How to Teach Your Team to Notice Issues and Solve Problems

What do you notice about the blog image with the cat and the plant? The real question is – what would you do about this situation?

• Point it out to someone else?
• Walk past and ignore it?
• Fix one or two and leave the rest?

All day long you will face this type of situation. See a pothole in the road on your morning commute? It's probably not something you’re able to or even empowered to fix. What do you decide to do? Drive around it? Flag it on Waze? Call the City to report it?

We all take different actions depending on the issues we are faced with and the situation. If you're late to work, you're probably gonna drive around it. Let's say you're visiting from out of town, you’re unlikely to call the city to report it.

As a Boss Leader (and I hope that you know by now I’m talking about that very special person who is working on elevating themselves and using their power for the good of themselves and those around them) as a Boss Leader, you’ve got to set expectations with your team on what YOU expect them to do with each type of issue.

Do you expect them to:

• Notice and say something.
• Just notice but don’t do anything. Let the appropriate people handle it.
• Notice, think about it, propose a solution.

There’s lots of advice for how to deal with problems at work. I’ve always fallen into the camp of Notice, Scratch the surface - learn about it, Report it & Propose a Solution. Then feed it into a mature issue and risk management system.

And not everyone agrees with that.

For example, Ben Horowitz in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things, suggests that you’ll lose information in the cracks or that people won’t feel free to mention an issue, when you expect them to offer you a solution.  The example he uses is about an engineer who identifies a serious flaw in the way the product is marketed. The engineer doesn't know how to fix the problem so in an office culture where people are not encouraged or allowed to bring bad news and when they are expected to offer a solution, they will ignore and fail to mention issues.

I propose a counter argument to this. Being able and willing to raise a problem to management is a cultural thing at the start. And, Horowitz says a healthy culture is one that encourages people to share bad news.

I suggest that we want a culture of people communicating positive and, in context, bad or negative news.

The reason that we say raise and AND offer a solution is because that is an important component of your team, department or company culture.  You’re aiming to create an environment that allows people to feel empowered and also does not encourage whining and complaining and martyrs all around.

In his example the person is not willing to bring the issue forward b/c they don’t know what it takes to resolve it. Fair, yet I’d offer these two points of view in addition:

• Asking people to suggest solutions isn’t about asking them to know the answer or fix the problem. It’s about ownership – where everyone believes in taking care of the company. Just like if you are at home and a lightbulb goes out in a room. Don’t you want to know about it? Do something about it?
• Second, we’ve omitted a critical part to program management, risk and issue management. So many companies and teams wait to do this until they are trying to resolve or mitigate. When you  proactively monitor and manage issues and risks as part of daily operations, something like a critical produce marketing error becomes easier to notice, flag, and address.

So, how do you teach our team to notice and address issues? 

• First, decide what you expect.
• Second, teach your team what you expect. Get very detailed here.
  • When you notice ____, I expect you to ________.
• Put an issue and risk management system and process in place.  This will automate issue and risk reporting, tracking, handling.
  • Does it take the burden off of you to review, assess and solve issues? Nope. But it makes the tedium easier. You don't have to decide every single time about severity, priority, and who's involved, informed, etc. You establish a baseline of information required for each issue and risk reported, so people learn to bring the real details necessary instead of just saying, hey there's always water on the pantry floor. 
• Involve your team in solving the problems. Teach them how to process and own the issues. Empower them to solve and resolve, to update process, procedure and behavior to avoid repeats.
• Don't stop at notice and report. Encourage and reward behaviors and actions that meet your expectations for problem solving (noticing, reporting, acting). 
• Set the standard by accepting and owning responsibility & expecting your other managers and leaders to own everything that rolls up to them, too.

That’s Boss Leadership in issue management.

Hear more about this topic, including additional examples, and what to notice and do about the problem of the cat and the plant in this video.