by Peter A. Arthur-Smith, Leadership Solutions, Inc.®

“You don’t hire people to employ them; you hire them to contribute. So why not call them contributors: either high contributors, contributors or non-contributors?”

One of the most intriguing factors this writer has noticed during strategic and operational facilitation sessions is that participants are normally pretty good at identifying change-issues. However, they then find it much more challenging in finding ways to solve any particular issue, but then even more difficult to bring that change-issue to a satisfactory resolution. If organizations could overcome such issue-solving hurdles, they would undoubtedly be considerably more successful.

If only they knew that it’s more about people engagement than problem solving abilities. We’ve all seen or read about extraordinary feats by business people faced with enormously challenging issues. Such instances only go to show how capable

and ingenious people can be when faced with the major hurdles in growing an enterprise. In reality they’ve had to meet three scenarios:

» Issue identification

» Issue solving, and

» Issue focus until it is resolved

» Issue identification – We won’t spend too much time on this one because people are usually pretty responsive to such identification moments, given the right circumstances and right nudges. Besides, we spend a lot of our time as a society thinking and talking about our problems or issues.  Good facilitators have techniques to spark a healthy conversation from which constructive issues can flow. It is especially helpful to break participants into smaller groups, where you will see amazing collective wisdom come to the fore.

» Issue Solving – At this point, once an issue has been identified, the solution challenge seems to increase significantly. Even so, if we can draw upon a group’s collective wisdom in the right way, it can often become much easier. In a number of this writer’s prior articles, he has invoked the option solving technique. This has the advantage of encouraging participants to think outside-the-box, explore wider possibilities, and utilize their phenomenal intuitive decision making capabilities…our latter gift is too often little understood or appreciated in our predominantly rational thinking world.

        As a reminder, this is where an identified issue is broken down into a least 5-6 realistic options to enable a person or preferably a smart group to draw upon their intuitive decision gift for devising an optimum approach. That optimum approach is usually far from perfect, but it is most times the group’s best choice based upon all the known pragmatics. To recap prior articles, it needs the following (A) and (B) approach:

1. – Group asks a rational question like: “What is our best option for solving XYZ; considering that 1) we don’t have much time to produce a solution, 2) we don’t have much money to resolve any solution, 3) we should all relax much more when trying to resolve solutions – because tensions shrink our thinking ability, and 4) with the right choice, business will flow much faster?”

– Group puts up its yin and yang bookends

– In between those bookends, group members insert at least 5-6 realistic options that could go a long way toward solving the issue – this produces a pictogram; a picture of the different options.

– Allow for some group emotional distancing to permit its collective intuition to subconsciously review the     pictogram’s options, while they’re doing other unrelated things.

– Either an hour, two hours or the following morning, the group reviews the pictogram with a quick refresher and then individual members of the group make confidential choices, which can then be amalgamated into an overall option choice… again drawing upon the group’s collective wisdom.

1. – Based upon that choice the group now sets-out a solution initiative sheet as follows:

– What are we going to resolve – their choice from the option solving exercise above?

– How – steps we should take to resolve the issue?

– Who needs to take on each step to resolve?

– When should each step be completed to gain momentum?

– Where do we need to go for allies to gain input, knowledge and/or insights to aid our approach and success: as well as get buy-in where we will ultimately need their involvement?

» Issue Focus Until it is Resolved – By now a group can foresee a beginning and an end to resolving its chosen issue, as laid out in its solution initiative sheet. However, there are extra challenges.

– The reality is, by the time the group reaches the initiative’s mid-point, unless that initiative is of a very short duration, it could tend to lose a fair amount of focus. Our focus is generally pretty good at the start and end of any project: the latter especially, if we’ve made some good headway.

– But at the mid-point, owing to so many other pressures, priorities and distractions in our lives, we so often let things fall flat.

– So we have to think about two possibilities:

1) Break the solution initiative down into smaller, doable and compelling milestones: that is, into daily, weekly, two weekly or monthly activities. (Note: An optimum approach is to start with weekly milestones, to help momentum build, and then progress to two-weekly milestones before arriving at any monthly ones.)

2) Then the group leader, or someone on the team, needs to be chosen as “cheer leader,” such that when every milestone is accomplished participants can be made to feel good about their progress. Note how in soccer, baseball, basketball, football and other well-known sports, teams celebrate each goal, home run, basket, touchdown and so forth. Such celebrations help to keep their team’s spirits up until they can close out their game.

The reality is we hardly do this at all within our commercial, institutional or governmental environments. We just dole out bonuses or keep our heads down instead. Those that do celebrate on a regular basis will display work environments where they are much more upbeat, have more fun, and are more engaged and successful in what they’re doing. This happens too rarely in the business world.

Of course, one push back from executives is that they have so many mountains to climb that it’s hard to be a cheerleader for all of them. That’s the whole point: take a highly successful executive like Warren Buffet, who advises you to make a list of all the things that need to be done. Then throw away 80% of them and just focus on the top few. Tackling the top few will bring you plenty of momentum once resolved.

So the challenge is not defining the issues. It’s more about finding the right solutions and then focusing on them until resolved. This is true for leader teams and contributor teams. Just break those priority solutions down into manageable milestones and then cheer yourselves along until accomplished. That’s the way to keep your leaders and people focused: through engagement, not problem solving prowess! We have plenty of the latter, but insufficient of the former.

To learn more about workplace people engagement, talk with: