I was developing leadership training material for a client. In the course of our discussion, I asked the director of people operations, “What’s the problem we’re trying to solve here?” His response was something along the lines of, “I don’t like using the word ‘problem’.”
Personally, I think words matter. So if he preferred ‘challenges’ or ‘opportunities’ or whatever, cool. Let’s arrive at some verbiage you’re comfortable with. But what I found out was that it wasn’t just word choice. He didn’t care for the idea that anything non-positive was occurring. That there might be something flawed about the company.
I’ll…uh..just tell you that’s not a healthy mindset.
As it happens, I’m a fan of problems. Not as in, “Wow it’s great to see your org riddle with imperfections.” Rather, recognizing we’re facing a disparity between our expectations and reality. To put a finer point on it, if we’ve identified a people problem, that’s great. We have a chance to fix it, and that makes things better for our people. And I’m always happy to see the employee experience get better.
Another positive in recognizing a problem is that we spotted it at all. There are plenty of unknown unknowns out there…things that are wrong that we don’t even see. If we see something, though, that means there’s at least some part of our operation where we’ve effectively deployed sensors. If we hear about more than one team member looking for work elsewhere because our compensation isn’t competitive, that’s good to know. We can do something about that. If, however, we’re hemorrhaging folks and don’t know why, that’s bad. In the both cases we have a problem. In the former we at least know what it is. And we have some sort of method for picking up on it. Leadership roundtable, effective 1:1s, someone in people ops has built rapport and respect…something is working.
In that example, though – retention is bad due to compensation – it’s important to understand the problem. Is it salary? Is it lack of equity? Overall compensation package? Only amongst senior folks? Only engineers? People under one certain manager? Don’t leap to a solution without a really clear picture of the problem. In fact, here’s a guideline I use…
A 50% solution to a 100% understood problem is better than a 100% solution to a 50% understood problem
and I wish I could remember where I picked this up so I could attribute that genius properly
You can hop in a car and drive very quickly in the wrong direction. You really, really don’t want to do that with people problems. And in case you’re wondering, I’ll leave you with another quote a friend of mine shared years back…”every business problem is a people problem.”