How would you characterise your mindset? Are you problem-focused or solutions-focused? Do you manage to maintain a strategic, long term perspective, or do you get sucked into operational fixing? The choices you make when you decide to approach your work with a strategic solutions mindset are fundamentally important. They directly shape the results you get and inform where you put your efforts. Like the Chess Grand Master, you’ll be better placed studying end games than perfecting your opening moves!
The Challenge
As a leadership coach I work with really capable people who already have the foundations of a solutions mindset in place. They’ve worked out the difference between a strategic approach and a tactical, operational one. Their solutions-orientation is strong; under ideal circumstances their internal compass points them in the right direction. But, they get knocked off course by what goes on around them, dragged down into operational, often problem-focused, activity. Recently, we’ve identified four culprits which deflect my clients from retaining their strategic solutions mindset.
The Main Offenders
Top of the list is other people’s labelling of issues as urgent, hotly followed by my clients’ predisposition to be responsive to this. This is a double bind as the more responsive these leaders become, the greater the payback for their colleagues, who then believe that their view of urgent is accurate and continue to send emails with red flags! Urgency of tone, particularly when the request comes from someone more senior, stimulates the Fix It! response. Appropriate for a junior colleague working tactically, it’s a major distraction for a senior manager whose real responsibility is strategic oversight.
In third place on the podium is people’s lack of responsibility, accountability and ownership. This is often a cultural issue. Where individuals are not empowered, they are unlikely to assume the mantle of accountability and responsibility readily. If they are micro-managed, their work pored over and frequently criticized, and if mistakes are seen as failure rather than learning opportunities, their ownership of their part of the process is likely to be weak. In this situation, even the most determined of strategic thinkers risks getting swamped by the need to support colleagues, on a reactive basis, at an operational level.
Finally, and possibly underpinning all of the top three issues, is the lack of a clear process for problem resolution. The right problem solving tools will help you identify weaknesses, understand their causes and develop solutions. But tools only help when they’re joined up and when they’re not, you end up stuck in endless cycles of analysis! Knowing when enough is enough is one of the key skills of strategic, solutions-focussed leaders.
Collaborative wisdom
Together we’ve come up with 10 things that you can do to strengthen your strategic solutions mindset:
- Be present and in the moment; don’t prioritise other people’s messages, for example by looking at your phone during meetings.
- Reflect before you respond. Twenty seconds is all it takes to NOT adopt someone else’s mindset.
- Stay curious – is it urgent or important or both (or neither)?
- Be mindful about who a request comes from. Their seniority doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right!
- Call out the Urgent Merchants. If EVERYTHING is urgent then NOTHING will be prioritized.
- Remember, you are an enabler of solutions, not the fixer.
- Trust your team!
- Ask, do we have a clear process that everyone understands for analyzing the problem?
- Be curious – why are we STILL talking about this?
- Role model ownership and accountability, take responsibility not throwing blame!
To conclude
You don’t have to be a Grand Master of chess to retain your strategic, solutions-focus, but these tips should maximise your chances of playing the long game! If you’d like a hand with your strategic thinking, please do get in touch. In less than the time it takes to make a move in chess, you can decide whether coaching is the support you need.