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When your organization is not functioning well you
hire a consultant. When the workload in your team is
too high you hire a new employee. When team members
don’t perform well you send them to a training
program. All of that sounds logical but it isn’t.
Very often problems can be solved without help from
outside of the organization by making better use of
what is already there. Managers can learn to utilize
more effectively the chances, strengths, resources
that are already available in the organization. That
is not only cheaper than to rely on external help
but often also more effective. Moreover, the
organization becomes more independent.
Internal Solutions
When confronted with problems many managers tend to
reach out for external solutions, solutions that are
not yet available with in the organization. External
solutions, like hiring a consultant, implementing a
new management tool or hiring a new employee, often
seem required to solve problems. That seems logical:
the fact that there is a problem proves that the
organization is not capable of solving it without
external help, doesn’t it? This article defies this
logic. In many cases the organization actually is
capable of solving its problems, even serious
problems. That the organization has a problem and
has not yet been able to solve it is frequently
because the organization makes too little use of
internal solutions, solutions that are already there
but are often overlooked. The organization often
underestimates its own competence because many
strengths, chances, and resources are not used fully
and even remain largely unnoticed. Often,
circumstances and characteristics are considered
irrelevant or are even unjustly seen as weaknesses
and limitations while they can often be useful for
the achievement of goals.
How do you identify internal solutions?
There are roughly two reasons to start focusing
deliberately on making better use of what is there.
The first reason can be that that you are eager to
achieve goals and are looking for more ways to do
this. A second reason might be that something or
someone is bothering you. Here is what you can do in
both situations.
Achieving Goals
When you are eager to achieve goals and are looking
for ways to make progress it often helps to take the
following sequence of steps:
-
Desired results:
visualize what you want to achieve. Which concrete results do you want
to achieve? What will be different when you will have achieved these?
How is this an advantage to you and the organization?
-
Past success:
when have you experienced that the desired results have already been
showing up to some extent? Even slight successes or just beginnings of
successes count. When were things going reasonably well or maybe even
very well? What was happening then? What was different?
-
What worked?
What helped in that situation of past success? What made it possible?
What worked well?
-
Action: How
can I apply this again? How can I use in the current situation what
has worked before?
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Case: Improving
Productivity
Charles wants to improve the productivity of his team because it
has been far too low the last few months. The team is now
performing on a 49 % productivity while the monthly target is
63%. Charles short-term goal is to get back on target within
three months. That way everybody will clearly see the team is
back on the right track. It would mean more job security for
everyone within the team. Also, it would mean that the business
unit manager would worry less about the team and get more off
Charles’ back. It would also be good for Charles’ reputation.
It would prove that he is able to turn a bad-performing team
into a well-performing team. Charles thinks of how he has
managed before to turn a lesser team performance into a better
one. He had organized a team meeting in which he discussed all
available information with his team and expressed his worry. He
had asked the team to come up with ideas to improve the
financial performance. In response to this several good ideas
were brought forward. Charles noticed that the team members made
more appointments with customers and that sales increased
quickly. Charles realizes that the following things worked well:
informing the team fully, sharing his worries, and activating
every team member to come up with improvements without telling
them specifically what to do. Charles again arranges a team
meeting and does the same things. This time too, it leads to a
quick recovery of the financial performance. The solutions
turned out to be already there within the team but they were not
fully utilized. By the intervention Charles made they have
become more available so that they could used to improve the
results.
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Dealing with Difficult People or Situations
Everyone will frequently be confronted with people or situations that are
difficult, hard and annoying. This can distract you so much that you want
to do something about it. It is very useful to be able to turn a thing or
a person that is bothering you into something or someone helpful. How to
do this? Often it helps to link the difficult aspect of the person or the
situation explicitly to your goals. Following these steps might help:
-
Hindrance:
make explicit for yourself what it is precisely that hinders you in
the person or the situation.
-
Desired results:
Make explicit what you want to achieve. Which visible results do you
want to achieve?
-
From hindrance to helpful:
Ask yourself the question: how could what is bothering, hindering me
be useful for achieving my goal?
-
Action: What
could I do to make more use of that?
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Case: Devil’s
Advocate
A management team
developed a new strategic marketing policy. As the leader of the
team, Peter had been slightly irritated by Ed, the controller.
What bothered him in Ed’s behavior was that he seemed to be
negative and critical whatever the topic of the discussion
seemed to be. The team members viewed Ed as overly critical and
thought he was slowing the team down. Peter wanted to the coming
session to be successful. That required everyone to be actively
involved in designing the new marketing strategy so that there
would be a broad foundation for whatever new policy would come
out. Peter explicitly asked himself how he could use Ed’s
critical attitude in this strategy design process. He realized
that the new strategy would have to be communicated to all
stakeholders of the organization, like the personnel and the
board. Peter knew t hose stakeholders would ask many critical
questions about the new strategy. Ed’s critical approach could
help the team to prepare well for any possible objections and
critical questions. He arranged the process so that the first
phase was aimed at identifying strengths, weaknesses, chances
and threats and the formulation of a draft strategy. In the
second phase he asked Ed to play the role of the Devil’s
advocate. Ed played this role very convincingly and to everyone’s
satisfaction this helped to significantly improve the strategy
and the way it had to be explained.
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Advantages
Managing with what is there comes down to using
internal solutions. Internal solutions often work
better than external solutions. This is why.
External solutions often evoke the following
questions with many people within the organization:
Will that really work here? Do we know how to apply
that? Are we capable of implementing it? In many
cases the answer to all three questions is: no! The
consequence is cautiousness and reluctance if not
downright resistance; and understandably so.
Internal solutions create much less resistance. They
have been applied before and have proven their
usefulness. While external solutions often lead to
insecurity and hesitation, internal solutions lead
to the opposite: trust and avidity to try them out.
Briefly said, the advantage of internal solutions
is: they fit!
Conclusion
The principle of ‘managing with what is there’ can
help managers well to achieve their goals and solve
frustrating situations. It helps to bring out the
best in the organization and its people. Strengths,
chances and resources can be used fully while it
often won’t be necessary to look for outside help.
And even weaknesses, disadvantages and obstacles can
often be made useful.
Coert Visser (coert.visser@planet.nl) is a consultant,
coach and trainer using a positive change approach. This approach is focused on
simply helping individuals, teams and organizations to make progress in
the direction of their own choice. Coert wrote many articles and a few
books. More
information:
www.m-cc.nl
/
www.m-cc.nl/solutionfocusedchange.htm /
Dutch
network /
Dutch
blog
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