Why You're About To Solve The Wrong Problem

**Mickey Anderson** (0:00)
The next decade isn't going to reward quick fixes. It's going to reward the companies that build their foundation strong so that they can support the growth that they want, and not scramble and throw headcount resources and cool technology onto the company in hopes for speed, but end up with chaos instead.
The most expensive moment in a fast moving business is when your team stops describing a problem and starts solving it before anyone's agreed on what the problem actually is. If you're a founder, you know this one. Every week, your leaders bring you problems and propose solutions. Each one's describing something real, each one is suggesting a fix, and the problem each of them describes isn't quite matching up. Here's the thing almost no one is naming. Most of what's hitting your desk is a symptom. The real cause sits one level deeper, and nobody on the team has named it yet. In the next 20 minutes, I'm going to show you why the leaders who can resist the pull to solve before they diagnose, are the ones building businesses that last. Every week, capable leaders are coming to you, and every business owner feels this, with problems and solutions and options. And it can be overwhelming because you're looking at the organization from a whole, and each one of these leaders is only seeing a sliver of what's actually happening, and their perspective is somewhat siloed. And then when you look at the different problems that are coming up and solutions proposed, they don't really match or connect. And so how do you as a leader understand what's symptoms, what's problem, and how do we choose the solution to move forward with? Now, most of what's hitting your desk is actually symptom. Yes, they're problems, but they're really a symptom of something deeper. And most of the time, when one leader in one function is flagging a problem, it's also happening across the organization in different ways. Just you're sharing it with different words and experiences and emotion. And it's hard to find the pattern or the throughway that connects it all together and allows you as a leader to find the root cause, address it effectively and efficiently, and move forward with your company as a whole. Now, the leaders aren't wrong. They are seeing accurate problems. They are suggesting good solutions from their perspective. The problem is when you choose one, you risk losing political capital because you're choosing one solution over another. And you're not seeing the connecting dots between functions and how the organization works as a whole. Usually, the symptoms that you're flagging and addressing first and jumping to solutions for are tied to data, churn, customer turnover, revenue, sales, et cetera. Because those you can see in your books, clearly, there's financial data tied to it. But a lot of the time, that's a later symptom coming up, showing you that there's a deeper problem even in those quiet functions. So what you end up doing is spending six months on a solution that might solve one tiny problem or symptom, but leaves gaps and others continue to bubble up. And you end up seeing six months down the road, that you really haven't addressed the problem. And although you've put a band-aid on that bleeding artery, now blood is popping up everywhere else. So how do we get to the root cause? And how do you identify what's the difference between a symptom and the root cause or the true problem? Let me give you an example. I worked with a small boutique accounting firm, and they were losing CPAs faster than they could hire them. They had a huge retention problem, and exit interviews with their CPAs were flagging that they were all choosing bigger name firms. They wanted something on their resume that could show they'd made it. And that's really hard to compete with as a small boutique firm. They were assuming that prestige and compensation were the problem. They couldn't meet the same compensation as the big firms, and there really wasn't any authority or prestige tied to their boutique name. Their proposed solutions were addressing compensation, signing bonuses, and a recruiting refresh, all of which sound like smart, logical solutions. But after we dug in, we found there was a different problem underneath it all. The CPAs were leaving and choosing bigger firms really because there was a solidified career path for them. They could see a future where they could move up within a company. And within this boutique firm, the principals owned all of the clients. There was no clear path for them to move up within the organization. And so a comp refresh, signing bonuses, and a recruitment refresh were not going to address the problem. There were going to be expensive solutions that didn't actually help. What we found was creating a clear career path and giving opportunities to move within the company, even talking about how we were working on creating new opportunities within the company changed the dynamic in both recruitment and retention, allowing us to spend less money, allowing us to create longer retention with our CPAs, and recruiting increased incredibly. Now, it's really easy to jump to solutions. The market tells you to slap a fix on things faster than you can believe. Every vendor demo, every new tech solution, every consultant, every framework wants to sell you a solution, but they skip the most important part, that true diagnosis. Now, the hardest part is being able to identify the root cause. And you don't need a methodology for this. You just need to slow down to speed up. Instead of asking each of your functional leaders or leaders within the organization, to bring their problems and solutions forward, you need to take those onto the table and start to really look at the patterns and listen in on the functions or departments that are quiet on the matter, because they usually are feeling the same thing. They're just not shouting at it, and there's no financial data necessarily tied to it to make it pop up on your screen. So the key is really to spend time on the patterns, looking at overall how these things connect together, what the symptoms are really pointing to, not just a hand-off problem, not just a recruitment problem or a retention problem, but is there a deeper connective issue that's causing this friction within your organization? And usually there is, and usually the fix is way less expensive or time-consuming than slapping on a new solution onto those symptoms. The next step is to listen to each function, and make sure that you're really listening to those quiet functions just as much, if not more, than the loudest functions. They usually have insights that are not being shared, and problems, symptoms, and solutions that haven't been considered. The next is to get everyone together, and really have them hash it out together. What the problem looks like from each department, where there's connective issues, how it's crossing departments, how communication, collaboration, information and data is all coming into the picture, so you can get a clear, visible picture from the entire organization, not just from your perspective, but from theirs as well, all together so they can hear from each other and start to connect the dots with you. Then we want to connect to data. Wherever there's data, that allows us to take the emotion out of it. And it's not always necessarily the loudest data, things like revenue or churn. Sometimes it's capacity. Sometimes it's you have a department that is absolutely slammed, that's not flagging the same issues or being as loud as other departments. They're focused on the work, but they are feeling it. And solving this deeper rooted problem could unlock some capacity issues within that department as well. Next is to look at your leadership team. What are you seeing from the outside? What symptoms do you see? What themes or trends do you see? It's really a big section of this is collecting data and information from all of the stakeholders, that you have a holistic view of what's happening on the surface, what's happening underneath. Usually, there's a gap between what leadership sees, what the functional heads or the departments are seeing.