Four Tips To Avoid Firefighting And Empower Your Employees
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As a business leader, you may one day find yourself rushing from task to task, firefighting, spending day after day dealing with various problems, issues and ideas for improvement brought to you by well-intentioned employees. Instead of focusing on your company goals and vision, busy work becomes your priority.
It’s an easy trap that confounds many leaders. Fortunately, there’s a solution. Here are four simple tips that will enable you to break the firefighting cycle.
1. Determine Whether You Are Firefighting
Are you focusing on smaller things that give a sense of accomplishment but don’t move the needle, or are you focused on outcomes that achieve important goals and solve problems?
Consider creating an “outcome list” instead of a “to-do list” to get off the hamster wheel of busyness. Once you write down the outcomes you want to achieve, you can identify the logjams preventing you from achieving them. Make sure the things you do day to day are getting you closer to these outcomes. And you can evaluate those goals by answering a simple question: “Why?” Most people start a project by asking what should be done, or how it should be done, but in fact, asking why helps your goals become clear. If you can’t answer why you are doing something, then it probably isn’t a priority for the company.
2. Understand The Problems And Hire Those Who Can
As a corporate leader, you want to have some understanding of the problems you are trying to solve and some basic ways to solving them. You don’t need to be a finance expert, for example, but you should understand the basics of EBITDA. This way, when you’re hiring a finance person in that role, you want to make sure they know more than you and can teach you something.
Why spend time doing due diligence when you are hiring people to manage the work?
If you don’t understand the basics of most aspects of your business, you’re essentially acting on blind faith that your employees know their stuff. That is no way to run a business. You need to trust but also verify.
Understanding the basics also helps you ask the right questions and get to the root cause of problems when employees seek your advice and counsel. And it demonstrates a level of empathy and support. People want to know you care about them and the issues they face. They want to know that you are there for them and have set them up for success. So, spend time coaching to ensure your new employees have the tools they need to get the job done.
3. Establish A Formal Problem-Solving Approach
You need your employees to think beyond ideas and get solutions that help the company reach its goals. To do that, you should establish a simple problem-solving approach that gets people thinking about solutions holistically. Here’s one example:
Step One: Create a simple rubric for problem-solving. Identify the problems, requirements and goals (PRG) before even considering a solution. This PRG rubric provides employees with the first step to identify the issue they are trying to solve, determine the requirements for success and define their goals well before outlining a solution.
Step Two: After you have the PRG in place, empower your team to identify and develop ideas to provide a solution and achieve your goal. As they ideate, they can evaluate potential solutions with an eye toward tangibles such as cost, priorities and risk. Your role is to help the team refine their ideas to satisfy the requirements. Encourage iterative brainstorming to develop the highest-quality solution with the highest probability of success before moving into planning or execution.
Step Three: Once your team has arrived at an ideal solution, then it’s time to begin planning. At this stage, it’s crucial to flesh out details about the people, processes and systems that the company will employ to deliver the solution. Train employees to develop a detailed plan that identifies resources in each of these areas, along with any gaps. Ideally, you’ll want one project owner who will take the lead to manage the team and maintain the timeline. That way, you’re advising one key employee who oversees expediting the project — not multiple employees who are responsible for only parts of the project.
4. Your Leadership Role: “Understanding” Doesn’t Mean “Doing”
Your primary role and responsibilities are to ensure company and team success. There can only be one person at the top — and that’s you.
Your function now is to genuinely understand the problems, requirements and goals so you can help empower your team to come up with the right ideas and implementation plans. The PRG rubric also enables you to understand the issues at hand and stay focused on the bigger picture. A great leader spends most of their time mentoring others on raw employee skills such as communication, organization, project management, etc.
Critical, too, is trusting your team and checking in with them to validate they’re on the right path. You’re not scrutinizing the team’s actions because you don’t trust them or need a status; you are following up so you can continue to help them succeed by keeping a high bar and on their toes. A true leader knows where their team stands and is responsible for assisting them in achieving success.
Reposted from Forbes