Our advice to leaders tackling big problems in both the public and private sector is not to slow down, but it is to take a breath and take a few mission-critical steps before sprinting. In our work, we call it earning the right to run. This means:
1. Make sure you’re solving the right problems.
Too often, we’ve seen change leaders attack the symptoms of problems and not their root cause, losing precious time and gaining little traction.
We worked with one leadership team at an early-stage tech startup that was convinced they had a culture problem embodied by a “clash of generations” between older and younger employees. In fact, they had a strategy problem: The company’s unwillingness to focus had driven employees to take refuge with other like-minded employees. By the time the team called us, they had been trying to solve the wrong problem for months.
The way out of this muddled mental posture is a mix of humility and curiosity. Don’t assume your take is necessarily right, particularly if you’re surrounded by people with strong incentives to agree with you. Toyota’s famous “Five Whys” practice codifies a way to expose the true origins of a problem faster. This approach, among other things, enabled them to build one of the most effective operating systems in the world.
2. Build more trust as you go.
Trust in leadership is a byproduct of logic, authenticity, and empathy, a pattern that goes all the way back to Aristotle’s observation that persuasion requires a combination of logos, pathos, and ethos.
Our take on the American people’s trust in the current government efficiency campaign is that it gets high marks for authenticity (we believe we’re seeing the real Elon Musk in action), the benefit of the doubt on the logic of the cuts (reducing government waste is a reasonable goal), but decidedly low marks for empathy. As Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) told CNN’s Manu Raju, the GOP should do a better job of showing “compassion.” Compassion is also a core American value. We see ourselves as decent people and want our leaders to embody that decency.
Our work suggests that low empathy is a big deal, as people don’t trust leaders who seem to be primarily in it for themselves. When we worked with Uber’s senior team to rebuild trust after its own crisis in leadership, the company quickly made it clear to drivers, riders, and regulators that it also cared about their interests—not just the enrichment of their shareholders.
3. Involve people you don’t know—and who know more than you do.
Decision quality rises when the stakeholders who are most impacted by those decisions—often the same people who know the most about a problem—are at the decision-making table. For example, social media platforms often miss the mark on child safety, we argue, because parents are underrepresented in their workforces.
In our work we push leaders to constantly “make new friends” and break their pattern of overreliance on familiar networks to solve problems. The colleagues who make us comfortable don’t necessarily make us better.
4. Tell a better story.
Storytelling is an essential part of change leadership, and getting it right has been a critical part of every successful transformation we know.
When Alan Mulally turned around Ford, he talked incessantly about his “One Ford” plan. He started every meeting by reviewing it, and he distributed it on wallet-sized cards to every employee. That’s the type of message discipline you need for people to truly understand where you’re leading them.
When it comes to the current efficiency efforts in Washington, the American people need to understand the payoff of all this change and uncertainty. What Americans want most is a government that’s responsive and competent, not one with diminished problem-solving capacity.
Read the article by Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss
