The Secret to Solving Problems
It’s easy to make others responsible for problems in your organization. Someone else fell short. It couldn’t be you!
When leaders blame, everyone blames.
Blame is the reason problems persist.
If you’re a leader, look around and own what you see. Finger pointing prolongs unhappiness.
Others won’t take responsibility until leaders own problems. The trouble is, irresponsible leaders feel the need to appear like they have it all together.
Leaders who need to be right, can’t take responsibility for wrong.
Responsible leadership:
If you want others to take responsibility, lead the way.
- Imagine “better.” Escape the gravitational pull of problems. Lift your eyes and get a picture of what you want.
- Connect behaviors with “better.” What are people doing when things are better? Problems become manageable when right and wrong behaviors are clear.
- Create environments where learning is safe and celebrated. Don’t pretend you already know. Say, “I hadn’t thought of that.” Ask, “What are we learning?”
- Develop more than one solution. When there’s one solution, the brain turns from exploring to defending.
- Evaluate frequently. Courageously ask:
- Are we headed in the right direction?
- What’s working?
- What’s not working?
- Describe the preferred future in behavioral terms.
- What could be better? How?
- What needs to stop?
- What might we try?
- Stay optimistic. Don’t start the journey if you don’t believe things can be better. Optimism celebrates small wins.
- Set high and low targets. High aspirations, by themselves, are discouraging. You need attainable targets. When you reach a target, set another.
Successful leaders think about problems and challenges in terms of their responsibility, not someone else’s?
Nothing changes until leaders take responsibility.
In irresponsible, blaming environments, how can leaders take responsibility?
Doesn’t get much better, Dan. The same goes for credit when things go well. I once heard a quote from a coach that said “If anything goes bad, I did it. If it goes semi-good, we did it. If it goes great, you did it.”
Thanks Jody. Your mind went where mine went. Credit and blame are connected. Thanks for the good word.
That’s a great quote!!!!
It’s great quote, Jody. I wrote it down for the future.
Dan, if on the one hand we celebrate success, then perhaps BLAME is the other extreme we do to mess with people for failing to meet “mastery.” So, could there be something called a “near win?”
Mastery is knowing that it means nothing if we can’t do it again and again. Mastery is not the same as excellence. It’s not the same as success, which I see as an event, a moment in time, and a label that the world confers upon us. Mastery is not a commitment to a goal but to a constant pursuit. What gets us to do something, what get us to forward thrust more is to value the “near win.”
The pursuit of mastery, in other words, is an ever-onward almost. Mastery is in the reaching, not the arriving. It’s in constantly wanting to close that gap between where we are and where we want to be. Mastery is about sacrificing for our craft and not for the sake of crafting our career. How many leaders and untold entrepreneurs live out this phenomenon?
We thrive not when we’ve done it all, but when we still have more to do. We build out of the unfinished idea. This is the dynamic of mastery. Coming close to what we thought we wanted can help us attain more than we ever dreamed we could. Even if we created utopias, I believe we would still have the incomplete. Completion is a goal, but we hope it is never the end…perhaps only a near win.
You said “If you’re a leader, look around and own what you see.” Has to be…
“Nothing changes until leaders take responsibility ” these words are my inspiration today. Thanks Dan
Blaming is always easier. Which is why it goes around so much
One more brilliant piece! Very often it is the leaders who act as impediment to progress and growth. Their penchant for protecting their territory leads to what is said in the article. But how long this can go on? Things need to come out in the open exposing the leader.
I just looked around me and I’m going to own what I see! I’m going to lead my team to solutions.
Great to be reminded that is easy to say “It is not my fault” than it is to say “OK. We are in a mess. What can we do get out from this mess?”
Problems look scary but they are sometime helpful because they are lessons for us. Blaming offends people and never improve. At least when doing wrong things, leaders should fix the problems and change the way they are if they are afraid of saying SORRY