I’m going to guess you’re pretty familiar with the elephants in your room.
Sure, you don’t talk about them. You may have even convinced yourself they aren’t really there. But you know them. Well. They’ve got you backed against a wall, hip-deep in shit.
So yeah, those elephants.
Time to kill ’em.
Okay, fine, move them to a game preserve if that makes you feel better, but the point is if you don’t get them out of the room — if you don’t consciously talk about what isn’t working in your company, or yourself — those elephants will kill you. And everything you’re trying to do.
We avoid what makes us uncomfortable. We avoid what requires work. We avoid what we don’t agree with.
But avoidance, as someone said to me last week, is a form of lying. When you avoid talking about what isn’t working, you’re also avoiding what will fix it. If what isn’t working is a fatal flaw — an outdated business model, an irrelevant offering, even a blindness to your own (poor) reputation — it will undo you.
And the kicker? You could have done something about it. But you didn’t. All because you didn’t want to talk about it.
Really? Wow.
It makes sense: almost always those “elephants” are really just manifestations of ego. Maybe yours. Maybe your staff’s. Maybe someone else’s. They’re egos you’re trying to protect. That protection, though, is short-term. Long-term, shielding an ego from itself also means shielding it from the changes that matter — and that’s no protection at all.
So next time you find yourself in a room full of elephants: Hunt them. Call them out. Call them by name. Describe them down to the last hairy knee or fear of mice. Because once you see them — once you make sure that everyone else sees them, too — then you can do something about them.
Bring someone in to help you talk about them if you need to — facing down what isn’t working can be a risky move, after all — or do it yourself. Hunt the elephants out in the open (call a meeting, state the agenda ahead of time, give fair warning), or become a sniper (start behind-the-scenes discussions, raise issues in the form of questions, seed change from the ground up).
Do it the way it feels easiest, safest to you (and those whose egos are creating elephants in the first place), because that’s the way it’s most likely to happen.
But whatever method you use, get the elephants out where you can deal with them, move them on, or let them go.
Tamsen,
You hit the nail on the head with this one for me today, but there is just one wee problem with Elephants, it’s not (only) that I don’t want to talk about them, true business Elephants are those that others don’t want to talk about. And you can’t just hunt and kill these.
I think often everyone knows what they are in some way, but the real problem isn’t the Elephant, its the attitudes surrounding it. There is a curious thing in business organization, people develop a series of mechanisms which basically say “back off” in one way or another. “If you go further I’m either going to become unproductive, or hard to reach, or hit back, or start bluffing my way with endless speil.” It becomes a buffer that everyone in the group learns to respect, as their own is. It produces endless clogs of communication and productivity. Magnets repelling each other. Elephants are made of these buffers it seems, built out of them when one issue touches off everyone’s defenses.
I love your call to action, but Elephants are slippery beasts.
That they are! But the funny think about hunting elephants in this way (figuratively, of course) is that often, it only takes one person talking about them to start the discussion.
You’re right that sometimes the reaction is to ignore the elephants even more, but that’s where I challenge all of us to figure out how to get the elephants out in the open productively.
What have you seen that works?
There wasn’t a chance I could pass up on this post in my reader, great article. The more you let the elephants control you the less in control you become, and with that comes the end result of failure.
Retweeted and shared.
Wonderfully said, John, thank you.
Elephants stink, especially white ones! Gosh, we have them in our family, in our love lives, in our addictions and in business … wow – never to worry about them being endangered ey?! Great article! Thank you!
I wounded an elephant at work today. Going to need a bigger gun tomorrow.
Do you hand out elephant-herding weapons with this brilliance?
I suspect my division isn’t alone in our vast number of actual elephants. Sadly, one of those elephants is the zookeeper, further complicating this issues and diminishing any hope for the herd.
But you hint at a concept that’s made a huge difference in my professional and personal life, and one that takes a rare and courageous leader or team to embrace… a breakthrough isn’t possible without a breakdown. Continuing to operate in the status quo, moving to avoid the elephants, hoping for the best, smiling more, being nicer, all that… is a huge investment of energy that will never, can never clear the room.
You wrote: “We avoid what makes us uncomfortable. We avoid what requires work. We avoid what we don’t agree with.” I will take that a step further and say ALSO that… WHAT we avoid makes us more uncomfortable. WHAT we avoid requires more work. WHAT we avoid enlarges the schism. And what we avoid consumes energy we SHOULD be using to do the work we were hired to do.
If (and it’s a big if) a team is willing to talk about the elephants, thing will surely get worse before they get better, but it will ultimately allow the team and the organization they represent to move forward.
Your point on the energy used is a great one, Cindy.
That’s what frustrates me when I’m in or work with organizations dealing with sizable (and growing!) elephants: that all the energy they spend working around the things that don’t work — people, processes, attitudes — could be so much better spent working through them, and on the things that really matter.
You’re absolutely right. Avoidance usually consumes far more energy, time, and resources than just identifying a problem, resolving it, and moving on.
What’s especially frustrating about avoidance is how it becomes ingrained in the culture of a group if not addressed.
LOVE this.
“So next time you find yourself in a room full of elephants: Hunt them. Call them out. Call them by name. Describe them down to the last hairy knee or fear of mice.”
I think this is one of the hardest things for organizations (& humans) to do. As you write, “We avoid what makes us uncomfortable. We avoid what requires work. We avoid what we don’t agree with.” Bingo. As our good friend Tom Webster often says, “You have to do the work.”
Thanks for the nudge.
Anytime, DJ.
Cindy, above, makes a great point: whenever we finally talk about issues like this, 99% of the time things get worse for a little bit. The system has to adjust to a new normal, one in which everyone has to face what isn’t working and their role (even if passive) in how it got that way. It’s not fun, but it is necessary if we want real change to happen.
What if you are the elephant?
Ha! Great question. Personally, I live in perpetual fear of being the elephant, so when I was a manager, I actively sought out feedback from my staff on colleagues on what I was doing that was — and wasn’t — working. That, combined with my own observations of same, usually kept me out of trouble.
In other words, I’d rather know I was being “hunted,” and why, than be caught unaware.
The older I get, I’m convinced that people really don’t change. I mean, some do, but’s it’s rare. So…not really an answer, but an observation, I guess.
Well, DJ, there really are two mindsets at work (and here I’ll point you towards Carol Dweck’s book Mindset): fixed and growth. People with a growth mindset can, and do, change. And the news I choose to focus on: people with a fixed mindset can learn to use the growth one.
The key there is convincing people that the switch is worth it.
Great wake-up call. Thanks!
Delurking to share something that happened to me recently.
I had an epiphany about my professional ability as someone who’s trying to break out into a digital marketing role. I’ve learned that I’m not absolutely amazing at everything I do (who is?), and that I’m prone to mistakes (who isn’t?).
I’ve made a personal promise to be absolutely ruthless where it concerns improving my ability and learning as much as I can possibly learn. I suppose the elephant in the room (for me, at least) is acknowledging my lack of talent/skill/ability/whatever you want to call it.
Thanks for the kick in the pants, Tamsen. I needed it. Retweeted and shared.
What a great point, Justin. I’ve always found that admitting what I don’t
know is the first step to learning even more. Sounds obvious, but when we
think we’ve got nothing left to learn, we stop looking for opportunities to
do so.
Admitting you don’t know something I think shows a sign of leadership. I also feel that it’s important to acknowledge that people feel admitting they don’t know something is a weakness; I think it shows strength.
“When we think we’ve got nothing left to learn, we stop looking for opportunities to
do so.”
Amen to that. In a sense, people are like sharks; if they (the sharks) stop moving, they die. If we stop looking for opportunities to learn, we become replaceable.
Very impactful article Tamsen. Glad I’ve got your feed tagged;). With your permission, and attribution, I would like to repost it on my own Leadership blog. If you’re so inclined, let me know.
You absolutely do! Glad you enjoyed it.
oh boy, “When you avoid talking about what isn’t working, you’re also avoiding what will fix it.” #starred
thanks for this, really appreciate the thinking. timely too.
Call out the elephant in the room and it becomes the mouse… a pesky animal that you need to deal with rather than ignore, but at least it is a manageable pest & not a beast waiting to crush you, whether intentionally or accidentally.
I love the saying, “If there is an elephant in the room with you… introduce it!”
Great post!
That saying is new to me, and I love it! Thanks for introducing it to me.
And you’re right: with really anything we avoid talking about, it’s
the anticipation of what it could be, what it could do
that’s invariably larger, and more stressful, than the actual thing.
Tamsen,
Thank you for this article! I have been frustrated by elephants for some time now – my biggest issue. . . I am often so close to the darn things that I can’t even see that that is what they are! Perhaps backing away from the issue to get some perspective and observe would help to identify the pesky creatures!
It’s hard to see our own elephants — very hard. That’s why it helps to
find a trusted friend, or even a completely objective observer (or in the
case of business, call in someone from the outside) who can give you
information without judgment, someone who can call it like they see it, but
not infuse what they see with unhelpful commentary — someone who can help
you figure out what the next steps are.
Good luck!
This is so true “When you avoid talking about what isn’t working, you’re also avoiding what will fix it”.When people start taking about their elephants and they will automatically be killed. Thanks for this great post