BRX Pro Tip: The Problem is the Problem
Stone Payton: And we’re back with Business RadioX Pro Tips, Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you. Lee, let’s talk a little bit about solving the problem, whether it’s identifying the root cause or the person assigning roles and activities to get the problem solved. What’s your take these days on attacking problems?
Lee Kantor: This is something that came up, you know, I’ve been interviewing so many coaches lately and hearing so many different types of coaching and ways to coach. And one of the ideas that I ran across was this idea of narrative therapy. And the heart of narrative therapy is the belief that the person is not the problem. The problem is the problem.
Lee Kantor: And I think that’s something that translates extremely well to business as well. Because when something goes wrong, it’s easy to blame the person, the customer, the vendor, yourself. And blaming somebody for anything really doesn’t solve anything. So, it’s important to be able to separate the person from the problem and really dive into and get curious about what actually is happening. Maybe the process isn’t clear. Maybe the expectations weren’t communicated properly. And to me, communication is usually at the heart of most problems. Maybe the person didn’t have all of the tools they needed in order to execute, and that’s what the problem was.
Lee Kantor: So today, my challenge to you is that just pick one problem you’ve been frustrated with, and remove the human being’s name from the problem and just focus on the problem itself. And dig into that and see if you can work on fixing the problem and not the person.
