Successful Management: People Problem Solving

One reason that some managers and executives outperform others in their organizations is their problem solving skill. The skill refer here is not just the ability to solve technical and financial problems, but to the very specific skill of people problemsolving. People problems abound in the world of business. People don't do what they said they would do; they arrive late to work or they don't come at all. People make mistakes; they don't do things right the first time, or the second time, and what's worse they don't seem to care about it.

People providing service to customers or internal users are rude, abusive and slow; the outputs of their work do not conform to requirements, and are not fit for use by anyone People problems are not the exclusive province of the entry level employee or the individual performing only unskilled or low-skill tasks. Scientists, engineers, accountants, physicians, nurses, administrative assistants, managers and executives are also sources of problems in any organization. Problems do not only come from people who report to us in a company. They come from our peers, our boss, our customers, vendors, regulatory agencies and other people outside our direct reporting structure.

Effective people problem solvers are like effective computer technicians who avoid creating more problems while finding a solution to the existing one. Consider the computer which has developed a problem and ceased to function properly. It is not doing what it should be doing. There could be hundreds of possible reasons for the failure. People are far more complex than computers. When people problems arise there could be far more than hundreds of reasons for the "failure". Some managers and executives panic when faced with that complexity. They haven't the slightest idea why people behave as they do, and essentially their attempts to resolve the problem are random.

In conclusion, people problem solving skills allow a manager to be more productive. You may wonder how we can measure the productivity of a manager or executive. One way to think about it is to consider the common role all managers share: they are paid to influence others. The simple truth is that some are more productive than others because they have more "influence per unit time". Such managers are generally those who resolve people problems correctly the first time around. In part this means they do it without creating such complications as hostility, emotion, defensiveness and resistance, which in turn are also people problems.