Solving issues as a team

Does it feel like your team talks about the same issues every month but you aren’t moving towards solutions? Are your employees working on urgent, short-term issues but not the strategic ones that move the business forward?

“When addressing issues, teams spend most of their time discussing the heck out of everything, rarely identifying anything, and hardly ever solving something” - Gino Wickman

I was there.  My team meetings felt like we discussed the same things every time. It didn’t seem like they were even valuable enough to have. When I honestly reflected on this, I knew it was because I wasn’t leading the meetings effectively. So I looked to peers who had great meetings and engaged teams. That’s when I found the process I implemented.

It worked. I developed a team that was passionately engaged; I developed a team that knew and could easily speak to the vision for the company I developed a team that regularly completed 90-day projects that moved the business forward, and I developed a team that was solving issues every week together.

Each week, 45 minutes of my team meeting was spent using this structured process to solve issues. 

Step 1: Identify: define the real issue. The problem is rarely the real issue - get to the root cause. 

Step 2: Discuss: everyone’s opportunity to say what they think about the issue 

Step 3: Solve: find the solution that usually then becomes a to-do for someone

I trained my team on this process and used it consistently every week. It was incredible how easy it became to solve issues instead of just talking about them.

I trained my team and now I share it with others.