Last year my friend Mark led an effort to reinvent his professional services group. The exercise was a success, but the outcome may surprise you. I asked Mark to share this extraordinary experience, and this is his story.

Our professional services organization was stuck. Our strategy no longer suited our goals, and we didn’t know which way to go.

We were a small cog in a giant product company. Our role was simple - to help enterprise customers implement our high-end communication technologies. After two years of startup pains, our group was running smoothly.

Then our corporate leaders issued a mandate - grow or die! Every profit center had to come up with a growth strategy. That was a problem for us. The demand for our services was tied directly to product sales, and our products were slipping in the market. If we wanted to grow our professional services business, we’d have to reinvent ourselves. I got the job of creating a strategic roadmap.

At first I was excited. The team had lots of ideas for new “solutions” to offer to the market, so we developed a few of them. Then we went looking for people with problems our solutions could actually solve. We never found any. Maybe you’ve had a similar experience.

Next we asked for feedback from sales people, partners, and customers. They listened politely, nodded thoughtfully, and wished us well. But they didn’t give us much feedback. I began to wonder if we were asking the right questions.
We’d been operating from the assumption that the company would continue to need a professional services group. What if it didn’t? I stepped back, looked at the strategy of the company as a whole, and saw what had been hiding in plain sight.

I was afraid to say what I saw. So I invited the leadership team to join me in a conversation. I asked that we all give ourselves permission to question our basic assumption that we must survive. Then we looked at the situation together. It was an extraordinary conversation.

We concluded unanimously that survival was not a strategic goal. Our reason for existing was to make a valuable contribution to customers and the company. We couldn’t see a way forward that would allow us to contribute enough.

A few months later the company shut us down. Some people moved to other departments, and many of us moved on. I keep in touch with my former colleagues, and most of them are glad they took a bold step that seemed unthinkable at first. They like what they’re doing now.

I learned something huge from this experience: to ask fearless questions of myself and others, and go wherever the answers take us. Sometimes the most empowering choice a leader can make is to give people permission to stop pursuing a path that isn’t working.

You can’t move forward unless you’re willing to let go of what doesn’t fit anymore.