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

“The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.” – Babe Ruth

  One of the most intriguing factors this writer has noticed during his strategic and operational facilitation sessions is that participants are normally pretty good at identifying change-issues. However, it then seems to become that much more challenging for them to find ways to solve those identified issues. From there it becomes even more difficult for them to bring any change-issues to a satisfactory resolution. If leader teams could overcome such issue-solving hurdles, they would undoubtedly be considerably more successful. Their people would become masters, too.

 If only they realized that it’s more about team-empowerment than issue-solving abilities. We’ve all seen or read about extraordinary feats accomplished by business people when faced with enormously challenging matters. Such instances only go to show how capable and ingenious teams of people can be when faced with the major hurdles in growing their venture. In reality they usually have to meet three scenarios:

» Issue identification

» Issue breakthrough, 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, but then don’t make a lot of progress from there.

» Issue Breakthrough – At this point, once an issue has been identified, the challenge of finding an optimum breakthrough increases significantly. This is where we can draw upon a team’s amazing collective wisdom, when it’s approached in the right way; especially if they use our option solving technique.

        This has the advantage of encouraging participants to think outside-the-box, explore wider possibilities, and then utilize their phenomenal intuitive decision making capabilities…our latter gift is too often overlooked or under-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 teams to draw upon their intuitive gift for picking-out an optimal approach. That optimal approach is far from perfect, but most times it’s a team’s best choice based upon all the known pragmatics. To recap on prior option-solving articles, they take the following (A) and (B) approach:

(A)- Team 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 breakthrough, 2) we don’t have much money to implement that breakthrough, 3) we should all try and relax as much as possible, since too much tension shrinks our ability to think, and 4) with the right choice, business will flow much faster?”

 – Team puts up its yin and yang bookends; that is, it’s least likely outside-options as a framework.

– In between those bookends, team members insert their 5-6 most realistic options.

– Allow for some emotional distancing time to permit the team to draw upon its innate wisdom.

– After an hour, two hours or the following morning, the group reviews its pictograph and decides on its optimum option based upon the team’s collective wisdom.

– This now becomes the team’s breakthrough option

(B) Based upon that option the team now develops a breakthrough initiative as follows:

– What are we going to resolve from our option solving choice?

– How many moves do we need to make to make a breakthrough?

– Who needs to take on each move to resolve?

– When should each move 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?

» Issue Focus Until it is Resolved – By now your team can foresee a beginning and an end to resolving its breakthrough issue. However, there are extra challenges.

– By the time your team reaches its initiative mid-point – unless it is of a very short duration – it could lose a fair amount of focus. Our focus is generally pretty good at the start and end of any project.

– 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.

  2) The team needs to choose a ‘cheer leader.’ That leader becomes the celebratory touchstone whenever a milestone is accomplished.

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 that well-known highly successful executive Warren Buffet. He 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 20%.

So the challenge is not defining the issues. It’s more about finding the right breakthroughs and then focusing on them until resolved. This is true for leader teams and workforce teams. Just break those solutions down into manageable milestones and then cheer yourselves along until accomplished. That’s the way to keep your leaders and people focused: through people-empowerment, not issue solving prowess! We have plenty of the latter, but insufficient of the former. Such exercises produce many organization masters over time, too. To learn more about workplace people-engagement, talk with: