Do you ever feel stuck? Are you looking for transformational solutions to problems?
I recently had a conversation with a client about a situation where he was feeling stuck. He had an employee who was disgruntled and was dealing with her frustration in passive-aggressive ways. The client felt frustrated by the way this employee was acting. It did not fit the culture he had been building in the organization.
The following are three options he had with approaching this situation with the disgruntled employee.
Ignore the Problem
One choice was just to let the employee be and not address the issue. He talked about how all of the members of the core leadership team were living authentically and in alignment with their culture. He had been investing a lot of time mentoring them. He then stated that the employee he was having a problem with was an hourly employee; someone who was not a part of the core team.
He lamented, “It is too hard to build into all of the hourly employees. They just want to show up and do their job and leave. Trying to find a way to engage all of them is just too hard.”
But, deep down he knew that this was just ignoring the problem. His rationale for this option rested on excuses and assumptions about what the employees were like or what they wanted in order to justify his reasoning. He was treating them like obstacles instead of real people. What did they really want?
Provide a Surface Solution
Another option was to try to devise a training program. Maybe if they could just train the hourly employees on the right interpersonal skills, then this would solve the problem. But as he talked through this option, he wondered if it would really work. Would the employees listen and really apply the training? Did he need to build trust first?
He realized that at this juncture, a training program, a new process or rules, would be like applying a band-aid to the skin when the problem is internal bleeding on the inside. Often, when we feel pain, we try to fix the symptom instead of the true cause. We want a quick fix, but then the problem does not go away. It resurfaces and you feel like you are continually putting out fires. In fact, often rules without relationship can lead to rebellion.
Transformational Solutions
The third option required digging deeper. I asked him to state the mission and core values of his organization. A central theme to their mission and values is connected to relationships. In frustration, he exclaimed that he had been living the mission and core values, which he had. He discussed how he had invested in his core leadership team and was seeing fruit from this. We discussed that he was doing an excellent job living the mission and values with his team. A healthy culture will not happen unless the leader is living it.
Then the light bulb went on. If the core leadership team is living the mission and values, why was it stopping there? He then realized that he had not been casting the vision and training his team to be mentors to those they supervised. He needed to cast vision of multiplication of relationships. The core team was being authentic and working well together, but they had turned inward. They also had become so focused on applying the mission and values to customers that they forgot about the opportunity to apply it with the rest of the staff. They needed to turn outward and multiply.
My client now knew what he needed to do.
Do you ever feel stuck with certain situations? You try to think through all of causes to the problem and solutions, but you feel stuck with moving forward? Don’t revert to the band-aid fix. Go deeper. If you would like to learn more about finding transformational solutions, please contact me.