If You Don’t Know About It, You Can’t Fix It

What happens when you hear a conversation start with ‘We have a problem!’?

Do you cringe?  Do you go ‘uh oh’?  Do you say ‘Don’t tell me!’ or do you get excited for this opportunity to further improve our efficiencies and build your team stronger?

If you said ‘yes’ to the first three, consider that the old way of responding. If you said ‘yes’ to the last way, well done because that’s going to let your team, department, company or whatever beat the pants off of any competition you have.

How you respond to people sharing information is going to set you up for success in the future.  Or it will kill any sharing culture that you are trying to create, assuming you are trying to build that sort of workplace culture.  So here’s an example of how it works.

Recently we had a coaching opportunity on this exact situation.   A contract worker came to his team leader and said ‘We have a problem with corrosion on some equipment’.  This guy didn’t have to report it because it wasn’t his task to maintain that piece of equipment, however he stepped out and made it his responsibility to let us know.  And by the way, this was mission critical equipment.

What was so encouraging here was that all the site leaders jumped all over the report with positive actions.  They said ‘thank you’ to the worker both face-to-face but also in front of the entire work team (100+ persons).  The work team were clapping, whistling and smiling for their buddy.

They didn’t jump all over the group that was charged with maintenance of this equipment. They didn’t say things like ‘how could this happen?’ or ‘why didn’t YOUhandle this?’.  Instead they brainstormed with the team by saying ‘we’ve got a great opportunity to sort this out before it becomes a shutdown issue, what should we do?’.  

The solution was that they not only fixed the one piece of equipment’s corrosion, they went all over the work site and figured out if there were other examples. End result, the corrosion issue was solved site-wide, however more importantly, the entire work site was made safer (read: more efficient) and they are getting more reports of other areas to look at issues.  They have started on their journey of being proactive in handling small issues before they become show stoppers.

Oh yeah, and that sharing culture they were aiming for, well they also shared the story throughout their organization so that the lessons learned could be replicated elsewhere too.

So remember that old adage ‘if you don’t know about it, you can’t fix it’ and turn those ‘uh oh’s’ in to ‘I know about it, so I can get it into our fix list’.  In this case, their work management is more informed so they can prioritize better with fewer unexpected shutdowns.  

And this was all because one guy stepped out of his comfort zone and so did the leaders. Think about how you react to ‘bad’ news like ‘we have a problem’ so that your response creates a desire for the individuals in our teams to step out and move forward.