During your work life, you will encounter problems and challenges. This is natural and everyone faces it. How you manage those define your leadership.
Try to solve your problems first, before approaching the management
The question you should ask yourself when a problem pops up is: How can I solve it? What can I do to improve the situation? The reason why I highlight the above questions is that during my career I saw so many times that employees or people in general just come running to a supervisor or a manager with their issues and the expectations they will get solved. In most cases, the problems could have been solved by the person directly but most people don’t realize this or are simply too lazy to do it. Those are however the same people that then later complain about a lack of career progression.
In case you want to be successful, simply keep in mind that you should be the one to step up and solve as many of the problems on your side before you go to the next instance in your organization. You should be perceived as someone that solves problems and not just delegates them.
Identification and resolving problems
The good news is that you can categorize almost all work-related problems into 4 areas. Your problems usually are:
- lack of money/funding
- lack of resources (people, time, material etc)
- collaboration issues or interpersonal challenges
- conflicting goals in an organization
Why is it good news? It makes the problems to an extent predictable and the first step in solving your problem is identifying the root cause and limiting factor. Ask yourself what is the main reason for the lack of progress?
- Does everyone know what to do and is the target for everyone clear?
- Do you have the right people on the bus?
- Are there other priorities that take away focus from your project/problem?
- Do you lack resources or money? Can you work around the lack? Example: Reduce feature scope, use cheaper methods, etc…
- Are there collaboration or communication issues? (Learn more on how to deal with such problems here)
By now, you hopefully have an idea of the main cause for the lack of progress. Now it is time to figure out what you can do to overcome this problem.
Look at the root cause and depending on it take action. For example:
- If it is a communication/collaboration issue then start better communication, maybe invite for a clarification call.
- In case money is the limiting factor have a look at the scope, and priorities and think about creative means to save costs or get it done with less. You can reduce the required investments in most cases by tweaking some of the above factors. If your idea will bring in money or save money create a business case that you can show to the management so that you can request funding with solid numbers in hand.
- Do you need an expert assigned who supports you? Well, how about you identify such an expert in the company and pitch the idea to him/her. In many cases, people like to help. They might not have 100% of their time dedicated but will still support. Official assignments from the management side help, however, I try to get first the buy-in from the experts on the ground as they are doing the execution (except if you know their managers are offended if you approach them directly, then talk first to the manager).
- In case of conflicting priorities in the organization, you need to check why they are conflicting and what is really more important. If a project has priority, maybe you can support it and finish it faster so that your topic can be picked up. Alternatively, talk to the project members or teams and try to get some buy-in to work on your items whenever they get to it next to the main priority.
Involving the management / How to prepare an outcome-oriented discussion
Should you not be able to resolve the issues on your own, then it is time to go to the next level in the hierarchy and involve the management. Before you raise the problems, it is important to remember that simply raising a complaint or talking about an issue will seldom turn into a fruitful discussion. Therefore, I would recommend to carefully prepare and consider what message you want to convey as well as what outcome you would like to achieve.
Your management can only act on the information they actually receive and are accurate. Especially with issues, critical information is often filtered out due to fear of looking bad. This in turn leads to bad decisions or actions. If you have bad news give them based on the facts and with a straight back. Don’t try to make yourself look better and change the story!
This is going to be an uncomfortable situation and this is ok. In order to prepare as good as possible and get a desirable outcome the following approach has worked very well for me:
- Research the facts
- Summarize the situation clearly and give only the facts!
- Outline possible solutions or actions and required decisions.
- Make it easy for your leads to take action or decision
- Having no proposals or asks will be perceived as complaining or lazy preparation
- Of course, your management can come up with a solution and proposals, and in many cases, they will give at least guidance, but you are near to the problem and should be in a better position to give a solid way forward
Once you are prepared with the required information and proposals, set up a meeting. Before you go into the meeting be aware that you might face temper tantrums. This is ok and to be expected if you give bad news (ideally your management is not too emotional but you never know..).
During the meeting present the facts and proposal in a calm and clear manner. In most cases, after the meeting, you will have a decision on how to take such a topic forward, act on it accordingly.
Do you have a different approach to problem resolution in your work environment? Let me know what works for you!
