Many years ago, I found myself in the position of running about a dozen units fulfilling similar roles. Most of them did well, but two of them were struggling and needed restructuring. So we sat down and made the hard decisions that involved reducing staff and reorienting the local organization. The changes we made weren’t exactly the same across the board, but they were quite similar and had the same broad strokes.

Of course, nobody involved was excited about this process. But the numbers were clear and so was the solution, even if we didn’t like it. My job throughout this was to help create the plan, and it was on the local team to implement those ideas successfully.

I visited all of my divisions, but when I got to these two units in particular I noticed very different energies. Both of them had seen a small tick down as the changes settled in, which was to be expected. But where one started to crystalize and regain performance in both sales and profitability, the other was just continuing to limp along.

I visited the recovering unit, and I was struck by their strong executive who had accepted the painful cuts and decided to move forward. His attitude was clearly one of, “Here’s what we need to get done, this is what we can do, now let’s focus on what we can achieve.” With his hands-on leadership, their numbers continued to trend upwards for another 2-3 years, and that unit was a glowing success stories about resurgence after making difficult decisions.

The other unit did not have that same kind of leadership. Over the next year, they never recovered even to their prior performance. And I noticed when I visited that there was this somber air of sadness hanging over the office. Desks were still filled with former employees’ equipment, workspaces were never reorganized to account for the new size and makeup of the team, and people would lament about employees who had gone and comment that they missed “the good ol’ days.”

That unit was covered in a palpable malaise. There was a begrudging acceptance that they’d been in a bad place and had to make changes, but nobody wanted to move on. Leadership allowed them to wallow in that feeling and ossify. Nothing changed because they were doing the same old work with fewer resources, and local leadership implemented no changes that would have made them more agile or efficient. The executive had accepted the cuts as necessary, but he never looked for a path forward.

I believe that the tale of these two companies hinges on their respective executives. The first unit’s exec acknowledged the hard thing, did it, and then moved on to help his unit thrive and grow in a new direction.

The second executive struggled to make peace with the hard decision and never moved forward. That team was so reticent to accept the difficult thing and the change that follows that a year later they had to be further restructured, which proved to be the only way to fix their downward spiral.

In retrospect, I realize that my own error in this tale is that I didn’t realize the second executive was unwilling to embrace the future and didn’t resolve that problem myself. Had I done that, perhaps these two units could have had similar positive endings instead of one of them performing so poorly that further cuts were necessary.

As you take stock at the beginning of this year, are you where you want to be? Is your company performing well, or do you see difficult changes on the horizon? Now is a good time to look ahead and prepare, rather than being caught unawares at a critical point. There are two paths forward: one is begrudging, and the other is understanding and effective. Which are you going to choose?

It’s easy to predict the themes of most columns this time of year — start setting your goals for 2026, take a look back at how you accomplished your goals in 2025, etc. There’s nothing wrong with these topics, and they’re classics for a reason; strong, visionary leaders are supposed to check their vision and chart the path ahead.

Here’s the thing, though. We’ve all heard this advice more times than we can remember, and I’d be willing to wager that 90% of people reading this either don’t remember or haven’t recently checked what their goals were for 2025 around this time last December.

I include myself in this figure, and I think it’s clear why we all talk a big game at the end of the year and then quickly forget our plans by March. Goals are large, abstract plans, and they’re of the kind that is especially unlikely to survive contact with reality. Even the premise is a little absurd — markets rise and fall regardless of the earth’s relative position to the Sun, yet we insist on planning operations based on the artificial timeline of a solar year.

If you don’t believe me, I’d encourage you to dust off your plans from last year and see how closely they meet the needs of your operation today. I suspect you’ll find one of two things. If you’re like me, you’re iterating so far in advance that you won’t even be able to find a starting point. But if you do find them, I’d imagine you haven’t hit them all these 12 months later, although I’d certainly love to hear that someone has completed their yearly list of goals and that it had a positive impact.

Instead of focusing on the annual aspect, I keep a list of things that I want to accomplish and update it year-round. But listening to a podcast recently, they talked about an aphorism often misattributed to Confucius that says something to the effect of: A man who chases two rabbits catches neither.

Reflecting on that, it was impossible not to notice that I’m always chasing more than a few rabbits, myself. In a recent column I talked about the importance of knowing which lever(s) to pull. Today, I’m advising finding a few quiet moments amidst the fray of new years initiatives and really thinking through if there’s one rabbit that would make a particularly good stew for you.

Of course, finding the right rabbit to chase is not always the simplest thing. I was recently working on a SWOC analysis with my team, and while I’m jaded and tired of these analyses, they really are useful tools for telling you the thing that you should already know. In this case, they’re excellent for helping you identify which goal is worthy of your focus.

If you’re struggling to identify which rabbit to chase, try a SWOC analysis — a quick one, not the kind that requires a hotel in a different city. It can be extremely useful to get input from stakeholders on what they see as opportunities and threats, and maybe that perspective will be what stops you from running after two or three or ten rabbits and helps you focus in on the one worth chasing.

Once you have a goal in mind, you have to keep it present in your focus. Otherwise, you’re going to end up getting sidetracked by another rabbit and lose sight of the one you’ve been pursuing. I recommend writing down your goal and looking at it at least once a month to make sure it’s remaining top of mind in your day to day operations.

Whether you’re in a dark room by yourself or at the whiteboard with your team, use your time and focus to give yourself the opportunity to bring home that rabbit and enjoy a tasty stew at the end of next year.

In business, so often it’s about knowing which levels to pull, when. You’re probably familiar with the allegory of a shipping magnate whose freighter is loaded with cargo ready for transport, but something is stuck and the shaft on the propeller won’t turn.

The shipping magnate’s crew looks the ship over and everything looks normal. Vexed, the magnate calls in an expert. This expert looks at the whole system — goes over the boiler, listens to the engine, generally pokes at everything for an hour and a half. They then pull out a giant mallet, walk to the drive shaft, hit it real hard one time, and tells the magnate to try and start the propeller now.

Miraculously, the problem is fixed. The expert tells the magnate, “Great, that’ll be $20,000.” The magnate is baffled and asks why it costs so much to swing a mallet one time. To which the expert clarifies that the magnate isn’t paying for the swing of the mallet, but for the expertise of knowing where to swing.

The moral of the story is that there’s a lot of value in knowing when and where to apply your efforts. Which leads me to today’s topic: knowing which levers to pull.

When running a business, whether a small local operation or a global enterprise, there are things you’d like to be different. There are probably several things, actually: you want to update your sales process, sell more of a certain product, etc. I ran into this issue when going on site visits with a management team. I’d look everything over and come away with 27 changes that would improve operations.

But in our allegory, the expert didn’t swing the mallet 27 times. They swung it once. If you have a lot of things that you want to change, then you have a responsibility to pull the right levers and make those changes. At the same time, the worst thing you could do is start pulling all 27 levers at once.

Because when you make a change, you need to see what happens after. Even if you’re 100% certain that a lever needs to be moved, maybe it only needs to be pulled halfway, or maybe you’ve overlooked a confounding variable that changes which lever needs pulling entirely. And if you only realize your mistake after you’ve pulled a bunch of levers, you’ll have no clues on how to course correct.

So think it through. Talk things over with your team, and when you’re ready, pull one lever, then sit back and watch to see how (and if) it moves the needle. I can tell you from experience that after thinking everything over, it’s going to feel like you’ve already been waiting for weeks or months by the time you actually pull the lever. But you need to give the change time to breathe and have its full effect on your operations.

But that doesn’t mean you need to sit on your hands while you’re waiting to see what changes, though. Instead, go back to your list of 27 items and look it over. Of all those items, I’d bet that some affect different areas; maybe some are pertinent to sales, whereas others pertain to operational efficiency or product development. If you can isolate the impacts of pulling different levers and establish separate controls, you can enact multiple changes and record them separately without worrying about them overlapping and messing with your results.

The only danger to this method is if there is unforeseen overlap between the two levers you pull. For example, if you change sales compensation, that will affect product movement, sales behavior, efficiency, etc. So if you changed something about a product at the same time you changed sales compensation and suddenly you’re selling more or less, it could very well have nothing to do with your product change, and you’re going to end up with some misleading results when analyzing your changes.

For this reason, having a well thought out plan is essential. Once you’ve accounted for all the variables you can and are confident that you’ll get good, isolated data, pull the lever. Then sit back, record what you see, and have the discipline to follow through and not change anything else until your first change has run its course.

Pro tip: If you can A/B test, do it. This will greatly speed up how quickly you can acquire real, actionable data about potential changes. If you work in retail, right now is a great time to try three similar-but-different concepts on three similar-but-different markets and see how the changes stack up side by side.

As a leader, it’s your job to know which levers to pull and when. While you should be cautious and methodical in your approach, you eventually need to make a decision and enact these changes. Because the only thing worse than pulling too many levers is pulling none at all.

You’re probably at least passingly familiar with the hit Blink 182 song, All the Small Things. It’s catchy, has a good beat, and I think we’ve all heard it countless times in the 26 years since its release. This song about the importance of small gestures recently came to my mind during a coaching session.

I was working with a group of business owners and coaching them through the process of organizing and preparing their business plans so that they’d be ready to go to market in the coming months.

At the end of one session, a participant who had done a lot of note taking pointed out that, “It’s all the small things. All the small things you don’t think about or know need done are what end up killing you.” It was an accurate observation, although this session in particular had a different dichotomy than big vs. small issues.

Instead, we were focusing on one-off tasks vs. continuing needs. Setting up licenses, organizing business plans, and ensuring product readiness were some of the one-off items we discussed. For continual development, we looked at things like training plans for future employees and instituting policy structures and marketing.

The ongoing tasks weren’t much of a revelation for this group, but the one-off items prompted a lot of discussion about where and how to allocate one’s time. This leads me to my main thesis here: Whether you’re an executive, a manager, or an owner, your most valuable asset is your time and the personal knowledge and experience that you bring to the table.

In the past I’ve recommended hiring to your weakest suit. Evolving this coaching lesson, I had everyone work on dividing these tasks not by one-off vs. continual, but by what they could easily accomplish themselves and the tasks that they would need a lot of time and support to complete effectively.

Once that was done, I instructed them to consider both lists. My advice was, “If there are one-off items on your list that you can do because they’re quick and easy for you to complete, go for it. If you see one-offs that would require a lot of training or heavy lifting from you, maybe hire someone else for those tasks.”

I know how unattractive a proposal that is when you’re beginning a startup — you want to do things yourself to save money when you don’t have much (or any) coming in. But I would encourage you to look at all the progress you can make on other items when you outsource the more challenging tasks to someone who has a skillset that better suits your pain points. Consider how much time and effort you’re going to save when calculating the real cost of hiring out for a service.

Sounds simple? Good, now I’m going to muddy things further. Once you have a list of ongoing and one-off tasks that you can personally complete, you need to quantify what the return to the organization is for the time you’ve invested. Unfortunately, what I often find is that the things in which I find the most joy are also the lowest return items.

In my experience, the fun, fascinating things I could do in a day simply don’t have the best ROI for the business. Instead, that comes from complicated, difficult things where I have to push my skillset to its limit. So as you begin to look at investing your time in your organization, make sure you’re opting for growth over the pride of doing it all yourself or the enjoyment of completing the fun tasks at work.

Any enterprise is not going to be as simple as just doing one thing all the time. But as Blink 182 so wisely teaches us, it’s all the small things. As a leader, you need to decide how you allocate resources to shepherd your organization through difficult areas and when you need to tackle the little things all by yourself.

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a very Irish, very Catholic neighborhood. The Serenity Prayer showed up in just about every household. Whether it was a plaque on the wall or carved into a soap dish, it was a cultural mainstay of that community.

You’ve probably heard this prayer in reference to 12-step groups. It is most well-known for its opening lines: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The way it seemed to be used when I was growing up was closer to, “Help me get through the nonsense my kids are up to, the strength to not yell at them when innocent, and the patience to think so I know the difference.”

Religious origins aside, it’s solid advice for leaders and managers, especially those who are managing staff and dealing with customers. Any time you’re working with people, there are going to be things you can’t control, random data inputs that shape your day and your environment. The key, as the prayer suggests, is to have the wisdom to tell the difference.

It does take a particular kind of wisdom to understand the factors in your business and management structure that you cannot change. By freeing yourself from wasting time and resources on these inalterable elements, you can then reinvest that energy into dealing with things that are within your purview to change.

I see this distinction clearly in a common grievance among managers — difficulty with staff retention. Managers often lament that staff are seeking higher-paying jobs elsewhere, or even that people simply “don’t want to do the work.” While both of these are possible causes of high turnover, I’ve seen this issue play out enough times that I tend to look for causes in other directions first.

Most often, how people are managed has a large impact on whether or not they stick around. Do your employees know what’s expected of them and the responsibilities of the role? In what ways are you supporting them doing their work? If you can’t find easy, satisfying answers to these questions, then it may make more sense to consider issues within your control than to assign responsibility to circumstances at large.

I don’t mean to sound naive — money matters. But even that falls within your sphere of influence, at least to some extent. For employees on the lower end of the pay spectrum, an extra 50 cents or dollar an hour can make a big difference. If you’re having trouble retaining staff on the upper end of that spectrum, pay is an unlikely reason for people to make sudden, unexpected changes.

Telling the difference between things you can and can’t change requires taking a frank inventory of your business and your own management structure. And even if you don’t have control of the problems you’re facing right now, knowing that still gives you power over your situation. Maybe you can’t do anything to fix a difficult market, but you can alter pay scales and work conditions to better meet your staff’s needs.

You can also create new circumstances that are more favorable for your business. Whether that means letting employees bring in pets, giving them more input in their schedules, or allowing part-time remote work. It’s also worth considering any negatives in your workplace. Are you unintentionally rude? Do they need more support? Are they overworked because they’re short-staffed, which makes training more difficult? We have one location where my keeping them in snacks is the key to a happy team. Costco makes this an inexpensive solution.

Taking stock of these realities requires courage and strength. But in nearly every situation, you have tools you can use to make your business a more attractive place for employees.

Of course, there are times when a situation is well and truly beyond your control. Let’s say you’re not getting enough people through the door. During an economic slump and a worldwide downward trend, it makes sense to identify the cause of your problem as something you can’t really help. If these external forces are truly causing your woes, then all you can do is hope for the serenity to navigate trying times.

Last year, we saw two hurricanes tear through our community and severely hamstring the sales of one of our stores. It was painful, of course — our new store was just starting to get its feet under it, but the community was devastated, and we lost a quarter of our sales as we dug ourselves out of that pit.

But at the end of the day, nothing we did could have stopped the hurricane or the harm that it did to our community. So all that was left was to make peace with it. When you have the understanding to identify what’s under your control and what isn’t, you can focus your efforts into areas where they can really make a difference.

The Serenity prayer may be associated with 12-step programs or various Christian traditions, but at the end of the day, the message that you need to pick your battles is something that can benefit all of us.

Lately, a lot of my time has gone toward a new training venture. In this process, I’m documenting skills that I’ve used throughout my career to help new business owners get in front of the very hard learning curve. I’m a “hands-on” manager and prone to jump in, which is often the very wrong answer.

I recently completed the first draft of these training sessions, targeted to people who are starting up a franchise location. When it was ready for feedback, I showed it to a colleague who read through it and then got back to me with the million-dollar question. “This all sounds great, but how do I do this stuff?”

The information in the workbook was good, but I realized that my advice was a lot of high-level strategy. It was missing executable tactics. The more my colleague and I worked on it, the more I refined the core ideas to tie in day-to-day implementation. The concept being someone needs to have the Big Ideas, but having them is not enough. You have to make sure they get done, and it shouldn’t be you doing most of it.

As we worked, a new through-line began to take shape: helping a new entrepreneur quantify the value of their time. I’ve written before about the value of time for an executive, but to my mind, your time becomes even more valuable in an entrepreneurial or start-up role like a franchise. And missteps are more critical.

In a larger organization those at the top have an obligation to create the big plans, and usually their time is allotted that way. You also have a lot more people and a lot more moving parts. Much of the “business” happens regardless of your input. In a small business, you are your organization’s most expensive resource and without you providing the right inputs it may stall on you.

Identifying the best uses for your time, I find it helpful to create AND DEFINE the two buckets that your productive time falls into: working in your business & working on your business.

Working in your business is the hands-on work that you do to facilitate daily business operations. It may be paying bills, engaging with customers, or stocking a shelf.

Working on your business is when you create a process, a sales plan, a new product set, sort out how to inject a lead gen platform, etc.. Your work grows your business in the long term, although it may not generate income that same day.

You may have heard the adage that an owner needs to work on their business, not in their business. Working in the business is very valuable for setting examples, teaching and a customer-feedback loop. You just need to keep it in small doses. There should be a clear limit to how much of this “doing” time you’re giving your business every week. If you are the only person in the business, you have a job by another name. For you to own an enterprise, you need to have others working.

Working on the business is what I used to get done in the office when I was an executive. I’d spend nine to ten hours there a day working on the Big Thoughts: organizational trends and plans. I would have told you all of it was focused and valuable. I was wrong.

With the pandemic and the rise in work from home, I realized that a lot of that time in the office was spent engaging with office culture and the cycles of the building rather than actually making plans and setting them into action.

If I spent ten hours a day in the office, maybe four to six hours of that was spent on deliverable work. And now, even when I have a lot in the “working on the business” bucket, I find that I’m best served by a one-to-two-hour sprint. Not only are these sessions productive, but you’d be surprised how quickly your brain gets tired when you’re focused exclusively on big ideas in front of you, as well as how much you can crank out when focused.

In my experience, one to two sprints once or twice a day will get you much more value for your time than grinding out a ten-hour day. When entrepreneurs and new business owners don’t realize this, they start to wonder why they’re consistently working 18-hour days and doing nothing but spinning their wheels. There is a failure to separate high-value concept work and the linear tasks you have to do to support the organization. Often, it is easy to get sucked into working in your business and then be too worn out to give working on your business the time it deserves.

The solution to this issue is to set aside dedicated time to working on your business so that working in your business doesn’t take over. Believe me, I know how easy it is for one quick question from an employee or customer to turn into hours on the floor.

But I also know that if I spend an hour working on marketing plans for the next month and send out instructions to the relevant parties to get plans in place in advance, we have more sales than if I go into the business, get an idea for a video on the fly, shoot it, and cross my fingers that it gets traction.

I don’t deny that it can be difficult to do. But if you’re spending all day working in your business and not getting anywhere, maybe try stepping back and giving yourself permission to spend more time with higher-level thinking. You have to Define and Defend the “on your business” time and make sure you block it in FIRST during your most productive times. When you find the right balance, you’ll be able to work in your business and enjoy it without sacrificing the forward growth that only you can generate.

Right now, do you pivot or stay the course? Hunker down or rise up? The landscape seems to change not by the hour, but by the minute. As the current presidential administration continues to sow chaos throughout the global economy, it’s nearly impossible for business leaders to stabilize their footing for long enough to make a plan.

The best way I can conceptualize the situation is to compare it to an ice floe. The temperature is just about freezing, but the ice is thin. You may be fine if you stay where you are, but the ice feels shaky and unsteady beneath your feet. In the distance, you can see pieces breaking off and floating away. Do you wait for cracks to start appearing under you, or do you make a break for it?

At this moment in time, there is no good path forward. Everywhere you look, penguins are jumping into the water because something bad is coming.

I can’t offer any certainty in a world that is so profoundly uncertain right now. But I can tell you what I think are some smart steps to take. My first observation is that the market hates uncertainty. Whether you’re receiving products from China and are directly impacted, or you paint houses for a living and the impact is indirect, the uncertainty in the market is going to affect you.

Talking to non-essential retailers, it seems like almost everybody is reporting that their stores have become ghost towns. A big driver in this change is people deciding to make major purchases to lock in prices before the tariffs affect supply lines — cars, dishwashers, etc. Consumers might not need these big purchases right now, but they’re taking money they would otherwise spend on non-essentials in a normal environment.

Adding to this uncertainty is the fact that swaths of the US economy are laying people off to cut costs in an unpredictable time. This leaves people unsure if they’ll have a job in a month, particularly in the public sector, where entire departments can be eliminated seemingly at random. All of this serves to create those cracks in the ice.

First and foremost, my advice is to get your cost structure as low as possible. I realize I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth: layoffs may cause further ripples, but unless you’re cash-rich and ready to weather the storm, get your costs in line. Jettison anything you’re questioning and be as tight as you can, because now is not the time to find yourself without a cash cushion.

At the same time, you have a responsibility to shepherd the emotional health of your team. Your team is just as unsettled as you are. Arguably even more so, actually, if they don’t have decision-making abilities and can only worry about the future of their careers.

If your team has concerns because they see business going away or cuts tightening up or factory floors not running, you need to be up front with your staff. Tell them what you’re thinking and seeing, and give them whatever assurance you can. And if you can’t give them assurances, give them the truth. An uncomfortable truth will do a lot more to create stability and understanding than a comforting lie.

Nobody wants to tell someone that, yes, they could be laid off. But when you deliver that information, tell them what that looks like. In what situation would you need to reduce your workforce? How will you know when you’re at that point? Not only does this give your team some semblance of certainty, but it creates an environment where your team knows what a bad situation for them looks like and has the opportunity to at least try to prevent that from happening.

My final observation is that, while uncertainty incentivizes hunkering down and cutting costs, it also creates opportunity. Sam Walton always says that a recession is a great time to double down on market share. So if you’ve been looking at a new market, new customers, or new areas, now is a good time to reach out. Potential customers might be more open to receiving a message of lowering costs or delivering products faster, especially if your service team is based in the US.

Whatever your value equation is, look at how you can pitch in a chaotic environment to take some more market share. For better or worse, opportunities like this don’t come around all the time.

Above all else, do your best to stay in a good spot. That might be hiking, yoga, or just about anything else, but give yourself time to keep yourself balanced and centered. Nobody else is going to get you off the ice floe, and you have the best odds of success if you’re taking care of yourself.

I don’t see anything that will keep the ice from cracking. It’s just a matter of where and when, and how nimble you are at jumping away from the polar bears.

Friction is just about everywhere you look. But if you’re the person in charge, it’s your job to minimize it as much as possible. Every transaction, customer engagement, product delivery, etc., is going to have some level of friction. That’s true for anyone who doesn’t operate 100% by themselves. While you can never completely remove friction, reducing it pays dividends.

There are two types of friction in business: internal and external. External friction is when a company like Google has an issue that’s inconveniencing a million of their hundreds of millions of customers. That’s a big enough percentage of their user base to be worth their time to remove as much friction as possible, but an issue that affects ten people probably wouldn’t be worthwhile for them to resolve.

On the other hand, internal friction happens within your organization. Usually, it’s the result of issues with your core processes at work. I recently saw this while working with an organization that was rapidly expanding. They had one location that worked like a top — great communication, everyone knew their role, and there was a general understanding of where the bumpy areas were and how those issues were to be dealt with.

My client took this to mean that they had great, easily transferable processes. Not so. What they had was a stable, well-informed team that knew how to problem-solve together. Trying to expand this institutional knowledge to the new team, my client quickly found that their processes were not as infallible as they’d believed.

When presented with the same problem, the first team would go left, while the second team decided that right seemed to be the way to go. When they had the first team help document the procedures they’d established, the second team found that several of these solutions and ways of doing things were organic workarounds rather than logical answers. This illuminated areas of friction and the ability to correct processes and procedures that would no longer require the workarounds. If they hadn’t tried to scale, who knows if they’d have found those improvements?

Perhaps ironically, friction is often the result of experienced professionals trying to make things run more smoothly. For example, a salesperson tries to enter an order but finds they can’t fill out all 19 boxes on the sales screen. As a result, they can’t complete the order. This problem comes from someone in accounting who, wanting to be as efficient as possible, realized that order forms would go more easily for them if everything was placed in its corresponding box.

That sounds great in theory, but in practice, this salesperson doesn’t know what to put in box 16a, and that’s creating a lot of friction in completing their orders. To remove that friction, the salesperson would need a way to opt out of filling in that box or better options so they don’t have to force the customer into something that doesn’t fit. But accounting might not like that. Your role is to work that out for everyone. That might be you doing it, might be appointing someone capable of seeing all aspects and empowered to resolve them.

For your own business, figure out where you’re getting in your own way selling products because of friction. These are places where there’s anxiety or stress on a team, and I’d highly encourage investing some time looking for these areas throughout your organization. The trendy term for these is pain points, and finding these areas of heavy lifting is crucial to reducing friction.

Sometimes, discovering points of friction takes some sleuthing. Other times it’s easy and you can walk into a department and ask them what the dumbest thing they do all day is. Sometimes you’ll get good answers, and sometimes you’ll get bad answers. Either way, keep asking. By operating in good faith and listening, you’ll be able to learn a lot about the role of friction in your organization.

When I started managing a new regional branch, I found that the most productive use of my time for the first week was to interview managers and sub-managers to find these pain points. There were some issues I couldn’t fix, of course, but there were many more that I could. This turned out to be a great way to make a good first impression with the new team as well as reducing friction with minimal costs, which benefited the organization, the team, and our customers.

Ultimately, the higher in the ranks that I rose, the more my goal became simplified to two essential points. The first part of that goal was setting a direction for the organization. The second part was getting out of the way. Clear yourself and as many hurdles as possible from your team’s path, and you’re removing friction. This way, your people will be able to accomplish the big-picture things you want them to get done instead of being caught up shouting expletives at a screen because they aren’t able to fill out box 16a.

I’m a firm believer that wisdom can be found anywhere, and I recently made a new discovery while walking my dog. As the primary dog walker, I tend to take us around three basic routes. The first is a quick around the block, a 10-minute route where he can sniff and do his business and I don’t have to invest a ton of time into a longer walk. The second option is a path that’s about a mile in total and goes around a park where he can enjoy sniffing the trees.

He’s happy with either of these options, but sometimes I choose a third option. Funnily enough, this third option starts off the same as the first two, but at a certain point he realizes that we’re going on a longer walk and he starts to fight me on it to try and get me to turn around and head for home. Once he gets over that and accepts that we’re doing a longer walk, though, he continues along as normal and has no problem finishing the walk.

The through line with all three of these routes is that he’s happy enough to go along once he knows which route we’re on. He also knows that we prefer sidewalks, so although we may be in the middle of a crosswalk, he lunges for the sidewalk on the opposite end of the street. Even when that almost got the both of us hit by a bus.

My point being that my dog is able to recognize patterns and knows that two paths are comfortable and one path pushes him. Generally, he will express a preference for one of the easier walks. More than that, he knows how to recognize and set out a path for sidewalks, even if that’s not where we should go.

This is a dog that will knock you over the second he thinks he can go for a walk, then drag you back home the second he thinks the walk is over. Believe it or not, this isn’t just one long ad for your local dog shelter. It occurred to me last week, when he made a very good attempt at tripping me, that this isn’t too dissimilar from work patterns.

In business, it’s normal to have certain established patterns. You probably know what the start of the day or week or even month is supposed to look like. And at work, we tend to have a few different modes of operating. We can make the light and easy choice; go for a middle-of-the-road, manageable route; or push through with the hard choice and maybe accomplish something significant.

The most common option is to pick one of the two easier routes. And even when you make the hard decision and pick the more difficult path, there are still pitfalls to watch out for. Because when you’re pushing yourself, a lot of the times you’ll spy the sidewalk on the other side of the street, and making a break for that familiar route could put you directly in front of an oncoming city bus.

Even with these risks, though, it’s more often than not worth it to push yourself to take the more challenging path. Very little growth is going to happen on a quick, 10-minute walk around the block. You can enjoy stability on the normal, medium walk, but accomplishment only comes with the long walk and the prospect of doing something difficult.

When you’re in the middle of doing something hard, it can be tempting to look back and think, “Man, I could sprint for home and be done with this hard thing.” But unless you push through it, you can’t enjoy the rewards of doing something strenuous, the breaking of patterns, the discovery of a different path.

If you are the boss, or in a leadership role, you have to be the one to balance the normal with the need to achieve. You have to be the one to decide whether your team needs the easy week or can make the leap to the big idea. One could argue that “making others do the hard” is easier than pushing yourself. But good managing is not always pushing; it is balancing for maximum output. Whether this is you doing you, or you running a Fortune 500 company, the rule applies.

While the calendar doesn’t mark today as National Take Your Pet to Work Day, I hope that you’ll take this as a reminder that that easy doesn’t necessarily mean good, and it certainly doesn’t mean growth. So go out, get lost, and don’t turn for home when things start to get scary.

There is always a pile of books on management and entrepreneurship to choose from, and although I don’t find grand revelations in every book I pick up, I do like the search. Recently I discovered a new book, and what has stuck with me is the author’s description of catastrophic thinking, or catastrophizing.

The author presented this as a pattern that he noticed in himself. As he explained it, he had recently started a new enterprise and it was moving along in fits and starts, as a new business is wont to do. And he noticed that at every downturn or bad week, he found himself projecting one negative event to the nth degree.

“Okay, I got half as many orders as I normally do. That means I’m not going to be able to cover some bills — what if it happens again? I won’t be able to pay this month’s rent!” By the end of this thought exercise, he was living on the streets and had lost the majority of his teeth.

The author’s assertion was that moments like these are a lesson for entrepreneurs to know when to get out of their own way, because that thinking doesn’t stop at logical points. It spirals indefinitely until you’ve convinced yourself that you’re in some dark, awful pit with no means of egress.

I’d like to think that I am not the only person who saw themselves reflected in the author’s panic and “what if” response. In business, emotional swings are to be expected. When you run your own business, whether it’s a growing startup or a plateaued mature business, you’re simply going to have to ride the emotional rollercoaster.

As I considered the familiarity of this pattern, though, I developed a question. If it’s easy for owners to ride the emotional rollercoaster down, why can’t we ride it back up to the top? The fantasy of slipping ever downward is a compelling one, but if we’re really going to consider this as a rollercoaster, then you should be able to use that downward force to ride back up the other side to new heights.

When you’re riding the rollercoaster down, you’re projecting a fantasy of scarcity. “What if I don’t sell as much as I need to? What if I come in under the line?” While this fear is certainly compelling, that doesn’t change its unreal nature. So if we’re going to indulge ourselves in fantasies anyway, why not make them ones of abundance? “What if I sell an extra ten units? How would I handle it if I sold a hundred more, how would I manage that kind of rampant growth?”

In response to that question, I would point out that there are more than a few books that give guidance on how to scale up your business. Which can lead to interesting hypotheticals and planning scenarios, although the advice is somewhat limited by the refrain of, “Just ask somebody to loan you $100 million so you can afford to annually lose $10 million for 10 years.” While I have no doubt that that plan of attack is effective, it’s not something that most people can even conceive of, let alone enact.

If you’re an average human being without access to near-limitless capital and looking to advance your business, I’d recommend that you invest the time planning for your business’ success instead of dreading its downfall. Take some time and paint the picture of what a little more success looks like, and then a lot more.

From there, start backing into scenarios like, “Well if I did this and got 1, how could I do that again and get 2? What behaviors got me there, what did I do that generated success, and how do I do it again, and bigger?”

There will always be strong positive and negative emotions that come with owning and operating a business. But just like you ride the rollercoaster down with alarming speed, you can use that same energy to propel yourself upward and create a vision of where you’d like your business to be. Once you can see it, you’ll be able to start taking concrete steps to make that goal a reality.