Surface Ripples

Ignoring Problems Doesn’t (Always) Work

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like people didn’t care, or where you decided yourself that you just ‘couldn’t handle’ yet another problem people came to you with?  I have.

My job as a leader is twofold:

• Help my team be all they can be
• Create the conditions for them to succeed in this

Life doesn’t always cooperate - I get it - but leaders are there to support.  This doesn’t mean always handing the answer to team members on a plate, as I’ve written previously.   

The skill, I find, is striking the ‘right’ balance between coaching and spoon-feeding.  Take Napoleon Bonaparte: when his generals wrote to him about a problem with which they needed help, he used to ignore the letter for six months.  If he heard no more, they had clearly solved the problem.  If they wrote again, perhaps it was serious.

Communications in Napoleon’s time meant that letters could take a long time to reach their recipient.   Today, communications technology means we can reach out to someone halfway round the world and talk to them in real time.  People now set aside “disconnect time” when they turn off (or at least remove from sight and hearing) all mobile phones and their computers so that they can ‘decompress’.  24/7 technology and ‘working from home’ during the COVID pandemic mean that the boundaries between ‘personal’ and ‘work’ time have more or less merged. 

Back to Napoleon; ignoring genuine problems isn’t good strategy.  It doesn’t make them go away; it creates others - maybe worse – and frustration amongst team members.  Ignoring that our job as leaders is to develop our team to become leaders themselves means we will continue to foster a cohort of ‘needy’ teams who can’t live without us.  Whilst it may appeal to certain egos to think they are ‘indispensable’ to their team, it means more trouble in the long run.

So, my problem is the balance between keeping things going, and coaching others to take more decisions themselves.  It’s an art we never cease to learn as we progress as leaders. 

I try to divide problems into:

• What they should be able to solve (or at least provide recommendations to solve);
• What could turn into a disaster if I don’t intervene.

If it’s the former, I use the ‘What Else?’ approach.  If the latter, we work together to develop a solution.

I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management.  I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.  For strategic questions that you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.

Labels: Crisis Management, Leadership, Productivity, Strategy, Teamwork

posted by William Martin @ 14:58