Seth Dobbs (he/him): Have you struggled to get people on the same page? When faced with a problem, do you find yourself overwhelmed and unable to sort out where you should focus your energy? Have you ever stopped to just think about what a problem actually is? 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 for 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, often one that’s full of setbacks and distractions, sometimes so much so that it can feel like you’re not really accomplishing anything beyond just spinning your wheels.

Now, one of the biggest challenges that I’ve seen organizations face in problem resolution is actually recognizing and clarifying a problem. Now, many of these teams rightfully pride themselves on being really good problem solvers. But I’ve learned that if you’re not a good problem identifier, you can actually waste a lot of energy and create a lot of frustration.

You can easily become overwhelmed by trying to fix things that don’t actually need fixing, or the reverse suffer from not recognizing a problem when they’re prominent and in front of you. Identifying problems and then refining your understanding of them is actually a pretty deep topic. And today I’m gonna cover three key concepts.

First, what a problem isn’t. Second, what a problem is. And third, how to frame a problem. So the first concept, what a problem isn’t, I think it’s easy to get distracted by things we shouldn’t be distracted by. I think that’s why they’re called distractions. But these distractions often masquerade as very important things.

And there are many things that can surface as problems that people find urgent people feel need to address, including yourself, that simply aren’t problems. For now, I want to highlight two things that we treat as problems that are not, in fact, problems in and of themselves. And that is something being done differently than the way you would do it in the absence of a known solution.

I think both of these are prevalent in many organizations and they can just chew up a ton of effort that could be spent more productively elsewhere. So let’s start with the first one. Just because someone would do something differently than you, doesn’t mean. They’ve done it wrong. There are typically many ways to reach an outcome, to realize a vision, to resolve a problem, and I can te, I can guarantee you that there are approaches that you yourself wouldn’t take.

There are many approaches I wouldn’t take myself either, but that doesn’t mean that what they’re doing is wrong. In my experience as a professional, there’s actually very few cases of absolute right and wrong ways of doing things. If an approach will create the outcomes you need to create, if it handles all the assumptions that need handling, honors, all the constraints that need honoring what’s wrong with it, why would it be bad?

Just because it’s not how you would do it. And if there is a reason that you think someone’s approach wouldn’t reach an outcome, it’s missing a constraint. It’s missing an assumption. That’s what you should talk about, not just an absolute right or wrong. And I think one thing to consider while you yourself, may have once been a strong individual contributor.

The more you move into leadership and get away from just doing things, the less I find that you can actually trust how you once did things. So you definitely don’t wanna make somebody doing something differently than Lee, than you to a problem in and of itself. The second thing I often see as treat as a problem that is not in fact a problem, is treating the absence of a solution as a problem.

And this is insidious, especially in the world of digital and technology products. There are so many packaged solutions out there, and a vested interest from sales teams to make sure you feel that the absence of their solution isn’t itself a problem. And I’ve seen this play out a lot of ways. I, I knew someone that was once trying to build momentum around buying a software package to support and monitor her team’s work.

She basically showed it to me and said, look at all these great reports. My question was, do you need all of that? What are you going to do with that information? Well, we don’t get this information now. So that wasn’t really solving a problem. All she had was an absence of something, these reports, but not a purpose in having them.

Nonetheless, she ended up getting approval to buy it, but to this day, doesn’t use most of it. So the two things, people doing something differently than you and the absence of a solution, neither of those are problems in and of themselves. So let’s move to concept two and talk about what a problem is. How do you recognize when something is a problem?

It’s actually a deep question. In some ways it’s hard to face reality and to prioritize against what you’re seeing. That is engage in the spirit of ongoing problem resolution if you can’t actually decide if something is a problem or not. Something is a problem when it prevents you from reaching your vision.

If something occurs that needs to be overcome, surmounted worked around and so forth to reach your vision, to reach the desired outcomes. It’s a problem. Conversely, if something you perceive as a problem isn’t preventing you from reaching your vision, is it actually a problem? Does it need to be addressed?

In my experience, it does not. You should be focusing your energy elsewhere. This concept gives you a filter to rapidly sort out the things that you simply don’t like from having to be addressed as well as things that others might consider a problem and focus your energy on the few things that really do need addressing because they’re getting in the way of you reaching your vision.

So I’ve spoken in the past about the first core principle of leadership that leaders provide vision. This concept of defining what a problem is, is the big link between vision and problem resolution and why. As a leader, you start with vision. Without reasonable vision, clarity, it’s hard to truly recognize if something is a problem.

In other words, if you don’t know where you’re going, it’s hard to discern if something is actually in the way of getting there. Now, typically I see people needing to embrace this concept, to filter out the noise, to filter out the things that aren’t problems. And you’re probably experiencing this surrounded by lots of so-called problems.

But with a little bit of analysis, you might see that many things you and others are raising aren’t actually in fact preventing you from reaching your vision. But the flip side of this, it’s actually equally important to apply this concept to see a problem in something that you might’ve ignored. I’ll talk about the company Zappos.

When they first started out, they had the vision of being the best at satisfying the shoe buying customers. And in the early days, this was really a heavy focus on the online experience, and they outsourced fulfillment. They didn’t think fulfillment was a problem they had to solve. It was pretty well solved problem in the world.

However, the outcome of that approach was that their customers were not, in fact thrilled or satisfied because the standard fulfillment approach at the time, there were a lot of issues. There were deliveries not coming on time. It was hard to predict when things were gonna show up. And so the actual outcome was that people, not only were they not thrilled and some cases they were dissatisfied in the end, no matter how great the online experience was, people were just receiving shoes.

Which meant that Zappos was not, in fact, truly satisfying the shoe buying customers. So stated, simply Poor, if even typical fulfillment, was preventing Zappos from reaching their vision of being the best. And so it was a problem that they had to take on, and they did. They took fulfillment on themselves.

They’ve since had other solutions, but that change really supported their vision of being the best and drove them to who they are today. And that gets us into the third concept, framing the problem. As an individual contributor, you might look at a problem through the lens of doing what do you need to do to fix something?

Is it being done the right way? As a manager, you might look at a problem through a broader lens of doing, how do you lay out a team to tackle a problem? What does it need to be resolved by? And all that kind of good management stuff. But from a leadership perspective, a problem isn’t about what is or isn’t being done or even how it’s being done.

As a leader, you should view a problem through the lens of achieving and not achieving. Are you achieving the progress, the goals, the outcomes that you’re seeking, or are you not? In other words, when you talk about a problem, you should frame it in one or two ways. By talking about the outcomes you need to see that aren’t happening by talking about outcomes that are happening that you in fact don’t wanna see.

Let’s use a retail chain as an example to, draw this out. Imagine you’re running a retail chain and sales are lagging behind your growth goals and so easy, you think Problem is you just need to get more traffic, get more people into your stores, and so you act on it. You invest in advertising, drive more traffic to your store is great.

And yet your sales don’t increase. So what went wrong in the problem? We talked about we need more people in the store, but that’s a phrase that’s more of a solution. We need more people in the store. It’s not a problem. And in fact, a deeper analysis might uncover several things. Perhaps your advertising is not bringing properly qualified buyers into the store.

You might have a lot of hype, a lot of hoopla and excitement, but no clear value to help potential customers identify themselves. So you’re getting the wrong people in, or perhaps people struggle to find the products they wanna find when they’re in your store and they give up and leave. And if that’s the case, driving more people to the store might not matter, and in fact, create a wave of people that don’t ever wanna come back.

Framing it this way starts giving you a different view of what’s happening and allows you to rethink how to talk about the problem so you can actually better direct the way you solve it. At a high level, you have an outcome you wanna see. An increase in sales and you could further qualify this to think about it, do we want an increase in ticket, the dollars in a particular sale, and or an increase in volume.

But regardless that becomes an outcome. There are also outcomes you didn’t wanna see, and that is more non-buyers than buyers coming to the store and people are not able to find what they need when they’re in the store. Now those negative outcomes that are currently happening could easily be reframed as outcomes that we want to see.

We wanna see more of the right buyers coming to the store. Thinking about that gives us a different and better problem to solve than simply more, maybe we actually need fewer people coming to the store as long as a greater number of them are the right buyers. The second thing, which is people not finding what they need could be reframed as we want it to be easy for customers to buy from you.

This could then drive changes in merchandising and store flow, employee training and so forth. But all of this reframing to center on outcomes helps make it clear and can help you create a bigger impact on your organization, on what you’re trying to accomplish. All organizations face problems. They have challenges, roadblocks, all that kind of stuff.

And sometimes you can feel overwhelmed if you can’t filter through all of that. Sometimes you might even ignore things that should be addressed. So getting good at identifying what is and isn’t a problem and then revamping the way you think and talk about the problems can go a long way to helping you see reality, to prioritizing your efforts to be more effective in reaching resolution.

And the three key concepts to help you get better at this one, be clear on the kinds of things that seems like problems but are not, in fact, problems like things just being done in a different way than you do it or solutions in search of a problem. Two, be clear on what a problem is, and that’s something that gets in the way of reaching your vision, of reaching the outcomes your team is trying to achieve.

In three frame problems in terms of outcomes you want to see but aren’t seen, and outcomes that you’re seeing, but don’t want to see. And with practice applying these three concepts will help you make a very effective team. So I want you to think about how often does organizational muscle memory kick in and just provide solutions disguised as problems or the absence of solutions, and think about what you’re currently treating as a problem that is not, in fact getting in the way of reaching your vision.

How can you apply these three concepts today to reprioritize where your energy and your team’s energy is being spent? Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend if you liked it, and join me next time where I’m gonna talk about the third core principle of leadership, that leaders create more leaders.