Resolve Your Toughest Work Problems with 5 Questions
NEW BOOK: In Managing in
the Gray, Joseph Badaraccooffers managers a five-question framework for facing
murky situations and solving tough problems at work.
· BOOK EXCERPT
Untying the Gordian
Knot from: Managing in the Gray: 5 Timeless Questions for Resolving
Your Toughest Problems at Work
by Joseph L. Badaracco
Gray areas are basically organizational versions of the classic
Gordian knot: that is, they are dense tangles of important, complicated, and
uncertain considerations. As such, they can be some of the hardest work you
have to do as a manager, and they can feel like a serious burden. At the same
time, like the Gordian knot, they can be compelling challenges that show you
and others what you are capable of doing. According to myth, Alexander the
Great became so frustrated with the Gordian knot that he unsheathed his sword
and sliced through it but, as a manager, you don’t have this option. So what is
the best way to deal with the gray area problems you face?
The Five Questions
The answer, in its shortest form, can be stated in a single
sentence: when you face a gray area problem at work, you should work
through it as a manager and resolve it as a human being.
Working through gray area problems as a manager doesn’t mean
acting like the boss or a bureaucrat. And it doesn’t mean having a particular
job on an organization chart. Management is basically an extraordinarily
effective way of getting things done, inside and outside organizations. At its
core, managing simply means working with and through other people to accomplish
something. Approaching a gray area as a manager typically means working with
other people to get the right information on a problem, analyze the data
thoughtfully and rigorously, and look for practical solutions to problems.
But, with gray areas, this first step isn’t enough. Information,
analysis, and discussion don’t resolve the problem. You still don’t know what
to do. When this happens, you have to take a second step: you have to resolve
the problem as a human being. This means grappling with the problem, not just
as an analyst or a manager or a leader, but as a person. It means making
decisions on the basis of your judgment—which means drawing on your
intelligence, feelings, imagination, life experience, and, at a deeper level,
your sense of what really matters at work and in life.
This second step may sound simple, but it isn’t. We often hear
that, when we face tough decisions, we should follow our moral compass, emulate
a role model, follow the guidance in our organization’s mission statement, or
do what passes the “newspaper test” and ask if we would be comfortable seeing
our actions reported in the paper, or just do the right thing. But there are no
quick solutions to gray area problems. If there were, we would have them on
laminated cards in our wallets.
Algorithms can’t solve the hard human problems of life and work.
Managers who face these problems have to learn all they can from information,
data, experience, and rigorous analysis. Then they also have to think deeply—as
human beings—about what they really should do. Resolving gray area problems as
a human being means asking yourself the right questions and working hard to
develop your own answers. These questions are the indispensable tools for
deliberation and judgment. There are five of them, and this book explains them
in depth.
Why do these questions help and what makes them so important? In
essence, they are the questions that thoughtful men and women have relied on,
for many centuries and across many cultures, when they had to grapple with
hard, complex, uncertain practical problems. The questions reflect profound
insights about human nature, our common life together, and what counts as a
good life. Understood fully and used together, the questions are valuable tools
for guiding your judgment when you have to make a decision about a gray area
problem.
You may be wondering if there really could be just a few
questions that actually cut to the core of really hard problems. Why would this
be the case? There is no definitive answer but, as you will see in the
following chapters, there is a plausible, if controversial explanation. It says
two things. One is that we human beings have a common human nature, because of
Darwinian evolution or divine creation. The other is that all human communities
have confronted the same basic questions about responsibility, power, shared
values, and decision making—and converged on the same basic approaches.
There is no single, right way to phrase the five questions. I
have spent much of the last twenty years trying to develop useful, practical
tools that managers can use when they confront hard issues of leadership and
responsibility. The version of the five questions in this book has been refined
and tested through countless executive and MBA classes, research interviews,
and counseling sessions with individual managers, as well as through research
and reading. In the spirit of the great American pragmatist philosopher,
William James, I have tried to develop useful, everyday tools rather than
universal truths, and a practical bias runs throughout this book.
·
What are the net consequences?
·
What are my core obligations?
·
What will work in the world as it is?
·
Who are we?
·
What can I live with?
It is natural to wonder why these five questions would be
remarkably useful. The answer is that they have passed a demanding test. It
asks if there are ways of thinking about hard decisions that have, over the
centuries, engaged many of the most penetrating minds and compassionate hearts
when they were searching for the right way to resolve really difficult
problems. As you will see, the five questions, expressed in various ways, have
engaged philosophers, ranging from Aristotle to Nietzsche; religious leaders,
like Confucius and Christ; and political thinkers, like Machiavelli and
Jefferson; as well as poets and even artists.
To be clear, this test does not ask whether there is some grand
consensus that the great thinkers of history all accept. That would be a
preposterous claim. The key question is whether there are some approaches that
have consistently engaged many of these powerful, incisive, compassionate
minds, when they tried to understand what made for good decisions and good
lives. If some ways of thinking have passed this test of history and culture,
then they are well worth our time and thoughtful attention.
The five questions are, in effect, important voices in a long
conversation about how the world really works, what makes us truly human, and
the soundest way to make difficult, important decisions. No single voice in the
long conversation gives us a universal truth, but each gives us valuable
insights for making uncertain, high-stakes decisions. That is why these
questions are such powerful tools for testing, broadening, and sharpening your
judgment when you face gray area issues.
What kinds of tools are they? Philosophers, lawyers,
theologians, and political theorists can sharpen each of the questions to a
fine edge and wield these intellectual scalpels with brilliance. But managers
need something different: they need sound, sturdy, everyday tools—like the ones
in toolboxes and kitchen drawers. This comparison to tools may seem like a
passing metaphor, but it actually reflects a long intellectual tradition at
Harvard Business School, which has aimed, for more than a century, to develop
important, useful ideas for managers. Professor Fritz Henderson, one of the
school’s intellectual pioneers, believed that most useful theory for managers
was “not a philosophical theory, nor a grand effort of the imagination, nor a
quasi-religious dogma, but a modest pedestrian affair or perhaps I had better
say, a useful walking stick to help on the way.”
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/resolve-your-toughest-work-problems-with-5-questions?cid=spmailing-13398414-WK%20Newsletter%209-7-2016%20(1)-September%2007,%202016
No comments:
Post a Comment