Not My Problem, Part 2 | Customers, Etc.
Employ radical empathy to get creative about what's in your control
In my last post I talked about the wisdom that’s required to focus on what’s in your control vs what you can influence. The timing of that story took place right around the beginning of July. But just before the events in that post, I had gathered with my team at an offsite to do a simple brainstorming exercise.
I started with four basic questions1:
What’s working?
What’s not working?
What’s confusing?
What’s missing?
Almost immediately, we zeroed in on what’s not working. That’s not surprising. It’s the rough edges of our work that stand out the most, so those things are usually top of mind.
As ideas began to fill the board, I observed that most of what we had written down were things that weren’t working in parts of the business outside of our control. No doubt these were legitimate issues—they were clearly having downstream effects on the team—but they weren’t things that my team could directly control.
I challenged the team to shift our focus to consider what we could control even if other teams stayed exactly the same. As we considered goal-setting heading into the next quarter, I wanted our team’s goals to be 80% focused on what we could control and 20% focused on what we could influence. To get the balance right, our reflections had to begin within our team.
“I’m the problem”
In my Organizational Transformations class at Georgia Tech, we talked about a game you can play where you think through a problem you or your team is facing and begin from the standpoint of “I’m the problem.” Even if you’re not the problem—or you don’t think you’re the problem—for the purpose of the game, draw a hard line: you are the problem.
With this frame of mind, assume you have control over yourself to reduce the problem or reduce the probability of it happening. What would you do if you are the only thing you can control? This can lead to radical empathy that opens the door to creative ways to solve the problem that you hadn’t imagined before.
For example:
The video is of course extreme (and humorous), but even in that situation, you can see how the game plays out. The obvious solution, which is outside of the man’s control, is off the table. So what can he control? At the very least, he can control the level of empathy in his response. It may not fix the problem, but it provides a path forward.
Get your own house in order
Focusing on what you can control before focusing on what you can influence is another way of saying, “get your own house in order first before worrying about someone else’s house.”2
I don’t know if 80% control and 20% influence is the right balance, but it feels right, and it’s certainly better than the inverse. If every team were to focus primarily on influencing other teams, nobody would get any work done. Teams would spend the bulk of their energy saying how much more productive they would be if other teams would just do things differently. But then each team would only have 20% of their time to do actual work3.
What if something really important really does need to change in another part of the organization? That’s where the 20% influence comes in. And I don’t mean “20% effort”. Give 100% of your effort communicating what problems need your influence with 20% of your time. Be clear and direct. These are the things that are gumming up the wheels of the organization and prevent it from meeting its goals. Your team is already incredibly productive—see what they’re producing with 80% of their time—but they would be so much more productive if we could better align across the organization on shared goals and remove inefficiencies. That’s where your 20% influence comes in, but only after you’ve focused most of your energy on what you can control.
Get your house in order.
I’m pretty sure I got this from The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.
My intention isn’t to draw religious analogies in this post, but since the parallel is obvious, might as well point it out: take the log of your own eye before taking the splinter out of your friend’s eye. Matthew 7:5, paraphrasing.
It’d be interesting to prove this out mathematically. Imagine 5 teams where each spends 80% of their energy trying to influence other teams. That means each team member—or more likely, the team’s manager—spends a significant amount of energy feeling the effects of being told they’re doing something wrong. But it’s coming from each of the 4 other teams in equal weight (20% per team, for a total of 80% of the company’s energy directed at you). And you’re spending as much energy dishing it out as you’re taking it in! In the meantime, you only have 20% of your team’s energy to deal with all these problems, so you don’t possibly have the bandwidth to get ahead of the problems. You’re perpetually in a state where your team’s not good enough (from the other teams’ perspective) and the other teams aren’t good enough (from your perspective). Exhausting.
If you flip it and each team spends 80% of their energy on what they can control and 20% of their energy on what they can influence, that leaves ample bandwidth to handle what’s coming at you. Assuming “influence” is distributed evenly, each team is directing only 5% of their energy in the direction of other teams, or a total of 20% of the company’s energy at any single team. That’s certainly manageable if the team has retained 80% of its energy to focus on what it can control.