Focus on the Right Problems

As a leader, your team brings problems to your desktop daily. As an effective leader, you want to engage your team in problem solving to improve the customer and team experience. Unfortunately, the realities of scarce time and resources may force you to make tough choices and prioritize which problems you address first.  This simple 3-step approach can help: 

1. Understand the problem - How do we know there is a problem?
2. Determine the impact - What is the magnitude of the problem?
3. Prioritize – Should we postpone any of our current initiatives to address this problem immediately? 

Understand the problem: 

First, understand why we think we have a problem. 

• What is the target performance vs, current performance, and what is the gap? 
• What is the business impact of the gap? 
• Does the gap negatively impact customer satisfaction? 
• Does this issue result an unsafe condition for our team members?
• Will this issue increase cost? 

Determine the impact: 

In some cases, you need to take immediate action if you’ve identified an imminent danger or compliance issue. Otherwise, consider:

• Business impact – how will this issue impact achieving business goals? This includes goals related to Quality, Safety, Delivery, Revenue and Cost 
• Difficulty to resolve – what is the relative time and resources (capital, people) required to address the issue? 
• Priority – where does the issue rank among our existing list of projects? Should it supplant one of our current initiatives? 

Prioritize amidst other organization initiatives: 

Too often, organizations make the mistake of automatically adding another initiative to their priority list without honestly examining existing bandwidth. Once you exceed your capacity for projects / problem solving you simply end up with a longer list of unresolved issues and fewer improvements. The result? You stretch finite resources across more and more projects. More activity, but less accomplished. 

A better approach is to review your top 3-5 priorities and determine where the new opportunity fits. If it’s truly a high priority, you may need to supplant an existing project with this new opportunity. If not, add it to your priority list once you complete other near-term priorities. 

This simple, but disciplined approach will not take much time if your current strategy, metrics, targets and priorities are clearly communicated throughout the organization. If they are not, address that gap to ensure your organization is in position to be nimble and adapt to constantly evolving customer needs and expectations.