Settling…..

This morning, clearing my inbox and feeds, I noticed a headline. It referred to the average tenure of GTM executives being 17 months….. The article offered sound advice on how to deal with a career living in 17 month increments. My thought, in reading this was, “Why do we settle for this? Why do we consider this acceptable? Wouldn’t we and the organizations we lead achieve much more with longer tenures?”

Then I reflected on how much we “settle” for.

• 15-20% win rates.
• Fewer than 40% of sellers achieving goals.
• 70%+ organizations achieving goals.
• Average tenure in any GTM role of 11-18 months.
• 83% of customers not wanting to talk to sellers.
• Lengthening sales cycles.
• Plummeting employee engagement and satisfaction.
• And on and on and on.

We rationalize these with all sorts of excuses, “That’s just the way things are…., But we are hitting our numbers…, People are changing their expectations of work…., Everyone else is doing the same thing…, It’s a problem with the new generations of workers……”

I constantly struggle with this. I keep thinking, “It doesn’t have to be this way! Why do we continue to accept this? Why do we settle?”

We see this in all aspects of our lives.

I sit on the board of an educational not for profit. Yesterday, in a board meeting, they were discussing declines in educational performance. The discussion was, “How do we reverse this?” We see surveys on declines in mental health and health in general. We see declines in engagement in so many aspects of our professional and other lives. Even in simple things like many of the purchases we make, we see and accept declines in quality and customer experience.

And we accept these. We may whine or complain. We may think of the “good old days,” even though those may have only been pre pandemic. In spite of all of this we settle.

The interesting contradiction, at least from a business performance point of view, we celebrate, as heroes and potential unicorns, those people who refuse to settle.

We revere the start-up founders, overcoming all sorts of adversity. Even those who fail, and try again. We revere the large organizations that, somehow, manage to innovate and continue to grow. We surround ourselves with all sorts of models of “success,” whether they are companies or individuals.

It may be the high performing seller. It may be the person who refused to lose that big deal. It may be the modern day Thomas Edison’s who weren’t stopped by 9000 ways an electric light didn’t work, but focused on finding the 1 way to make it work.

While we revere these people, while we say we aspire to similar things, in the end we have a mindset around settling.

This confuses and concerns me. It never seemed to be that way–and I’m not talking about the huge successes, but it never used to be that way in our every day work–or at least not as pervasive.

And refusing to settle isn’t that difficult, but can produce such profound results. One of my favorite examples is how we have come to settle for low win rates. We are now happy with 15-20%. We never challenge ourselves with, “What’s it take to win 30-40%?” We are already investing in those deals, we are already spending the time and resources. But somehow we are OK with losing 80-85% of those.

Or let me go back to the leadership tenure issue. We are settling for 17 months. We are trying to figure out how to build careers out of those 17 month increments. But when we reflect on the leadership responsibility to maximize performance over the long term, it’s virtually impossible to do this in 17 months. So the organizations we work for don’t improve, they just go to the next iteration and the next and the next. And as leaders, we don’t develop because we never are around enough to see success or to learn how to adjust to improve success.

And this failure ripples through all the other issues in organizational performance.

I don’t know how we got here. I don’t understand the contradiction between how we revere those who don’t settle, but find it acceptable to settle ourselves.

Perhaps, selfishly. I focus on the lost opportunity. I keep thinking, it’s so easy to double revenues, all we have to do is double our win rates, not settling for 15-20%. Or it’s so easy to drive organizational performance, but it takes longer than 17 months, so we have to commit to doing the work and investing the time to achieve it.

What am I missing? Why do we find it so easy to settle? I’d love your ideas, and I’d love your ideas on how to change our mindsets.

I do find this new trend of settling quite unsettling.