Welcome to Friday 411, issue #078. In 4 minutes, with 1 insight and 1 action, you will identify the root issues that are causing your team’s biggest challenges.
1 Insight
In your effort to put out fires, conquering today’s flames may be fueling tomorrow’s inferno.
As a leader, you face seemingly insurmountable challenges. Your immediate reaction may be to tackle the problems head-on. You determine quick fixes and then move on to the next issue. Unfortunately, this approach, often referred to as “putting out fires,” rarely works. At best, it shrinks fires from a rage to a smolder. At worst, this approach can feed fires as the root issues continue to fester.
On November 23, 2016, high winds picked up sparks from a couple of teenagers playing with matches on a hiking trail in our beloved Smoky Mountains. Over the next several days, the fire grew to uncontrollable strength, destroying property and taking lives. It took 21 days to fully extinguish.
Many experts have weighed in on reasons behind the fire’s devastation. Some point to the thick layers of underbrush built up from years of putting out smaller fires. In an effort to control the immediate problem in front of them, foresters had been inadvertently growing a massive fuel-source to feed a future wildfire.
In leadership, putting out fires rarely works because it fails to address the layers of build-up beneath. Most big problems that your team faces are connected to seven potential issues that we’ve identified in the Unleashed Leadership framework.
The Unleashed Leadership Framework
In our history of working with leaders, we’ve noticed a pattern of people getting stuck when facing big challenges. When a leader can’t identify a way forward, they leash their own leadership as well as their team’s.
In our two decades of helping leaders, we’ve discovered that 7 leadership issues cause 95% of organizational problems: Character, Competence, Capacity, Clarity, Community, Culture, and Consistency. We developed the Unleashed Leadership framework to help leaders continually upgrade their leadership around those 7 issues.
An Unleashed Case Study
For example, you might lead a team in the service industry. Each of your frontline employees have daily quotas for the services they need to deliver, but they fall short most of the time. You, like many other leaders, want to figure out what to do to get your team to move faster. You could:
Read a book about getting things done faster and smarter
Lower your standards (but frustrate your customers)
Increase the work hours (but anger your employees)
Hire more staff
Provide better training
Plan a motivational meeting
etc., etc., etc.
Each of those solutions puts a band aid on a major wound. It doesn’t address the root issues. If you don’t tackle that undergrowth, you will lose revenue and profit. You will have frustrated customers and staff members. And you won’t sleep well at night.
Let’s examine how the problem of “not delivering service fast enough” could stem from any of the Unleashed Leadership issues.
1. Character
Character issues arise when individuals do not take ownership of their responsibilities or fail to hold themselves accountable. In the context of unmet quotas, a character issue might look like employees blaming external factors or other team members instead of looking inward and assessing how they can improve.
Potential Solutions:
Foster a culture of 125% Responsibility.
Create accountability groups that hold each other to your standards.
2. Competence
Competence relates to the skills and abilities of your team. If employees lack the necessary knowledge and skills to perform their tasks, no amount of hard work will close the gap.
Potential Solutions:
Bring your team together to do step-by-step training on service delivery.
Ask the highest performers to mentor low-performers.
3. Capacity
Capacity issues occur when employees do not have enough time or resources to complete their tasks. If your team is consistently overloaded with work, it’s a capacity problem. They might be working at their maximum capacity, but the sheer volume of work is too much to handle within the given time frame.
Potential Solutions:
Plan service routes to be more efficient.
Invest in better tools that allow the team to accomplish work more quickly.
4. Clarity
Clarity is about ensuring that everyone understands their roles, responsibilities, and expectations. If employees are unclear about their targets or the processes they should follow, they cannot meet expectations. This often happens in fast-paced environments where communication is rushed or inconsistent.
Potential Solutions:
Display a “quota” board that enables every person to see their performance compared to clear targets.
Create processes that streamline the service delivery.
5. Community
Community issues arise when there is a lack of trust and respect among team members or between employees and leaders. If your team doesn’t feel valued or supported, their performance will suffer. This can lead to disengagement and a lack of commitment to meeting quotas.
Potential Solutions:
Increase the trust you give to each person, in the hopes of getting that trust back.
Schedule regular touchpoints with each person to see how you can help them.
6. Culture
Culture refers to the behaviors that flow from the values and beliefs within your organization. If the culture has long tolerated poor performance or a lack of accountability, it will be challenging to change behavior. Employees might have become accustomed to a relaxed attitude towards meeting quotas.
Potential Solutions:
Determine specific habits you want your team do. Train your team in those habits and hold them accountable to them.
Identify poor behavior that you have tolerated. Address those behaviors and stop tolerating them.
7. Consistency
Consistency is about maintaining steady priorities and expectations. If you constantly shift goals or change directives, you create confusion and hinder their ability to meet quotas. Inconsistent expectations leads to inconsistent results.
Potential Solutions:
Determine standards for your quotas and discuss them every day.
Create a template for your team meetings where you examine the same metrics every time.
Stop Putting Out the Fires
Most major organizational problems — like not hitting your daily quotas — can be traced back to a couple of the 7 issues. Spend time understanding the root issues. In turn, you will save significant energy by creating lasting solutions. You’ll stop “putting out fires” and start building a sustainable organization.
1 Action
Identify the biggest challenge in your sphere of influence. Determine which of the seven issues are at the root of that challenge.
