Contrary to popular wisdom, walking away from an unattainable goal is not a failure but a crucial leadership skill for organizational effectiveness.
Successful leaders recognize that walking away from a commitment that no longer serves their goals is a strong call, not a weak one.
What creates the confusion is the difference between reactive quitting and strategic quitting. These are two very different catalysts.
Reactive quitting is what people normally think of when they hear that someone has walked away from a matter of importance.
The assumption is that they gave up and withdrew emotionally because the situation or challenge was too hard for them. But what if they quit because the data and information they gathered suggested it was the best course of action?
That is what strategic quitting is all about, and decision-making experts claim it is an essential leadership skill that many leaders need to perfect.
When leaders quit strategically, they have made a conscious decision that it is no longer in the best interest of the organization to pursue the outcome.
This decision typically arises because the data suggests the goal is no longer attainable or the costs of pursuit have climbed too high.
Because the tendency of all leaders is to keep investing so as not to forfeit the investment already made (called sunk cost fallacy or entrapment), knowing when to quit is critical to long-term success.
The best way to discern when quitting is imperative is before launching the strategy or initiative.
Good leaders and decision-makers establish criteria or checkpoints to tell them when to quit.
These “kill” criteria, as decision-making expert Annie Duke likes to call them, help to signal when the goal or outcome is no longer attainable or not worth the cost to pursue any further. As such, they assist leaders in avoiding the sunk cost fallacy and in pivoting effectively to other goals and opportunities.
Kill criteria are almost always set in advance and establish a decision, expiration, or due date. They include deadlines, pass-fail benchmarks, required milestones, estimates of stakeholder or team buy-in, and probability data.
Essentially, whatever is required to reasonably continue investing in a goal can be turned into a checkpoint for a quitting decision.
At a minimum, once a kill criterion has been flagged, a discussion about whether the leader or team should quit must take place.
For those situations where it is too tempting to keep investing anyway, the kill criterion can be used to pull the plug automatically. Think of a stop-loss data point where a stock is sold automatically when its price falls to a predetermined level.
Setting kill criteria at the start of a project, strategy, or investment transforms quitting from reactive to strategic. While many leaders claim they have such checkpoints in their head, the best decision makers make these criteria explicit and let everyone on the team know when a retreating discussion will be triggered.
Strategic quitting is anything but a weakness. It allows for a reallocation of resources and a renewed focus on something attainable. It frees the energy and mind space for pursuing new opportunities instead of languishing on goals or issues that can’t be realized.
It’s just as important to know when to quit as it is to know when to aggressively pursue opportunities. Sometimes quitting is the smartest choice a leader can make.
Refusing to quit only displays grit and persistence when the goal is attainable. Once it becomes clear that the outcome is too costly or unreachable, the best description for continued commitment is foolish.
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