Seth Dobbs (he/him): How well does your organization rally around problems? Do they bury their heads in the sand? Are you all thrown off by the unexpected or are you overwhelmed by there being just too many problems and feel like you might never be able to dig yourself free? Hi, I am 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 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. The step we’re gonna take today involves the second of the three core principles of leadership that leaders resolve problems, and specifically I’m gonna talk about how this principle helps create effective organizations and why that’s pretty important.

But before I go too far, I want to acknowledge that problem resolution is a vast topic. So for now, I just wanna set up future discussions by talking about the relationship between problem resolution and healthy, effective organizations. And this is important because all organizations, teams, whatever, have problems, challenges, whatever other words you might want to use.

And I don’t think that the measure of an organization is an absence of problems, but rather how well they face the inevitable. And there are lots of ways an organization can become ineffective or at least lots of causes. I think there tends to be some similar patterns, though you’re not getting the desired results.

You’re unable to create the outcomes you wanna create, or maybe you’re even seeing outcomes that you did not wanna create. I’m sure you’ve seen examples of these kinds of things. I think it feels unavoidable at times. So years ago, a friend of mine, Kavitha, worked for an event planning and management services company, a really cool company.

They started doing, their startup was with corporate events, picnics, celebrations, handling, annual full company get togethers and things like that. It was really cool. They handled kind of everything. They would find venues and procure them. They would handle staffing for the events, the catering.

They could manage the registration. They could even get guest speakers if that was desired. And they did a really fabulous job at this. They had a solid reputation in their market. They had a really good roster of repeat business for quarterly and annual single day events, and typically ranging from, a hundred to 500 attendees.

These events ran like clockwork and they were fun and in general, attendees just found it very positive, great experiences. Because of that, like I said, they had a lot of repeat customers and some of those customers started to grow, so my friend’s company started having new opportunities. Because of some of that growth.

They were finding themselves getting opportunities now for multi-day events, for events that started having upwards of a thousand or maybe even more attendees. And so as more of that sold, they started finding other opportunities with the senior management of some of those clients to do new things.

Some of the management were involved in fundraising, so my friend’s company started getting into opportunities to plan and manage fundraising events or even professional society type events and meetings. The growth was astonishing, but at the same time, something didn’t seem quite right. My friend Kavitha, who worked in finance, couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but it felt to her, like while there was still some revenue growth, the pace of it was changing.

So they had bimonthly business reviews, and in the process of attending those, she started realizing there was an emerging pattern. And that was that their NPS was starting to drop. An NPS or a Net promoter score is a measure based on customers rating, how likely they are to recommend you to someone else.

Said another way the score can be seen as a rough indicator of customer sentiment. And in this company’s case, it was starting to indicate that their customers were thinking less of them over time. Now, the first couple times they saw the month, over month drops. They had a lot of reasons for it. They’d say things like, well, such and such that that client is a tough grader.

You know how he is. Or, you know, at this last event, there was this one thing that happened and we’re just getting some bad scores because of that. And so the NPS continued to drop. And more reasons were found and given to not actually change anything. In fact, at some point there was talk of change, but of changing the way they calculated NPS to factor out the so-called difficult customers, which essentially means changing the way they were collecting data to tell them something other than what was actually happening.

They were being really good at finding reasons to not change their course in the face of evidence that would tell them otherwise. Now, my friend did try to raise questions about this because in part, they were starting to see erosion of revenue, starting to see misses and contraction in sales. However, she told me she felt the leadership didn’t really like her asking those questions.

It was kind of a super positive place, the nature of running fun events, everyone had a lot of high energy and I think she felt that, they didn’t appreciate her questioning some of the stuff. And so eventually they actually stopped talking about NPS altogether. Now, of course, that didn’t actually stop the net promoter scores from going down.

It just meant that they stopped thinking about it. Unfortunately, they had to keep looking at revenue. They couldn’t ignore it, and their growth was eroding to the point that they were actually missing key sales numbers. And this brings us to the principle leaders resolve problems. This doesn’t mean that you fix everything that comes your way as a leader, but it’s about ensuring that your team is in, in an environment that can effectively deal with the unexpected or the undesired.

This is essential to good leadership skills. Your team’s gonna struggle to be successful if you can’t get a handle on, on, on doing this, and that’s because problem resolution is the effective principle. Without having that drive to problem resolution, it is hard for an organization to be effective. This is a drive that ensures that you and the people you lead can collectively come together, handle adversity, remain effectively focused on the future, on getting to the right results.

Now fostering continual problem resolution in an organization involves two key factors. One, a willingness to face reality, and two, the ability to consistently prioritize. Now it is hard to overstate how essential facing reality is to problem resolution and to having a healthy, effective organization.

It’s sometimes challenging, and I get that it’s a little bit of human nature. Many of us are simply wired to view the world the way we wanna see it. Sometimes even in spite of evidence to the contrary, sometimes we fear that being negative might create negative results. This attitude can also stem from blame.

Throwing cultures from having been punished by bringing up problems and issues from a fear of seeming inept by recognizing perhaps mistakes in your own team or fear of seeming negative, all that kind of stuff. There are many reasons individuals and teams don’t wanna face reality, but you have to face reality eventually.

And you have to be able to prioritize how you deal with the things that come up. You really need that. That’s really important to how, how do you handle the problems that truly need handling? But if your head is in the sand, if you refuse to see even that the problems exist, you’re never gonna get to prioritization.

So let’s dig into this. Kavita’s company really struggled with facing reality. Now I don’t have the detailed data. I didn’t work there. I know correlation isn’t causation, but the timing and size of the erosion of NPS and of revenue are likely related. So what if instead of the course they took, what if after the first few business reviews, the team was actually willing to recognize the NPS pattern?

What could they have done differently if in, instead of assuming there’s just a few difficult customers, what if they asked themselves if that was really the case? Did the data truly indicate a pattern that needed deeper thought and be clear? NPS isn’t the cause of reduced revenue to lead indicator that could have driven the team to ask other difficult questions.

In other words. There’s likely one or more problems going on at that time in the organization. Something might have been going on in their operations, their planning, how they were executing events. So what if after several declines in their net promoter score, they decided to dig into this. They could have found any number of things they might have learned that they weren’t able to hire fast enough for that explosive growth.

And so they had event planners and organizers and other people on the ground running things that were tired and cranky from being overused and not capable of creating a great experience at the events. Or maybe they would’ve learned that the diversification they were experiencing required getting different skills and they weren’t getting enough of the right mix.

So they had the wrong people in positions of planning or executing. Or maybe they could have learned that their partner management group had decided to switch food vendors to reduce costs. And that resulted in a decrease in quality and people being disappointed with the events ’cause the food wasn’t any good.

Or maybe a new key event runner was just harsh and mean to attendees. Early on, any of those could have been easily corrected, but instead they let things get progressively worse. By refusing to face reality, they couldn’t resolve problems to get them back on track and after time they’re gonna become much, much harder to correct.

Now, to be fair, I don’t know if any of those hi hypotheses are right because my friend Kho moved on from that organization. But the important thing is that problem resolution is about embracing a team spirit of working through challenges together. And I find that in general, people really do wanna try to make things better.

People want to work together to do something good, to create something better. And so if you do a good job of fostering a positive environment in which your team can comfortably talk about the issues of the day, you might just find yourself not only getting a good view of reality, possibly seeing so many problems, you get overwhelmed.

And that’s a discussion for a future time. But problems, issues, challenges, roadblocks, whatever euphemism you might use, it’s still something that needs understanding and resolution. And if you can’t face reality, you cannot create a better reality. It’s that simple. So embracing a spirit of problem resolution makes your team so much more effective and so much more healthy because you’re all working together to overcome difficulty and create something better.

So, closing out, what do you think is preventing your team from raising a hand and pointing out problems? What’s preventing you from addressing them? When the team does raise a hand. What can you do today to start changing that culture, building trust, doing the things needed to create this environment of problem resolution.

Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend if you liked it, and join me next time where I’ll talk more about how big problems start small