The Cost of Human Due Diligence and Active Inaction

There is a theme that underlies the money I’ve turned down over the years. On some days I’m proud of it, and on others I wish I were a little less smart and a little less intuitive. My ability to rapidly see people is one of my greatest gifts. Yet there is a cost. The cost to me has been either killing hope for others or killing my revenue. Both come from recognizing and accepting situations in which people are unlikely to change.

My internal values and spiritual beliefs dictate that I hold out hope that all persons are redeemable. I believe that humanity is valuable, that people have worth apart from their alignment with my personal beliefs or agendas about what matters. I also believe that extraordinary events, forgiveness, love, and yes, divine intervention, have the potential to transform those we have given up on.

And yet, as a psychologist who observes and predicts behavior, I also make calls based on the practical timeframes at hand. Even with the best of intentions, the most motivated among us witness how long it sometimes takes to move from logical understanding to shifts in our own behavior. That lag time occurs WITH insight and motivation. Think about how long it may take for people who do not see the need to change.

Giving up that someone will change in time for what we need is not the same as giving up on their soul. I can care about people as humans and still decide that they are not allowed to come into or remain in my personal or professional sphere.

So if you share that north star, the differentiator is this: “Have I seen enough shifts in this person’s behavior to assume they can change in the timeframe we need for our organization?” The money I’ve turned down is when the answer is no.

I vividly remember a conversation where I interviewed several members of a leadership team. They asked me up front how much investment it might take. I told them, and while they choked on it, they asked me to proceed to the stakeholders I’d flagged. Three conversations later, it was clear they would spend the money and that a year on we’d have barely moved the needle. I knew I’d spend the year distressed, leading them to the conclusion I’d seen so quickly.

What I’ve seen over the years is that good people struggle with making the call. I’ve always thought it comes from believing the best in others — and that is part of it. The leaders in whom I specialize are fair-minded, integrity-driven, and most of all, take responsibility for themselves and their organizations, even when things are not completely theirs to own. This trifecta puts them at the highest risk for excusing a difficult person and their goodness becomes their blind spot.

If we are intellectually honest, it is also that if we acknowledge the truth, we will be forced to take an action we are not ready to take. We may need to choose an action that contradicts our core belief that people can change. We may incur grief from the death of hope about a partnership, an opportunity, a relationship that we so badly wanted and could see the potential in, if only two things were different. If we acknowledge the truth, we might need to work through questions about our own judgment or embarrassment that we misread a situation. Possibly, more than anything, we may worry about becoming hard or unfeeling.

A few years ago, a client spoke to me about a coach working with his organization. I’d seen the unlikelihood of change on the front end, but it felt like my client needed to keep hope. About two years on, when he and the coach had reached the same conclusion, I felt comfortable asking him: “If you’d come to me to help with this, would you have preferred the truth, or for me to tell you the odds but try anyway?” He said, “I think I probably would have still wanted you to help — at least to know I’d tried everything possible.”

And lest I come across as preachy or all-knowing — I’ve made the same mistakes. I remember being 27 and hearing the first red flag in a romantic relationship. It came in the very first conversation. But I didn’t want to be too harsh or too judgmental, and more than anything, I probably wanted a boyfriend. So eight months later, the ending played out anyway. In an organizational setting, those eight months create unnecessary risk and uncertainty — and I know, because I have made the mistake there too. I saw the problem, waited too long, and it cost my best team members their focus and peace of mind.

Seeing people and acknowledging what you notice is a double-edged sword. It gives you information, but it also demands action. The cognitive dissonance of seeing without acting is so great that it is easier to delude ourselves into assumptions of change. When I chose not to break the relationship early, or chose not to fire an employee, I convinced myself I could work on the communication or find another way to make the situation work.

I’m not sure what active inaction you choose. It may be to hire a coach to try to change someone. It may be to talk to your own coach or therapist about how to handle the person who is not changing. It may be best to have another conversation, just in case you can word it differently so the message gets through.

The conversations that are truly due diligence are those in which you are still collecting data. I do this all the time. It’s fine. Those conversations are ones you can have and build on until you’ve accounted for all of the variables. Yet, when you’ve collected the data and nothing is new, when your conversation feels suspiciously like the ones you’ve had before, this is when you’ve shifted from moving the needle to active inaction, where you have enough to plan, but are hanging the sequence on hope.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with going the extra mile, getting another set of eyes on a situation, or shifting strategy. What is wrong is our blindness to the opportunity cost of doing so. Most people can understand the team’s decreased morale. It is the cost I engendered when my team told me they didn’t want to add more stress to my plate but that the person I’d put up with made them uncomfortable coming to work every day.

The harder sell I’ve had to make is the increased organizational risk — actual litigation, or lost traction. I worked with someone who struggled for a long time with firing a key person, and the fallout would be not only an extra workload but also a loss of political capital. He followed through. We later learned that a longer delay in that decision would have opened the organization to allegations of fraud.

The deepest blind spot I’ve seen is the degree to which we put our own growth, our ability to make an impact, our future on hold while we wait for someone to change.

This pattern has been visible to me through a set of numbers, across the decades. When a problematic business partner, investor, executive, employee, or colleague is in play, all emotional and strategic attention goes to that relationship. Instead of my brilliant, visionary, growth-minded, competitive, incredible (yes, I’m biased) leader focusing on the growth strategy for next year, the investment direction that capitalizes on opportunities, the personal growth direction that increases excellence and fulfillment, we have the same conversation. That conversation is circular and it usually lasts for 6 months to 2 years, costing an incalculable amount of unrealized revenue potential. And I’ll leave you to consider the impact of lost sleep, attention, and peace of mind on your capacity to be and grow excellence.

Normally, when I write, I try to offer suggestions on how to tell if a person will change. For this article that misses the mark, because I can give you every red flag, and if you are not ready to be honest with yourself, you will downgrade them to pink or yellow and decide to wait and see. So I’m going to give you something more valuable than tactics. Here are the questions:

How many conversations have you had with the person you hope will change?

What will acknowledging the truth cost you?

What are you protecting them from that you should be protecting yourself from?

What is the fallout that may occur?

Are you more excellent or less excellent when you are thinking and working around this person?

What is this person costing your vision?

If you’re weighing whether someone can change in the time you have, How to Judge People goes underneath that call to the skill it rests on — reading judgment itself, before it costs you.

Dr. Tricia Groff is an executive coach, psychologist, confidante, and strategic partner, and author of Relational Genius. She works with high-achieving executives on intersecting systems of personal, business, and emerging change. drtriciagroff.com