How to solve frustrating issues at work

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This week is the third instalment of our five-part series on strategic leadership, based on the modules in You Don't Need An MBA: Leadership Lessons that Cut Through the Crap.

A personal note

I used to think I was such a hero. (Truthfully, I often still do.) In my childhood, I learned that the only person I could ever truly depend on was me. My mother was unpredictable, my family was fractured and anyone I ever came to depend on in the years that followed – government agencies, foster families, relationships and friends – inevitably let me down. Those deeply embedded patterns have followed me through my life and career in unhelpful ways, becoming a reinforcing story that I perpetuate without realising it.?

Every time someone else dropped the ball, I’d swoop in and save the day. I worked more hours, did more stuff and ticked more boxes than anyone else. If you want something done right, you do it yourself… right??

Wrong. You can’t be trusted alone. The hero model always starts off great – for bootstrappers, self-made people and start-ups?especially – but once you get through the initial madness, it becomes a risky strategy. Heroes get hooked on the buzz and start to experience cognitive dissonance. We don’t see the balls we’re dropping, the risks we’re taking or the limitations of our efforts. When you’re the white knight that saves the day, always pulling off the impossible, you start to believe in and rely on the fairytale. Over time, like my fear of trusting others, it becomes a story that’s hard to shift – and it holds us back.?

If we can’t stop thinking of ourselves as irreplaceable, we get stuck. Most leaders, by virtue of promotion or realisation, start to figure that out eventually, so they learn to delegate, becoming people leaders. This is a great start. When heroes redirect their energy into leading people, they reduce the single point of risk and spread it more thinly across a team. More points of failure, sure, but more diversification.?The magic is when we take the people out of the equation, assuming that blame won't get us far and that people are trying their best. When we do that, we zoom out to look at our environment and ask trickier questions - is the right thing the easy thing? What is making it hard for people to do well? How could we shift that.

Because here's the thing: while heroes might beat the odds, systems change them.?

Systems leaders are different

How much do you know about Reed Hastings? Anything??

…What about Netflix?

Reed Hastings, the founding CEO of Netflix, isn’t an amazing leader because he’s a hero, but because he built an powerful and unique system for content and video streaming. Netflix changed the way people experience entertainment, the way content is created and, you could argue, the way people live.

Examples of systems leaders are rife throughout history, but sometimes we confuse them with heroes. Nelson Mandela isn’t a hero because he worked so hard, but because he instigated the systems change that overturned apartheid. Richard Branson isn’t a hero because he’s at work longer than anyone else or hires the best people, but because he developed systems that changed the way industries work – from music production to air travel.

Systems leaders see differently. They focus on how all the puzzle pieces fit together and join them up in a unique way.?When we think in systems, how much we know, how hard we work and how good our people are become less important. Systems help us create new ways of thinking and working the default.

Systems leaders set up their environment to maximise success, even when people are fallible.?

Build a better house

Imagine trying to train a horse to run faster by teaching each of its legs to perform more efficiently. Dumb, right? Yet, decades after Michael Ballé first used this analogy in his book Managing with Systems Thinking, we continue to design organisations that do exactly that. The result is an environment that produces less than the sum of its five best-practice parts.

The core parts of a system differ depending on the type and size of your organisation, but usually include functions such as communication, finance, customer service, people and culture, delivery and operations. All of these parts have their own ‘work’ – the inputs they need to do a good job and the outputs they deliver. These are essential components for the system to function, but on their own they are insufficient, or even irrelevant.?

Your organisation is not the sum of its interconnected parts. It is the product of the relationships between those parts. Improving each part separately does not guarantee the improvement of the performance of the whole – in fact, it can do the opposite. As Draper L Kauffman says, dividing a cow in half does not give us two smaller cows:?

You may end up with a lot of hamburger, but the essential nature of ‘cow’ – a living system capable, among other things, of turning grass into milk – then would be lost. A system functions as a ‘whole’. Its behavior depends on its entire structure and not just on adding up the behavior of its different pieces.

Most organisational problems are better solved somewhere other than where they appear. A systems view focuses on relationships. The architect knows this clearly, drawing the house first, then the rooms. Rooms are only improved in ways that enhance the house. If the room can be made worse to make the whole house better, it will be.?

Signs you need to tackle your systems?

• You keep finding the same problems in different places.?
• Performance depends on the efforts of individuals.?
• Things take longer or feel harder than they should.?

How to take a systems view

You don’t need complicated software or an expensive consultant to diagnose systems issues; you just need to listen to the people who are held back by them. Most workplaces make a token effort to do so via their annual engagement survey, but unless the results come out positive the feedback is minimised or disregarded. Even when people accurately and consistently pinpoint the things that make their jobs hard, they get ignored – or, worse, accused of whinging or failing to perform. This is a mistake.

Study after study shows that while employees desperately want to be productive, their workplace is getting in the way. The average organisation loses more than a day a week to undetected organisational drag. Systems leaders are attuned to this and rather than blaming others, they listen, spot the themes and join the dots.?

We need to ask three critical questions to diagnose systems:

1. Why??Ask this 3-5x to establish the true root cause of your frustrating problems. You know you've struck gold when you hit on an issue that doesn't just have one flow-on effect, but affects multiple parts of the business.
2. So What? Not all problems need solving. Unless you're clear on the key risks and consequences, and what you're really trying to change, there's no use taking action.
3. Is it, though? Systems leaders don't take much at face value. Instead, they dig through another layer, examining the assumptions that sit underneath the answers to all of our ‘whys’ and ‘so whats’. Are we trying to do the wrong thing right? Are we trying to uphold outdated or irrelevant thinking or processes?

When in doubt, fix a connection

Systems thinking can feel complicated and overwhelming once we start digging in. There's no such thing as a single crime, and when we've started to unearth all of the impacts and issues inside our workplace, it would be easy to get discouraged. Odds are, you don't have the mandate, budget or capacity to fix everything.

That's OK.

The truth is, having mandate and budget can be a handicap. It makes it possible to try and purchase an off-the-shelf solution or throw money and people at an already broken system. This is about as useful as pouring water through a sieve.

Instead, next time you're faced with a tricky problem between the different parts of your system, don't try to fix the parts. Look at the connection between at least two of them and fix that instead. It could be something as simple as aligning file management between teams, changing communication or shifting deadlines to work more smoothly. These interventions are faster, more effective, and generally more sustaining.

Down with siloes

Systems are the skill of the future. The old, siloed model of leadership is dying an ugly death and your capacity to see the big picture, get your ego out of it and make your work run more smoothly will make all the difference to your future success and career.

For more on the five key skills of a strategic leader, make sure you're subscribed to Not An MBA weekly, to get the next instalments in this series. Even better, check out the?Alicia McKay Academy , where you can take a FREE?mini-naMBA ?and boost your skills right away!