Seth Dobbs (he/him): Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of problems that pop up in your work and your projects, and how do you decide which ones to tackle first? And how do you think other successful leaders cut through the noise and distractions to focus on what truly matters? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building teams and organizations, and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential in helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. The step we’re going to take in this episode involves understanding that core to creating an environment that embraces problem resolution, is having the ability to prioritize what should, and sometimes more importantly, what shouldn’t be addressed.

For this, I’m going to talk about Carla, who worked at a marketing firm for several years as a strong individual contributor. The firm was growing and needed a new manager to lead a team with a newly signed client. So they started an external search. Carla saw the job listing and decided to go for it herself.

It turned out that her boss hadn’t asked her about it because he didn’t think she was ready, but she made her case and he decided to give Carla a shot. So she was really excited about the opportunity to prove herself and jumped into the work meeting the newly assembled team, reviewing the client brief and talking to the client.

The client was releasing a new app to support their brick and mortar business. They were losing market share, but felt the new app that could help tie to online and brick and mortar was gonna turn things around for them. Carla’s team was asked to prepare a campaign to support the launch and garner as much interest as possible.

The client spent a lot of money in this new effort and needed the launch to go off on time and without a problem. Any delay in the product or the marketing support could cost them dearly. Carla was determined to not let her boss or her client down. She wasn’t gonna let any problem slip past her or her team, and in fact started a daily check-in to make sure everyone was surfacing concerns.

The first couple weeks went by quickly with typical onboard problems arising, such as access to the right documents, setting up virtual workspaces for everyone and so forth. Carla resolved all of these quickly, and once the team was set up and running, Carla kept her daily cadence of checking in as it seemed to really be helping .

As they dug deeper into the work, they of course ran into new issues. Tracking wasn’t clear to some, and so that started a rework on the method and display of information. The daily check-in itself started becoming chaotic, which kicked off a process of gathering info throughout the day with multiple check-ins.

At some point, they realized the brief wasn’t clear about who the consumer segments were, so they kicked that back to the client for more information. Now, Carla had worked with plenty of clients and knew they’d make up their minds eventually on the details of the brief, so she moved on to other things.

She was concerned that the virtual brainstorming environment that she’d set up wasn’t actually working right. So she kept reorganizing the documents, visuals, mood boards, and so forth. And as the work went on, she decided the tracking still wasn’t clear enough. Carla wanted a dashboard to see everything that her team was doing.

She wanted to be able to get an aggregate view of content, of creative work, of messaging all the other work streams and be able to click through to more detail, and she felt if she could see everything that is happening, she reasoned, no problem would get past her. This became a project in itself for her and she was excited because she felt this would help her solve and possibly even prevent future problems, not just within this project effort, but with future work.

The usual churn continued as with all projects, but she felt these dailies with her team were now keeping her even more on top of things. So one of those things was continuing to reorganize the document storage. There was a dispute over the best way, for example, to display the personas, the descriptions of different types of people that might use the product.

And so they reorganized around that. The team started putting together a campaign timeline from teasing the new concept prior to launch to the efforts at the day of launch and follow up. One vocal team member, though didn’t think the structure showed the right details, so Carla assigned her to make a new format for the timeline.

She went on to meet with individuals throughout each day to build the list for the next daily, and then get things stated in those updates in a consistent format and all this kind of activity continued. But the outcome of the next client review was that messaging was weak and unfocused.

Creative was a little confusing, and the timeline didn’t have a lot of meaningful content. Carla’s boss followed up soon after that client review and expressed his concern about the timeline and that there were major gaps in Carla’s team’s work.

Carla wondered how those things could have been missed as well, and, and started talking about how she was going to fix her dashboard. She pointed out that most team problems that her team surfaced were solved quickly, or assigned to be solved. And in fact, over 95% of issues and problems that were raised were taken care of many, nearly immediately.

Her boss felt she was missing something, but also realized perhaps he was as well. So he decided to spend a couple days shadowing her. What he discovered was that she was right. The team constantly talked about problems, and they spent a lot of time fixing stuff, but they made very little actual progress on the work for the client.

And he realized that most of what they were talking about and working on weren’t related to the issues with succeeding with the client. Carla had somehow conditioned the team to surface everything, no matter how big or small. He reviewed the dashboard in more detail and saw that indeed, as Carla said, 95% of the problems were fixed, which on the surface might sound impressive, but the 5% that weren’t included items like

client doesn’t know who their target customers are. He realized that without resolving this, they weren’t gonna actually be successful no matter what else was done. And that brings us to the second core principle of Principle Driven Leadership that Leaders Resolve Problems.

And it’s important to understand that this is the effectiveness principle. It’s the core principle that helps us as leaders be more effective. Now, in some ways, you could argue Carla was trying to embrace this concept and even foster environment where there was no fear of raising issues, which is great, but there, while there was no fear to raise issues, there was also no means of filtering issues, no means of prioritizing.

So in some ways it seems she even favored the easily controlled issues over more complex ones. The thing is, it’s hard to be effective when you think everything needs to be addressed. As the old adage goes, if everything is important, nothing is important, and problem resolution is about being effective by helping you prioritize through vision, through the outcomes you want to create.

As I talked about in more detail back in episode 10 of season one. A problem is only a problem if it prevents you from reaching the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. Anything else is probably a distraction, and Carla and her team were absolutely suffering from distractions. So returning to her after her boss spent a few days observing, he spent some time with her analyzing her dashboard.

She was nervous because she knew the clock was ticking, but her boss assured her it was a moment to go slow so that they could go fast again once this was done. With each open item and each new item, he asked her to consider how that item was preventing them from reaching their goal: A successful marketing campaign launch that would help turn around their client’s business.

They discussed how it was more important to focus on the content of the timeline than the format that at some point it was better to keep background information organized one way and not to keep changing it with every new discovery.

But the biggest thing that surfaced through this analysis was the client problem that they hadn’t settled on who their target audience and buyers were. Without that understanding, the team wouldn’t be able to actually create something successful. Now, once Carla understood what was happening, what she in part was causing, she shifted gears with her team.

She made changes and started dismissing, or at least deferring issues raised that were not actually preventing them from creating a successful campaign. And she quickly saw this approach was working when team members would themselves turn away items that weren’t actually problems. Over time, fewer of these distraction type problems were surfaced, and the team became more focused on their end result.

Here’s the thing, effectiveness is the power to create your desired results. And if you’re poor at problem resolution, you won’t create the results that you’re working towards. You won’t be effective. This could happen in many different ways by ignoring problems, by misprioritizing problems, by going too deep into unnecessary distractions.

I’ve shared stories over the first two seasons that go into several of those concepts, and the thing is, sometimes we focus on the minutia because we lack confidence in tackling the bigger issues, or we fear facing reality.

Problem resolution isn’t about solving every problem. Sometimes it might mean not solving anything that appears to be a problem because they’re actually distractions. Problem resolution makes a team effective by prioritizing and aligning with the vision. Everything else is just busy work and distractions.

So by focusing on the problems that are truly essential, which was anything that would prevent them from launching a targeted marketing campaign on time with a clear target audience, Carla’s team was able to retool and deliver and their client’s new product was successful and helped them recover business that they had lost to their competitors.

So I’d like you to think about a recent project you led. Did you encounter distractions or issues that diverted your focus from the primary goals, and how did you handle those and how do you currently prioritize problems in your work or personal projects, whatever you might be working on, and what methods, if any, do you use to determine whether an issue is worth addressing?

Carla initially struggled to connect the issues her team were addressing with the client’s primary goal. How would you define your goals clearly enough to filter out distractions. Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe, follow, comment, and share with a friend if you liked it, and send feedback and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com and I’ll try to address a few before the end of the season. And join me next time where I’ll talk about how sometimes it takes more effort to truly understand a problem than it does to develop a solution.