A Different Look at Addressing Organizational Problems
Jamie Flinchbaugh, founder of JFlinch and author or “People Solve Problems; The Power of Every Person, Every Daym Every Problem.”
Solving problems is not as exclusive to the process as many organizational leaders believe, says one founder. Instead, it’s in a different approach to leadership and people potential and development.
Jamie Flinchbaugh is the founder of JFlinch and and author of “People Solve Problems; The Power of Every Person, Every Day, Every Problem.”
Flinchbaugh was motivated to write the book because he saw a gap between what was offered in the market and what was needed in regards to fresh, more useful insights and approaches.
“There are numerous books on problem solving, and many organizations have training courses on problem solving. There is nothing wrong with any of that,” he says. “However, when leaders see that their people aren’t even solving problems in a structured way, or aren’t doing it well, they often return right back to training and more training. The training we have could always be better, and there’s nothing wrong with doing more of it, but it doesn’t really address why teams struggle.”
He recognizes the reasons for those shortcomings from professional experience and observations and explains it with an example.
“Teams struggle because of the culture and behaviors surrounding problem solving, such as taking the initiative,” Flinchbaugh says.
“Consider if a gym trainer taught you how to properly use the equipment; that’s your problem-solving training. However, your real challenge is getting to the gym in the first place. That’s what this book is for. It’s for all the things that wrap around problem solving that make us more effective: the capabilities, culture, coaching, and leadership.”
Problems can baffle and frustrate. Decision-makers often don’t know exactly how to best think and respond to that difficulty or they do yet they don’t proceed wisely. Flinchbaugh knows this mental processing too and empathizes with it and analyzes how it can look for people and organizations.
"Unexpected problems stop you dead in your tracks -- and this one seems impossible to solve. Yes, major hurdles can be disheartening and they're often unavoidable. But the way you engage with and think about problems directly influences your ability to solve them,” he has written. Learning how to absorb that emotion and frame how we interpret it to move through the problem-solving process can be a challenge.
“For starters, it helps to try to make problems smaller,” Flinchbaugh recommends. “For example, you hear a lot about staffing issues in organizations today. That’s overwhelming. But your hiring problem, your retention problem, and your employee utilization problem are all separate problems, and that’s still too big. Keep breaking problems down and making them smaller.”
The benefit? Managing what is possible and not stalling out and becoming helpless to what doesn’t offer full autonomy.
“This allows one of the other keys, which is ignoring the stuff that you cannot control. This is where we become a victim. We can’t control the traffic, the accidents, the weather. We can control what time we leave, whether we use traffic data, and how we drive. For every ounce of energy that we put into the factors we cannot do anything about, it steals energy from the stuff we can either control or influence. Don’t be a victim,” Flinchbaugh says.
He’s not overpromising on this mindset and practice either. He does suggest why it’s a more helpful approach.
“You may not always get the results that you want. But you can control the process of how you face the problems.”
Certain behaviors and principles can help drive habits and more successful dissection and solving of challenges. He talks about two that immediately come to mind.
“There are several that I outline in the book, so I can’t articulate all of them but there are behaviors that are what happens before problem solving even begins,” Flinchbaugh says.
“These include behaviors such as initiative and transparency. Initiative is like getting in your car and going to the gym, to return to an earlier theme. Initiative is when you’re faced with lots of stuff going on with a full meeting schedule and a full inbox, but you still decide to carve out time to get problem solving moving. That’s initiative, and is tremendously valuable. Transparency is about making problems visible and not hiding them. We cannot solve what we cannot see. Making problems visible is a gift to the organization.”
When engaged in analyzing and working towards overcoming problems, certain thinking and actions become necessary and valuable.
“There are also behaviors that are really important during problem solving. One of my favorites is to learn deliberately,” Flinchbaugh says. “That means that we treat all problem solving with the spirit of curiosity and humility. We seek to hold our assumptions lightly, test whenever we can, and be willing to backtrack based on what we learned along the way. If you already knew what you needed to know, you wouldn’t really need to be doing problem solving.”
Coaching is an undervalued core value and action in leadership and organizations. Coaching is communication as much as it is thinking and actions. It can aid greatly in preventing and solving difficulties and Flinchbaugh is a believer in it, if conducted in a specific manner.
“I think the most useful aspect of coaching is being explicit and honest about it. Too often I observe people trying to stealth coach,” he laments, explaining what that means, “They are trying to coach without the other person knowing they are being coached. This is about as useful as yelling instructions from the stands at a sporting event. The other person doesn’t even know why they should listen to you, let alone being prepared to do so.”
What he recommends instead is direct communication about it that creates clarity for all involved.
“Coaching is most effective when it is a clear understanding between both parties, that one is the coach. This is useful for both parties,” Flinchbaugh says. “For the coachee, they know what to expect. For the coach, they also know what kind of communication is expected.”
He explains more about why this is crucial, replacing the aforementioned stealth coaching.
“When you commit to being in a coaching conversation, you don’t muddle your coaching with managing, teaching, advocacy, misdirection and everything else that will dilute and confuse your efforts,” Flinchbaugh says.
Problem-solving statements are communication. Learning to become sufficiently skilled, and ideally, a master at crafting effective problem statements, and solving the correct problems identified and addressed is not natural. It takes awareness, focus, detail and skill.
“First, you are absolutely right that problem statements are communication. They set direction and motion just with our words. They create context for engagement, investigation and creativity,” Flinchbaugh says. “Without problem statements, ideas are just out there floating around looking for a reason to exist.”
He explains how he views it.
“Mastery of the right problem requires some intuition, but that intuition can be cultivated. It starts with considering your problem statement, always written in pencil. As you proceed through problem solving, keep returning to the problem statement and challenge yourself or the team about whether it's still the right problem statement,” Flinchbaugh advises and challenges. “It’s not about abandoning it, but looking at it critically and being flexible to modify it.”
He has another recommendation to accompany it.
“Also, socialize your problem statements,” Flinchbaugh says. “You still own it, but invite people to challenge your thinking and framing of the problem.”
The reason being is that, “They might see it from a different perspective. If you can combine their perspective with yours and make the problem statement better, you will be honing your lens for how to see, and communicate effective problem statements.”
Moving the process forward successfully requires people-centric capabilities, Flinchbaugh contends. That appears to be a mystery to some organizations, coming at great expense.
“For an entire large company to adopt this approach is pretty uncommon,” he’s discovered, offering what he usually recognizes. “Company-wide, it is much easier to deploy programs and tools rather than cultures and capabilities. The programmatic side takes over from the organic side. But at a team level, there are many, many leaders who take on this perspective and lead their teams.”
He knows, however, what is more possible than realized and more beneficial than often accomplished.
“Any leader that decides to focus on their team, their culture, and their capabilities, and provides them what they need to successfully engage in the problems in front of them, can make a real difference,” Flinchbaugh asserts, adding what he sees is part of his mission.
“I personally hope to inspire and coach leaders down this path. This requires a longer-term view and a (more) serious commitment than just sending people to training, but the payoff for resilient performance is absolutely worth the leader's efforts.”
