Management Success - Essential Components For Effective Problem Solving

As a manager you are responsible for taking and executing most of the strategies developed by the senior leadership team. No doubt you will from time to time encounter some problems or challenges. Tackling these problems is often a challenge in itself. So what do you need to have in place for effective problem solving?

Component 1: Clear identification of problem

How often do you come across a situation where someone knows there is a problem, takes action and nothing improves? Our natural tendency is to leap straight into diagnosis rather than spending the time clearly identifying and defining the problem. Make sure that you make the time to clearly identify the problem to be solved.

Component 2: Generate ideas

Few problems have only one way of fixing. There are generally many possibilities open to you. At the end of the day you want to be able to come up with the best solution. While there are no guarantees, generating many ideas is a good way of maximising the chances of coming up with the optimum solution to the problem.

Component 3: Follow through to implementation

It is great to generate a ton of ideas but the real return comes from taking and implementing the best ideas. Implementing the ideas starts with a clear decision about what you are going to do and then creating a step by step plan to make it happen.

Component 4: Create the right climate for effective problem solving

It is vital that as well as the tools you create the right climate or environment for both idea generation and implementation. This includes creating an environment of trust where people can openly put forward their views without fear of ridicule. It also requires a degree of risk taking. Creating these two components in the working environment is in itself quite a challenge. Remember that nothing significant is going to be achieved unless you do something different and something different brings with it some risk.

The bottom line

Effective problem solving requires not just process but an environment that supports and encourages effective problem solving.

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