Don’t Wait Too Long To Ask For Help!
I am a sailor and when I started sailing in Lake Superior, I learned the term sea room. One definition of sea room is “an unobstructed space at sea adequate for maneuvering a ship.” Another definition is “the space required by a vessel between its path and the shore or an obstacle.” Why is this important? Well, when a squall shows up you better have enough maneuverable space to prevent hitting the rocks and sinking your boat. I am not a pilot, but I bet the same is true for flying. If you’re in a dive you better have enough airspace to pull up to prevent you from crashing and burning. Likewise, if you are attempting to take off you better have sufficient runway to build the velocity necessary for takeoff, or again you are likely to crash.
Unfortunately, this analogy is strikingly relevant to business. If a CEO waits too long to ask for help, they are likely to run out of time, and either hit the rocks or crash and burn. I have to ask, why is it that many CEOs wait until their options are so limited they have little room to maneuver? Is it ego in the sense that they want to figure it out by themselves? Is it that they do not trust that anyone has the necessary skills to help? Is it that they don’t know how to ask for help? Alternatively, is it that they don’t know what they don’t know, and it never occurs to them that help is just a phone call away? I don’t believe there is one answer. I would like to hear from other consultants what their answer to this question; “why troubled companies either don’t ask for help, or ask for help too late in the process.”
Remember, a company is a system perfectly designed to produce the results it is producing. If you don’t like the results, you have to change the design. At the same time, you cannot wait until it is too late. Having an outside set of eyes looking at the design can make a critical difference in the outcome. You cannot intervene in a world you cannot see.
In my next post, I will tell you a success story where asking for help made the difference between crashing and burning versus flourishing.
