The obvious solution — may not be obvious!
In her post, she asked a great question,
What can business leaders do to change the perception?
I wish to be transparent! hence let me share my first impression of this post. While I was browsing my LinkedIn feed, this post featured and I told myself — yet another post where corporate leaders are looked down upon and thought that the obvious solution is not to add more horses but to fill the puddle with some soil so it is firm enough and one horse can still pull it out, while fixing the problem forever, since the path can be used again.
However today being a weekend, I paid close attention when this post popped up again. I was excited and amazed by the question it was posted with.
Why is the question so apt?
The question is great because the cartoon itself is very judgemental and unless the perception of the leaders is changed, people will continue to look at such cartoons and laugh at the corporate or demean them. Forgetting that respected JRD was a corporate leader!
The cartoon is depicting a problem & declaring that adding more people is the obvious solution. However, that is a big mumbo jumbo!
Let me ask a few “Obvious” questions.
What if the horses you add, go in different directions?
What if the horse you add becomes sick and the existing horse has to pull the cart and the new horse?
What if the new horse is costing you the same amount, you were to make by selling everything you had in the cart?
What if there is a bigger puddle waiting for you ahead?
What is the obvious answer now?
Let me share a few suggestions for the leaders of today on how to change the perception.
While working on any project or team, when we face a problem then the level of effort or the amount of work is increased. This is why everyone in the team is required to work more and if it continues for a prolonged time then everyone in the team faces burnout. This causes them to start feeling that adding more resources is the obvious solution and declares that the leadership is not listening or is incompetent and over time this builds a reputation.
Hence —
Be connected: As a leader, you cannot be miles away from the problem and try to solve it by having a bird’s-eye view. You need to be able to understand the details and the challenges the team members are facing. Unless you know exactly what the issue is, you will only band-aid it or worse case, you may add more problems to it.
Solutioning with the team vs Solutioning for the team: It is inherent that people tend to feel that they know it all and try to impose solutions. I propose inviting team members to the brainstorming sessions and including them in the process. Since they are the ones who face the problem first hand, they will have some amazing ideas, all you have to do is to curate.
Be Creative: Think out of the box, one of the trivial issues is workload distribution and this becomes an addon admin task for most of the team members, however, this can be offloaded to an automation engine. You can build an algorithm and let the engine distribute the work equally among the workforce — one task less. Templatizing your email could add to efficiency. Let me share a real story
My Friend Krishna, when he joined the team which I was part of. He was given the task of answering chat queries, it was expected that every chat engineer can multi-task and handle 3 chats at a time. I was surprised at how he used a simple tool (Autotext)to make it look a cakewalk — he configured an Auto text, which would allow him to type short cuts and full sentences would appear on the chat reply and then he would just hit enter. This then became the favorite tool for all the chat team members — they were able to configure a lot of responses, and the productivity actually increased.
Though some of us wanted to slit his throat, which is a story for another day.
Modernize: There are a plethora of tools available and today companies exist only to enable large enterprises to integrate their solution with others. Every cloud-based product has a market place and you could add a plugin to make a lot of tasks easy. Do you still need your team to work with excel and pivots? The time to change has long gone, you got to catch up.
Instead of adding more people to answer customer queries, look at AI/ML-based chatbots. If your escalation rates are high, doesn't mean you need more people or more training — invest in a customer sentiment analysis tool that could predict escalations & let you solve it before it explodes and adds pressure or more workload.
Leverage the data that you already have about your customer and predict the behavior, you don't need an army of renewal reps to manually reach out to everyone. Understand what your customer needs based on their usage and enhance or add those features.
Act with a sense of urgency: One of the major issues I have seen with a lot of teams and their leader is the time spent on analyzing the data and seeking approval for implementing the solution. This adds a lot of agony for the team and makes them feel unheard. Once you know the solution, act with a sense of urgency, and show the progress and what you are doing to solve it. When the team knows that there are steps being taken, you will be amazed at how they respond to the increased call of duty!
Over Communicate: This is the key, if you are waiting to give a big surprise — chances are that you won't have the audience to witness your surprise. Hence it's critical to keep everyone aware of the progress. People want to know what is being done to solve their issues and if it's taking time what are the roadblocks, at times they offer to help & remove the roadblock!
In the end, I urge every leader to practice these actions so much that it becomes your muscle memory. Since every leader touches and influences many lives and it's always fulfilling to do good.
