Sustainably Solve Problems With 5 Questions To Reveal the Root Cause

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Leadership is easy to summarize and hard to implement.

Here's an example:

"The manager who comes up with the right solution to the wrong problem is more dangerous than the manager who comes up with the wrong solution to the right problem." - Peter Drucker

I love this quote because it's true. I've seen countless leaders waste millions of dollars bravely leading their teams down the wrong path. I've been that leader more times than I care to admit.

But here's my problem with this advice. It's easy to see its brilliance when looking at your mistakes in retrospect. But how do we harness its wisdom to identify the right problem and avoid these wasteful cul-de-sacs in the first place?

My best answer: Diagnose your problems to root cause.

And while occasionally you need to unlock your team with unorthodox questions, these 5 simple questions are all you need to get under the surface.

1. Who is responsible?

Every activity at work is a system. A factory. There are inputs that get transformed by some combination of people, processes, and technology to produce the desired output. That output can be a widget, a sale, customer satisfaction, or even employee feedback.

A factory produces everything. That factory might be implicit and in the shared mind of the team. Or explicitly coded into process maps and software code. But trust me. There's always a factory.

And someone needs to be in charge of that factory. It's usually the manager, but not always. And without someone in charge, your factory will typically produce one thing really efficiently: chaos.

What I'm listening for: I'm looking to confirm who is in charge. If everyone is confused, I've found your root cause. I can keep going and undoubtedly find more problems, but they'll all lead back to this.

2. Do they know what excellent looks like?

You will be shocked at how often people are taking action without answering this question. This fuzziness is even more problematic when a leader lets a group operate without a vivid picture of its goal or how it plans to accomplish it. This factory will produce one thing: chaos.

Two more subtle answers to this question are even more dangerous.

Mr. Over Confident: The leader believes they know what excellent looks like but doesn't. This can happen with experienced leaders who pattern match from previous roles or new leaders who don't want to appear weak.

Mrs. Misunderstood: Good news: This leader does have a great picture of what excellent looks like. Unfortunately, they're the only ones. Their usual excuse is that "it should be intuitive" or "I didn't have time to get everyone on the same page yet."

What I'm listening for: I want to hear a clear articulation of how the factory should be operating. I'm asking myself, "Is that how an expert would design it?" And my radar is up for squishy modifiers like "should," ''usually," and "I think." And if there's no design or the design makes no sense, that's your problem. The next step is to establish a sensible design and try again.

3. What broke?

You can have someone responsible for a good design and still have things go wrong. At this stage, many things usually conspired to break in tandem. The trick here is to figure out which one is the deepest root.

I start by listing them all out and putting them into logical groupings. Then I ask 3 questions (in order):