Sweating the Small Stuff

We’ve had situations where it was simple to see our challenge and easy to understand it’s importance, yet I still failed to get the team focused on taking action. I found many of my frustrations were related to the level of urgency and importance people applied to our challenge. Leading Resicom has taught me many things, some items I grasped quickly, while others I simply did not have the logic required to understand.

We have a team of smart, hardworking people that love to solve difficult challenges. Realizing this made it all click – Why am I surprised that smart, hardworking people want to solve challenges? This was the missing piece of my logic – the core of my frustrations was the team’s ability and confidence.   The proactive improvements I was proposing  did not yet present themselves as a challenge, so the team didn’t feel they were important enough to take on.

One of the challenges of solving tomorrow’s issues today is it is more difficult to celebrate the avoidance of challenge than the overcoming of one. What I needed was to have the team see it the way I see it – the company has growth goals that we are going to meet, causing roles and processes to change and these seemingly small items could grow into significant problems if unaddressed.

My team runs fast and avoids the boulder size problems, it is the camouflaged pebble that would cause us to slip and fall. I needed to shift my focus from being a problem solver to a problem preventer. I need to live in the small stuff to create the scenarios that would challenge my team to take action and solve the small stuff.

Though it has been a difficult road, I believe the company is more aligned and more aware of our current and future realities than ever before. Taking the steps to sweat the small stuff is clearing the way for our team to be successful.