Smelling the Barn

The most dangerous stretch of any effort is the way out

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Smelling the Barn

“Don’t smell the barn, boys.”

Alec Haralovich had just finished his parting words to the Norwegian National Baseball Team. We were in Wrocław, Poland, this past week for the European B-Pool Championship, where the winner would earn promotion to Europe’s A Pool the following year. I’ve been gifted the opportunity to serve as an assistant coach with this group for the past several years, and Haralovich—a retired special forces Marine who serves as our general manager—has a gift for strangely perfect words at just the right moment.

Most of us know the expression one way. A horse working its way home catches the scent of the barn and finds another gear—head up, pace quickening, suddenly eager to close the distance. Runners feel it in the last mile, sales teams in the last week of the quarter. You can see the finish, so you dig in and finish strong. Smelling the barn is a good thing.

That wasn’t the barn Haralovich meant.

The same instinct has a shadow. That quickening horse can grow distracted and hard to control, so fixed on the barn that it stops minding the ground in front of it. It knows where it wants to go; it just stops paying close attention to how it gets there.

Haralovich broke a military mission into three broad movements. First comes the insertion, when you begin in good health and high spirits—excitement, anticipation, an operation studied and rehearsed until everyone knows the plan inside and out. Think of the enormous preparation, and the nervous energy, that preceded D-Day. Then comes what the military calls action on the objective: the event itself, the game or the presentation or the launch, the moment all that preparation has been pointed toward. And then comes the extraction. Getting out.

That last phase, Haralovich warned, is often the most dangerous—not because the objective has changed, but because the people pursuing it have. The end is visible, and comfort feels close. People start thinking about going home. They relax, rush, coast, or simply begin going through the motions.

Their bodies remain in the operation, but their minds are already in the barn.

You see it everywhere once you start looking. A team builds a comfortable lead and stops playing with urgency. A business nears the end of a long project and begins overlooking the small but important details. A student knows graduation is approaching and quietly checks out. A leader announces a change, then lets the energy leak away before it ever takes root. The work isn’t finished, but people start acting like it is.

This is the moment that asks the most of leaders. The plan is already made, and strategy is set. The work now is keeping people awake and reminding your team that nearing the finish and finishing are not the same thing. The European Championship would go to the team disciplined enough to stay present through the final pitch and the final out, not the one most excited to walk onto the field.*

Complacency won’t announce itself. It shows up disguised as relief, confidence, or the reasonable belief that the hardest part is already behind us. But the barn is not home until you are safely inside.

Where are you beginning to smell the barn? How will you keep yourself, and the people you influence, at full throttle until the work is truly finished?

Anyone can bring energy at the beginning. Influence is helping people carry it all the way to the finish line.

* This turned out to be exactly the case. Slovakia overcame a late-inning deficit to capture the championship over host Poland in walk-off fashion in the bottom of the 10th inning.

“It ain’t over till it’s over.”

—Yogi Berra

Connecting this quote to the story. Seeing the finish line doesn’t mean the work—or the need for focus—is finished.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Preparation gets you started; sustained attention brings you safely home.