square footage is. But that’s why we just can’t keep addressing things with capacity. And when we don’t have constraints, it doesn’t force us to prioritize. And I think that’s the value of the constraint.
So that’s target number two, processes. Let’s talk about target number three, and this is the hard one, people.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
One of the things that you have always talked about, dad is the idea of seasons. And I think this really comes out of Henry Cloud’s work. But the idea that we are first of all stewards as business owners and leaders, we are stewards of the people that God’s entrusted us with, we don’t have an entitlement to their forever employment with us or something like that. For some people, their season with us is going to be short. For some people that season with us is going to be really long. And what we need to always have in mind is the season is going to end one way or the other. So again, we want to normalize this. It’s normal to prune people at a certain point and sometimes people prune us, they leave to go for some better opportunity or they decided they want to be in another career and that’s their way of pruning and there’s nothing wrong with that either. They don’t owe us that loyalty for life either.
So there’s really two ways that this can look like firing people and that in general is related to performance or related to a job becoming obsolete. Maybe you determined that you could collapse two jobs into one because your business model has changed or you don’t need that position anymore because your business model has changed or it’s just become too complex and it doesn’t make sense to have that department or that team internally. We’ve just been through a process where we determined that we were going to outsource a function that we have had internal for a long time, but there were some real advantages to that.
And so we made the decision that we were going to outsource this and we took great care of the people that were working in that area and really did our work to make sure where they were going was fantastic. They actually are going to work for our new outsourced partner, which is great, but that’s a necessary pruning to achieve what we are going after in the future.
The other area are layoffs, and this is one that everybody feels really uncomfortable with. If you’re uncomfortable with firing, you’re really uncomfortable with layoffs. But this can serve a purpose whether it’s for purely financial reasons, because your cost structure has become bloated or maybe your margins have become compressed due to inflation or because you really need to do a restructure because there’s a better organizational model for the company that you’re becoming. We went through that earlier this year and we realized what this structure doesn’t make sense for the future in the way that it used to. Wasn’t bad in the past, just we need something different. And it was really hard, but it’s been really, really good.
The structure we have now is the right architecture for where we’re going in the future. And of course, we always prioritize taking great care of people when they’re on their way out just like we do when they’re on their way in. But I think the embracing of seasons is a really important part of psychologically getting yourself to a place where you can let go and give yourself the freedom to ask the question, are the people that are on my team now the people I need for the future? Do I need different talent? Do I need different structure? And this could look like one person that you need to move out or this could look like a lot more than that.

Michael Hyatt:
The value of this to me, Meg, the way that you framed it, is it doesn’t make me a bad person as a business owner or a CEO when I have to let people go.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Nope.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s just again normal to go back to the Henry Cloud quote, “We’ve got to normalize this. This is just part of the evolution of the business.” And we’ve got to do it with dignity, we’ve got to do it with care, just like you talked about. But it’s normal. And so it doesn’t mean that we’ve done anything wrong, it’s just normal. Have I said that it’s normal?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
You know what I think about a lot when we have clients ask us questions about this, far more often, in fact, I literally cannot think of an example when somebody came to us with a question about whether or not they should let somebody go, where in the past they had done this capriciously or too often, it’s always the opposite. It’s always the case that people have allowed outdated roles to continue on their team, under performers to stay with the team too long, people that are just not the right fit or a structure that doesn’t make sense anymore. The reality is, we’re all drawn toward that desire not to experience conflict or to feel bad about ourselves or hurt people. And so usually, we avoid this one and we put it off until we absolutely can’t do it anymore. And so I would just encourage you, not only do you not need to feel bad about this, more than likely if you’re thinking about it, you’ve already waited longer than ideally. In hindsight, you will have wanted to when you have the benefit of hindsight and probably it’s time to take action.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, that’s target number three, people. Target number four, our final target is personal obligations. So all of us have commitments that we made and if we’re people of our word, people of integrity, we want to honor those commitments. But even those, we should think of those as for a season. We should complete the season, whatever it is to the extent that it’s possible for us, but reevaluate in our commitments to causes or organizations or people or activities, we got to think of that as seasonal and it doesn’t always fit with our life anymore. And so I think those have to be handled carefully. And I think relationships are the same way.
I find that people, in fact, I was just having this conversation with my wife Gail this weekend, but there are people that rotate in and out of our lives, that come into our lives for a season, and then often, merely because of proximity, we’re not around those people anymore. We don’t have the relationship or we don’t have the same relationship that we once had.
I’ve left jobs in the past where I was interacting with people that I considered friends, I was having conversations with them everyday, we were hoping and dreaming and then I left the company, never hear from them again, right? But guess what? I didn’t pick up the phone and call them either because we didn’t have the advantage of proximity, we didn’t have the advantage of a single purpose. There was just not the same reason. But I know people that feel, and I’ve felt this way many times, felt badly about that. But that’s normal. Again, it’s part of the pruning process.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Okay, I have a question for you, because I think you are a person who is very, very committed to honoring your word. You know will follow through on what you committed to, even when it’s expensive or embarrassing or inconvenient. I’ve seen you do this my whole life over and over again. And I think you’re really good at pruning your commitments. Very often you will have the realization that this doesn’t make sense anymore and I need to come up with another plan. So how do you balance those things? Because I know that our listeners care about that too. They’re people of integrity, they want to honor their word and they don’t want to be overwhelmed and they want to make space for the exciting new things in the future. So how do you think about that?

Michael Hyatt:
Well, let’s say that you committed to something and you underestimated how much work it was going to require or how much time it was going to require, and now you’re in a pickle because continuing to fulfill that commitment, let’s say it was, you’re serving on a board or you’re serving on a committee, or you’re doing something outside of work that you thought was going to be one thing and it turns out to be something else. Or you want to honor your commitment, but that doesn’t always mean you have to fulfill your commitment.
So what that might look like is you have a conversation with the organization, with the chairman of that board or whatever, and you say, “Look, I made a commitment to serve on this board and I want you to know that I will honor that. But I really would like to talk to you about that, because what I’ve discovered is that it’s taking more time than I thought it would. And I’m in a season of life where my parents are really needing extraordinary care. And this is something I didn’t factor in, I’m sorry. What I’d like to propose is that I help recruit another person to take my place. And if that person is acceptable to the rest of the board, then we will move them in and I will move out. So I don’t just want to leave you high and dry and dump the commitment and make it your problem. I want to own the problem because I made the commitment. But something needs to change if possible.”

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I love that because it’s a real third option. I think most of us probably think about honoring our commitments, following through on what we said we’re going to do no matter what. And sometimes that is what’s called for and I think we have to be open to that. But I also think what you’re saying is, there can be a third option where you renegotiate the commitment in a way that is honoring and respectful of the person you committed to and doesn’t leave them with a problem sitting in their lap. You really come to the table prepared to be part of the solution if necessary. And sometimes they’ll just let you off the hook and say, “No, that’s fine. We actually have a waiting list or whatever.” But when needed, you can be part of the solution and get out of the commitment in a way that is truly win-win at the end.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s good. And I’ve had the opposite experience where somebody just decided that it’s too much work, it wasn’t what they signed up for and they just quit and left us scrambling. And so I don’t want to be that guy that leaves a bad taste in everybody’s mouth. I want them to feel good about the decision I’ve made.
Okay, so we’ve talked about four different targets and I just want you to think if you’ve ever watched that show Porters, you don’t want to be the business version of that. And really tackling these four targets for pruning is a way to avoid that so that your organization stays healthy. All healthy things have to be pruned to stay healthy. And hopefully this has been helpful in your pursuit of business health.

Joel Miller:
Michael and Megan approached the pruning principle by looking at four targets, programs, processes, people, and personal obligations. They opened with a quote from Dr. Henry Cloud from his book, Necessary Endings, where he talks about normalizing these kinds of purposeful subtraction. But if we’re honest, the challenge in normalizing pruning is mostly emotional. I thought, who better to talk about that than Dr. Cloud himself? I caught up with him recently and he shared some valuable insights into why leaders struggle with pruning. And he also pointed out where leaders usually go wrong and how they can get it right.
Dr. Henry Cloud, thanks for being here. One of the things that you have spent some time focused on is helping people get used to the idea of seasons or seasonality in relationships. And that there’s a time when there are necessary endings. As you put it, you talk about three types of pruning. Imagine a relationship is a flowering plant or something like that. You talk about three types of pruning healthy relationships that aren’t the best, unhealthy relationships that won’t get better, and then finally, dead relationships that rob healthy ones of needed resources. Can you put those in an organizational context for us?

Dr. Henry Cloud:
That first category is, look, we got a lot of good stuff going on here and might be adding to the bottom line might be profitable, but about, and generally it’s the 80-20 rule. About 20% of it is where the real life of the company is. These products, these activities, and that’s where the future is. And so even though the rest of that is good, and that might be product lines, it might be people. I’ve worked with companies where we take a business unit and we look at these three categories and there’s activities, there’s people, there’s processes, there’s meetings, there is a big one, and certainly performance issues, where in that seat, the person or that product, it’s doing good, but it doesn’t really have the potential to be the best. And there are those that do.
So when you take a rosebush, there’s a lot of roses on there, but there’s some that have the potential to be the best and they’re taking resources from the vine and in an organization that’s money, time, energy, et cetera.
So you prune the good and you leave the best and then everything can be focused on that. In the sick and not getting well, there’re some product lines, there’re some people, there’s some aspects of the business. We’ve tried everything, we’ve gotten them coaching, we’ve brought in consultants, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s just not going to get well. And so that one’s got to be clipped. And sometimes, Joel, that’s the hardest one for people to face because there’s relationships involved with some guy, you just want him or her to make it and you’re pouring into him and love these people, but as we used to say in the South, that dog just ain’t going to hunt. I’m an author, right? At some point, Borders didn’t see it for example. That business model of brick and mortar stores, it’s just not going to get well. And so it’s hard to let go of those.
And then obviously the last one, there’s stuff that’s just dead and taking up space, but it’s not causing any noise, but it is taking up space and it’s distractions and all that. So very, very important. And I’ve taken this in gazillions of companies and it is amazing the conversations that’ll start when you just ask yourself those three questions, What are we doing this good, but it’s not the best and we need to focus on the best? What is sick and we’re not admitting it that it’s not going to get well? And what should have been gone a long time ago?

Joel Miller:
You talk in the book about a sustainability inventory. What does a business owner know or need to know when they’re getting ready to prune? What do they need to be looking for?

Dr. Henry Cloud:
Certainly, a business owner’s got to look at the metrics that they use to tell them whether something is healthy or not. And there’s always the numbers side of it, but sometimes those metrics can fool people because they’re doing well, but somebody’s asleep at the switch and they’re not looking down the corner or around the corner that … The world is changing and we think we can keep this thing going. But as everything shifts, the big one we saw however many years ago, the digital shifts, some people were ahead of it, some people weren’t, but they’re making money, right? They’re doing fine. And they say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Well, a lot of times you got to break stuff that’s doing well. So part a leader’s job is always to look and see things that don’t exist yet but are coming. That’s a big part of it.
A second one is, that when you start a business or you take over a department or whatever, then that’s got an existing pattern to it and it’s got existing people and processes and all this stuff. And it’s so easy to come in and take those and try to make them better. But if you bring the pruning question to it, that gives you the methodology of how am I going to make this better? What do I need to do? As Colin says, “Do I even have the right seats on the bus? And after that, do we really have the right people?”
You know what, Joel? Leaders, the big mistake they make in this area is, they’re always looking at how things are working and evaluating thing and analyzing and getting data and all this stuff. But the real place that they need to look is themselves. Because so many times they’re the ones in the way of making some necessary ending that they should be making. And what happens is, they can’t. Then we’ve got some conflict inside because if something’s not working, the numbers might be telling them something is not working, but a lot of times it’s about a person and people have come to them and said he’s this or that he’s a bully, or he is not pulling his weight or he is causing division and they keep hearing this over and over and over, but they really are in denial about it because they’ve got some attachment to that person. They started the business with them or a friend or they don’t want to hurt them, or sometimes they just have fear. A lot of times people don’t have deep seated fears about hurting or frustrating somebody else and it gets deep into stuff for people.
So many times it’s the emotional attachment and sometimes it can be an attachment to the past. You might have worked with this person and built this thing and all of this and they’ve been there since the beginning and it’s just hard. Breaking up is hard to do.

Joel Miller:
Right.

Dr. Henry Cloud:
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone into a company and you do all the interviews and look at all this and I come back to the CEO and I say, “You are one firing away from incredible success.”

Joel Miller:
How do you coach them through that? Maybe that misplaced loyalty or fear or whatever’s driving it?

Dr. Henry Cloud:
Well, the first thing we got to do is, let’s just start with the same set of facts. You’ve told me that you want something at this level from that seat, you want this performance, you want this talent, you want this wake that the person is leaving in the team and the culture. And here’s the reality, right? You’ll admit to this. So there’s a gap. Well, we address gaps. Have you addressed this gap? “Yeah, well I got him a coach or I did this, or I’m doing one on ones.”
So you’ve got to go with them to make sure that they are seeing it themselves. And then we got to ask, “Okay, so what’s hard about this?” I’ve seen grown men cry with that question. And then you just got to get to the fears and it’s like hoarding. If you go to try to work with a hoarder and you say, “I’ll help you clean out your garage.” “How long’s it been since you used this?” “Oh I don’t know, 20 years.” “Well let’s throw that.” “No.” And what’s the first thing they say? “I might need that.” And they’re going to come back with something valuable about that person that we really do need what he or she contributes.
Well, you hadn’t got anything out of it in 20 years. So if you need it, we can go buy a new one. And then the second thing you hear is, “No, don’t throw that away. That was Johnny’s first poopy diaper.” And they’re just attached to the good old days or the memories or the emotional side of it and you really got to help them through it. And you know what? The demons live in the closed circle of their own heads. And so what you’ve got to do with the leader who’s stuck in that conflict, you have got to surround them with the right people that they trust, that they feel safe with and they’re going to walk them through that. And might be a board member, it might be a friend, it could be a CEO coach, it could be a pastor, it could be other teammates. They’re not going to do it in the vacuum because their fear is going to overtake them.

Joel Miller:
You talk in the book about the ability to actually engineer urgency such that you can drive these kinds of decisions. Can you tell us more about that?

Dr. Henry Cloud:
Yeah. It’s so interesting and I think I put this in the book, there’s such a difference between what’s vital and what’s urgent. What’s urgent causes us some pain that we immediately go to it, you get a call or you got a plan or you got next month’s product release or whatever it is. There’s always something urgent that really needs a leader’s attention and there’s immediate pain to that. And because there’s immediate pain, we got to hit this deadline next month. There’s immediate pain that gets all their attention. But while a toe nail that’s poking you in the toe with a sharp, it’s probably way hard visual, but we got rocking it. That’s going to get our attention. Your colonoscopy, it’s not urgent, but you better go get it because if they don’t find what’s in there, you could die. And that’s the leader’s job is to create urgency around the vital because everybody else is doing their job and urgently hitting deadlines and all that.
So what we got to do is, and here’s the phrase, we’ve got to figure out with that person in their context, how do we create urgency around the vital? Because it’s not causing us any pain now. And that’s the leader’s job. So one of the things that really, really helps with this, you got this thing that’s dragging on, but it’s not urgent. We got other things to worry about before we deal with that position or whatever. But they keep talking about the performance of this person or the culture or whatever.
And I always ask them, “Okay, this conversation that you’re telling me about that you just had, are the numbers that you’re telling me about that you’re getting from this person that aren’t making you happy, do you want to be having this same conversation six months from now? Because if you don’t do something, you will. It’s been like this for a while. So if you want to be sitting here six months from now, a year from now, then ignore it. But if you don’t … And once they say, “I’m just putting off the inevitable.” You’ll see them a lot of times slumping their chair going, “No, I don’t want to have that conversation again.”

Joel Miller:
So here you are, the business owner, and you’ve come to this point where you’re ready to have a tough conversation. There’s a program, there’s a process, there’s a person, there’s a personal obligation that you have to cut. I wanted to ask Dr. Cloud one last question. Is there any way that we can do this badly? Because if there’s one thing I know about myself, I’m prone to doing the right thing, but sometimes not always the right way. And I thought that might be a problem for more than just me.

Dr. Henry Cloud:
Well, everything in life, in your brain is designed to do things in a certain way. Very simple formula, ready, aim, fire. So the leaders that do it well, they go in that order, they really get ready for this, and then they really aim, they focus on what is it that I’m trying to pull off or what is it I’m trying to do and what are the steps? And then I got to be able to pull the trigger. So the bad ways that leaders do this is they don’t do it in that sequence or they don’t do one of those. You got a bunch of leaders that go fire, ready, aim, and basically when they’re impulsive like that, they’re in a fight or flight mode, something’s going on, or they get panicked or they get worried and they boom, they just start doing stuff. And even if it’s the right thing, you’re not ready to do it yet because you’ve got to delay the groundwork for big changes and to make sure that you, you’re going to sustain them through the trip.
And then there’s others that are ready, ready, ready, ready, ready, ready, ready, ready. And they never can pull the trigger because of the fears. And then the third one is, they’re not aiming, they just know they’re just trying to end the pain. “Well, I can pull the tooth, but how am I going to chew my roast beef, right?” And they got to get focused and aim for, I know what we’re trying to do and we’re going to hit that mark and then I can pull the trigger because I’m ready to, I got a new tooth in there, we know how we’re going to find the person or we got the capital to go through the change or whatever it is. So if they just think about those three categories. Am I ready to do it? Am I focused on what has to be done and where we’re going? And do we have the courage to pull the trigger?

Joel Miller:
If you think about it, all of this comes back to that observation up at the very top of the show, vision. If you’ve got a program, process, person or a personal obligation that you need to prune, the question is, how do you know for sure? And the answer is, if it doesn’t fit your vision. Vision tells you what fits and what doesn’t and what’s more, if we’re going to have to face our fears, face the discomfort that pruning presents, we really need to have the vision to do it. We need to have the vision that says, “This no longer belongs and that needs to go in its place.” That requires clarity, confidence, too. And both of those come from having a well-defined vision that inspires and motivates you. If you’ve got that, you can get rid of the extraneous, get rid of whatever is robbing you of your ability to pursue that vision and go attain it.
Dr. Henry Cloud, thank you so much for being with us. This has been really helpful.

Dr. Henry Cloud:
Joel, it’s been fun to talk to you. You guys do great work and best to you.

Joel Miller:
That’s a wrap for the first episode of the Business Accelerator Podcast. If you’re a business owner interested in learning more about our Business Accelerator coaching program, go to businessaccelerator.com. We help successful but overwhelmed small business owners like you, scale yourself and your business so you can win at work and succeed at life. It’s what we call the double win.
If any of this show resonated with you, if this conversation hit home in any way, I’ve got just one request. Go ahead, share it with somebody in your office and have a conversation about it. Have a chat about the things that you might need to prune out of your business. And that’s it. We’ll be back next week with another conversation to accelerate your business.