We’ve been delivering a lot of training and coaching programmes over the past few months aimed at ‘problem solving’ and it’s this that got the thinking going this month. You see, when we deliver any programmes we always look to build in a dose of working on real improvements back in the work, which we subsequently coach around, and so we see a lot of different problems. The things that people work on are almost always about how we can redesign the work and have been validated by senior leaders as important. And so, process focussed problem become the main.
What about other types of problems?
If you’ve ever worked in or currently are involved in a leadership team you will know there is always a focus on performance of the big goals, the big measures, the bottom line, the things of strategic importance and maybe a bit of politics thrown in.
The process problems we see a lot of will impact in here somewhere, but they may not be the biggest opportunity to improve on all of the things mentioned.
Thinking about problems at this higher level and working on improving there will ultimately have an impact on all of the other things that have been identified as opportunities, including redesigning work. Understanding the answer to this question should be a focus for all leadership teams but we almost always tend to look outwardly at the things we need to get our people to do rather than what it is we, as a team and a group of leaders need to do.
The impact of not recognising and working on problems at this level could be huge for you.
1. Problems that are aimed at redesigning work often require collaboration cross function, demonstrated at a leader level otherwise progress is difficult, sometimes impossible
2. Observed leadership behaviours will determine how people in the teams choose to behave and how they feel about the team
3. A lack of alignment at the leadership team level equals low alignment within the business towards any purpose, vision or mission goals
This article has a fair few recent stats that help to think around some of the problems that can exist in this critical layer.
The thing that struck me when I was looking around this though and the talents that leaders should have, is the lack of any description around how leaders work together as opposed to against each other. I believe this should be high on the list for a whole host of reasons, some that link to improvement in those stats mentioned in Apollos article and also the ability for people who we work with on redesigning work to be able to redesign it cross functionally rather than in silo.
We are working on these BUT…
I know people will say, we have leadership development programmes working on this, we have coaches working on that and that is great, but I’d like to drop a challenge in here to help you think….
If you look at the different programmes that are going on within the different functions right now e.g. L&D, Change, Operations, how interlinked are they AND does the leadership around these support alignment or division against a common purpose?
Are you working on solving the right problems?