Nurturing Problem-Solving Skills In Our Teammates
Choosing what to eat for breakfast. Picking out what to wear for the day. Charting out a new project. Saying no to a proposal. Our days are full of decisions. Some are small, while others could affect a company’s profit margins or a person’s career trajectory.
As leaders, we have learned to feel comfortable with the process of problem-solving and thoughtfully making decisions when the time comes. However, we may come across team members who need our guidance to do the same. Especially those with what are traditionally referred to as “left-brain,” analytical minds can suffer “analysis paralysis,” where an overload of information or uncertainty can make decision-making impossible.
Here are some ways you, as a leader, can nurture the skill of problem-solving in your employees.
Guide, Don’t Solve
First, it is very important to guide your people toward solving the problem rather than immediately solving it yourself. I know of a team in which one member was struggling to fully understand and utilize the company’s AI programming to its fullest capacity. A more experienced colleague tried to help, but he would simply pull up a chair to the team member’s desk and figure out the issue or use the function himself without fully explaining what he was doing and why. That team member needed someone to support his learning process, not someone to just “fix it.”
If you give a person a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach them to fish, you feed them for a lifetime. This team member needed to be taught more about the program. He needed to be shown training materials or given non-priority work tasks that would give him the freedom to experiment and play around with the programming, learning the ins and outs of the application. Having a colleague fix each specific issue was only providing fish for a day—not teaching him to fish for a lifetime.
Nip Perfectionism In The Bud
Another aspect of nurturing problem-solving is to offer assurances that perfection is unattainable. Too many people are afraid of being wrong. Of course, being wrong about everything is not the goal. However, if the fear of making a bad decision stops a person from making any decisions, then no progress will be made. Talk to your people about this difficulty and explain that you understand and embrace the struggle that is part of the process of decision-making.
One of the best ways we can demonstrate this struggle is to share stories about times we ourselves have experienced difficulties with business issues and then grown from those moments. We can talk about the processes that we used to overcome challenging situations and how they were eventually resolved. And if appropriate, we can invite them to glimpse some challenges that our team or company is currently working through. Talking about struggles, both past and present, can make the conversation commonplace and combat some of the fear that may fester in an indecisive personality.
I have a friend who says that she has no regrets because she always makes the best decisions with the information she has at the time; I think that way of thinking fosters confidence in the problem-solving process.
Encourage Collaboration
Lastly, I recommend fostering collaboration in problem-solving. If someone is having a rough time in a project or wrestling with a decision, they are much more likely to overcome those challenges in a collaborative environment. A company culture that encourages teammates to approach others with challenges and ask for collaborative thinking sessions to brainstorm solutions is ideal.
Several people recognizing a struggle and working together to overcome it will help a person see that their struggle is valid. Also, collaborative thinking will hopefully provide several creative solutions and cut down on the time it would have taken to solve an issue if it were just one person.
Final Thoughts
Cultivating our team’s ability to face multifaceted obstacles with confidence is beneficial for everyone. When we nurture resourcefulness and independent thinking, we can trust in our team’s capacity to grapple with any of the many business problems that may arise daily—both large and small.