When Normal Equals Unexceptional, It’s Time to Clean House

My wife and I are in the middle of selling one home, and we just bought another. I’m a responsible homeowner. Most weeks, I spent time doing maintenance around the house or yard.

Also, we aren’t hoarders. We both prefer not to have clutter.

In spite of this…

For the last few months, I’ve spent many days fixing all kinds of things in the house that we’d overlooked, or thought we’d get to later. It’s amazing the amount of stuff we have to get rid of.

The other day, I spent hours scuttling around, hunched over in my crawlspace, experiencing the discomfort in my hip flexors and back. It was sweaty work to move a decade of accumulation out of our crawlspace. Half of which we immediately discarded or gave away.

Now on to the garage….

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Seeing what I didn’t see

Transitions are great times for reevaluation and perspective. Realizing that we were going to have a parade of strangers wandering around our home inspecting it, appraising it, and deciding whether to give us money, sure brought things into focus for me.

My personal epiphanies were mostly in these 3 categories:

• “Where did all this stuff come from?”
• “Why did we hang on to that?”
• “What? That needs to get fixed too?”

Profound stuff.

Many of the fixes were very quick and easy, and they immediately improved our quality of life. For the handful of remaining weeks, we’d live here.  Why hadn’t I fixed those earlier?

Most of the carefully stored stuff we discarded I had forgotten about anyways. Why did I hang on to all of that?

Normal is rarely ideal

As leaders, we often relate to our organizations, our teams, or our goals the way I related to our home. We aren’t neglectful. We genuinely do put time and attention into making sure things are taken care of. But so much slips by.

We learn to live with the organizational equivalent of squeaky drawers, loose hinges, and dings in the walls.

Policies never quite get written. We never quite follow up on our plans or goals. That issue with that one employee…never quite gets addressed.

We stop noticing the organizational “junk drawers” that we can’t even find things in. That one shelf in the garage that we just avoid looking at.

This could be historical issues in our organization that still control the way we see and relate today. It might be old policies or practices that used to work well but no longer do. It may actually be our stuff or our facilities.

A sense of normal develops that describes what we’ve just learned to tolerate or live with. We’re persuaded that everything is fine. Or good enough. And we are no longer aware or feel motivated towards what could be.

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What creates this suboptimal normal?

Mindsets: Honest truth? I stored much of what I had because I’ve long struggled with a scarcity mindset. It was an honest mindset. Long portions of my life were lived right up close to the poverty line. I know what it’s like to not have. To feel vulnerable. Embarrassed because of my limits.

Life isn’t about money. But not having money can be an onerous way to live. I stored things I no longer wanted or needed because it was so difficult to get them in the first place.  I stored them because I was afraid that perhaps in the future, I might not be able to replace them. I stored them simply because I thought that’s what you do.

For me, a scarcity mindset has been a current that has undercut my professional growth for many years. There were very real periods of my life where extreme thriftiness and spartan living were necessary choices. They made sense and they worked. But I’m no longer in scarcity. That mindset no longer serves me well. In fact, it holds me back.

Many leaders hold onto the scarcity mindset. Or a sense of, “If I want it done right, then I need to do it myself.” Or a need to prove themselves to someone.

There probably used to be a time when those mindsets were needed and were important.

But, are your mindsets still serving you well?

Deferred Leadership: Many of the things I didn’t fix were simply because I didn’t want to “open that can of worms”.

I was worried that the projects would grow out of proportion or exceed my ability to keep up. In reality, in nearly all cases, the fixes just took a few minutes and were very simple. But I had deferred maintenance because of fears and preconceptions.

Leaders defer leadership for the same reasons. They put off making decisions, setting directions and resolving issues because of “what ifs”.

What they never ask is, “What if we don’t take action?” “What if this is never resolved?” “What if we never boldly take action?”

Instead, they hope that nothing will change. Or that circumstances will magically arrange themselves to remove the need for a decision to be made.

Deferred leadership is not leadership.

What decisions or issues do you keep avoiding? What if it turns out that the consequences only grow with avoidance? Or more likely, what if the fix is far easier than you thought?

Tolerance: In a different kind of moving story, when I worked in Kosovo, part of my job was to help resettle people out of a refugee camp back into permanent housing.

Factoid 1: Refugee camps are not great places to live. People don’t like them.

Factoid 2: It can be really difficult to get people to leave.

The human ability to adapt and accept almost any circumstance is astonishing. Once a living (or working) environment becomes tolerated as normal it can be very difficult to get people to change. Even when they know it could be better somewhere else.

Normal, whatever that is, starts to feel comfortable. People may not like their circumstances, but they like (and will even defend) the familiarity of their circumstances.

What are you mindlessly tolerating just because…you might not even be sure why? You don’t think about it. It’s just normal.

I’ve learned to become highly suspicious of normal. What most leaders accept as normal…is really just settling. When leaders settle, they force everyone they lead to choose between settling too, or else leaving.

Think about that.

What is the future for a group of people who decide that just settling is good enough? Is that the future you want to steward?

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The Antidote: Reinterpret Discomfort and Then Act.

People tend towards the comfortable. The path of least resistance. The easy way. The known. The familiar. When things feel uncomfortable, when there is resistance, when the path isn’t clear – it doesn’t feel good. For many people, not feeling good is the only sign they need to know it’s the wrong direction.

It doesn’t feel good to have to decide what to throw out. But it feels much better to be unburdened.

It doesn’t feel good to have to take more time to fix things. But it’s easy to underestimate the energy or enjoyment that broken things consume.

In the place that you lead – what needs to get cleaned up? What should finally get fixed?

Don’t wait.

Take Good Care,

Christian

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