You Have To Do The Hard Thing

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George Washington was the United States' first President and is considered the founding father of America.

Sometimes in life and especially in leadership roles you have to make a hard decision that is the right decision. Facing these decisions often feels like a battle with yourself because you know what you have to do but don’t want to do it.

The best way I like to think about doing the hard thing is the analogy of the herd of buffalo vs. the herd of cows when the storm rolls in.

Imagine there is a herd of buffalo and a herd of cows grazing in a field. When the sky gets dark and the wind starts blowing both herds know that a storm is coming. But they do two different things.

When the cows see the storm coming from the west, they turn and run in the opposite direction. prolonging how long they are in the storm because they are following along with the storm when it catches up to them.

The buffalo, on the other hand, runs directly into the storm. Facing the problem head-on. The buffalo might face more intense weather as they are opposing the storm but they are out of the storm much quicker than the cows.

Other times you have to have a difficult conversation with someone that will also likely feel like a battle. Often we put off these conversations or avoid them entirely because of how difficult we know they will be.

I heard this idea a while back but I can’t remember exactly where but the idea is, if you avoid confrontation then you create conflict.

As tough as they may be to have you sometimes have to have difficult conversations. The sooner the better.

Here is a story that illustrates this point.

Shortly after I was hired at my first job after college, our site was visited by a bunch of people from corporate. The reality was we were starting to fall further and further behind on our orders and we needed to recover.

Even someone with half a brain could tell you there was a problem by how swamped each department was. It was a problem that was small at first and snowballed over time.

Our site manager could’ve seen this upfront and mandated some overtime when the issue first became noticeable. However, the site manager was new to the site as he was only hired earlier that year and wanted to keep a good relationship with everybody.

That was his big mistake.

By the time the people from corporate came in a weekend or two of overtime wouldn’t cover it. Corporate mandated that the site stay open during the week-long holiday shut-down at the end of the year so that we could catch up.

Safe to say, the good relationships the site manager was trying to maintain vanished as quickly as people’s vacations did when he had to break the news to everyone.

The moral of the story, you may not like the situation you’re in but it is far better to face your problems than to run from them.

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