I remember it clearly: we had just released a new product, and as demand grew, the manufacturing team just could not deliver. This new device was used in a unique way, and there was a performance issue that had evaded our typical quality checkpoints. The sales team had been aggressively incentivized to switch clients over to the new product, so backlog was building. The line was paused since we had escaping defects, and the team was burning more energy on internal conflict than getting to the root cause. To top it all off, this was a key driver of the division’s profitability, so the stakes were high for all of us.
I had recently joined the team and was charged with getting a solution in place.
Moments of Truth
Moments of truth like this come up swiftly and fill your full windscreen, demanding that as a leader you deal with them now. Perhaps trust has been broken with a key customer and the manufacturing team is struggling to find the cause. Or, it’s a partner that has let you down and is now putting your commitments in jeopardy to your constituents. You may be launching a new product, start taking orders, and then find out the process and the team was not really ready to meet the expectations and strong demand.
In other cases, it may be an internally-driven process change, such as getting a new ERP in place, or new innovation process. But when you go to scale, all hades breaks loose and the change doesn’t hold.
Executing strategically in the real world is chutes and ladders: you can be on your cadence, running production meetings, optimizing supply chains, and then suddenly slip off the track. The response to these issues is always to convene a team and start working on the problem. One of the most common and least discussed situations is when the team gets stuck – do you double down and push through, or do you stop to refresh and retool?
These calls are gut-wrenching, sleepless-night creators.
And the answer? It’s “yes” and “it depends.”
Cutting Through the Overwhelm
The team is stuck, you have seen this pattern before and your intuition is telling you that something needs to change. Conventional wisdom and a strong pull to avoid conflict will urge you forward on the status quo path using the normal tools (8D, Six Sigma, etc.), but you also know that if you need to take a step back and don’t, you will get a path of incremental pain with a reset at the end.
Experiences with dozens of these scenarios show that a well-timed step back can lead to geometric gains and discovery.
So, how do you know when to push through and when to stop and retool?
Unfortunately, typical advice will have a tendency to increase the “stuckness” of the team and only create frustration and friction.
A New Framework
When you are leading this kind of multi-disciplined effort under high pressure, you need to elevate the paradigm and lead with clarity. The tools I listed earlier are great, but you need a higher level schema at this point – a tool that gets you above the linear and the purely technical. You need to have a way to break out of the challenge in ways that allow you to evaluate context, talent and approach.
One solid framework to overlay on these seemingly unknowable issues is Project, Team, and Plan.
The first question to ask yourself, is whether the team is doing the right project, for right now? We know that a team has a limited number of hours in a day, so it’s very important to constantly evaluate and ask what problem we are solving. In the case of the above, it took some detective work. An early application had applied the product in an unanticipated way, so we needed to work hand in hand with the client to improve our understanding of the application, then go to work on the manufacturing process to prove capability. The outcome was a win-win. We were able to gain control and capability for what the client needed, and we gained a competitive advantage by being one of the first to do it.
When you lose the chain of the direct correlation between what the client is valuing and what you are creating and delivering, it’s a clear sign you need to pause and retool.
Secondly, ask yourself if you have the right team. As a sponsor, it’s on you to be sure that you’ve activated the right subject matter experts and curated a group so that their problem solving can flourish. Your work does not end when they are all in the room – you must take the time to equip and facilitate them into a team. Are they positively challenging the status quo? Getting the experiments formed and completed? Watching out for one another? Making sure that they are getting past each other’s blind spots?
I’ve found the best way to do this work is to take two to three short sessions to get really clear on who is on the team, what their core leadership styles are, and then share specifically both the expected patterns of strengths and challenges (participants report this work is very helpful). You may well need to add or change out a team member to get the dynamics right. Additionally, this allows the leader and the group to help each other do real collaborative work, regardless of the problem-solving tool they are using.
Lastly, is there a coherent plan to harness all the best efforts? Is it accelerated appropriately pending the need? Are handoffs crisp and do people know their role and expected contributions? Are the intermediate milestones clear, visible, and measurable?
Leaders who do this work can expect a fresh release of problem-solving energy with the current challenge in front of them. Additionally, this training is highly transferable and follows the team member back to their core responsibilities once the cross-functional team is reassigned.
For more on the Right Project, Right Team, Right Plan framework, see articles here, here and here.
To the question I posed in the opening: do we double down or pause? The answer is that it depends on how you answered the Right Project, Right Team, and Right Plan questions. Did you find gaps? Then pause and eliminate them. If not, then you have the best team on the field, deployed in the best way possible, so push on.
Solve the Acute, Then the Underlying Cause so You Don’t Get There Again
Shrewd readers have already noted this, but there is always a problem behind the problem. How did we get sold into an application that called on our product to perform in ways that we had not designed it? We built a team that was composed of key resources including sales, sales engineering, manufacturing engineering and product leadership. This work improved our firm and set the stage for a long and successful product arc.
How I Can Help
I help leaders who are accountable for delivering when the stakes are high and outcomes are pivotal. I can help you get your group on solid ground and have hard discussions in a way that is not personal.
If you’d like to explore what this kind of coaching and facilitating service could do for you, please reach out to my direct line (847-651-1014) or use this link to put the call directly in my diary.
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