Episode 849 - Turning Big Problems Into Fuel

0:04 Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of performance through strong human relations, team building, and goal achieving. This is the 7-Minute Leadership Podcast with your host, Paul Falafelito. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 7-Minute Leadership Podcast. It's episode 849. There is a moment every leader eventually experiences. You walk into work, open your email, answer your phone, or sit down in a meeting and somebody drops a problem in front of you that is so big you immediately think, you have got to be kidding me. Maybe you lost your biggest customer. Maybe two key employees quit in the same week. Maybe revenue dropped. Maybe an expensive piece of equipment failed. Maybe somebody made a mistake that's going to

0:57 cost your organization a lot of money. Or maybe you're staring at a problem you didn't create, didn't ask for, and somehow you're the person expected to fix it. Welcome to leadership. And today I want to give you a different way of looking at those moments. Stop looking at every big problem as something that is trying to destroy you.

1:21 Some problems are fuel. The problem is energy. Your job as a leader is figuring out where to point it. Think about a rocket sitting on a launch pad. There is an incredible amount of energy underneath that rocket. Heat, pressure, fire, noise, vibration. Under normal circumstances, you would run away from something producing that much violent energy. Engineers figured out how to contain it, direct it, and use it. And suddenly, all of that energy becomes thrust. That is what great leaders learn to do with problems. They turn pressure into movement because big problems have an interesting side effect. They get people's attention.

2:11 You can spend six months telling an organization that something needs to change and everybody nods their head. We should probably fix that. We should look into that. Maybe next quarter, then something breaks. Suddenly the meeting that couldn't get scheduled for six months happens tomorrow morning at 8. The money that wasn't available somehow got found. People who couldn't agree on anything suddenly agree that something has to happen. That's fuel.

2:40 I've spent most of my career in emergency services, and one of the things you learn very quickly is that problems don't arrive politely. They don't send a calendar invitation. They don't ask if Tuesday at 10 works for you. They show up. Sometimes several of them show up at the same time. And when that happens, standing around talking about how terrible the situation is doesn't improve the situation.

3:10 You identify what matters now. You start making decisions. You move resources. You communicate information. You adjust when the original plan doesn't work and you keep moving. That same mindset works in business. Let's say you lose one of your best employees. That's a problem, a big one. The immediate reaction is usually, how are we going to replace this person?

3:34 That's understandable. There's another question worth asking. What did this employee's departure expose? Maybe you discover that one person had knowledge nobody else had. That's a training problem. Maybe one person controlled an entire process. That's a systems problem. Maybe nobody on the team is ready to move into that position.

3:59 That's a leadership development problem. Maybe the employee left because something inside the organization wasn't working. Now you have information you didn't have before. The resignation created pressure. Use the pressure. Fix the system. Train the people. Document the process. Build the bench. Make the organization stronger than it was before the resignation happened. That is turning a problem into fuel.

4:29 Maybe your biggest customer leaves. That hurts. Now you have a choice. You can spend the next three months talking about how unfair it was, or you can ask some uncomfortable questions. Why did one customer represent so much of our revenue? Why didn't we see this coming? Where else are we vulnerable? What do we need to change so losing one account never puts us in this position again?

4:55 The problem becomes the catalyst for building a stronger business. Sometimes a problem exposes something you've been ignoring. Those are painful because somewhere deep down you knew You knew that employee was becoming a problem. You knew that process wasn't working. You knew the equipment needed replaced. You knew communication was breaking down. You knew the numbers were going in the wrong direction, but nothing had reached the point where you were forced to act. Then it did. Leadership gets expensive when we ignore weak signals. So when the big problem finally lands on your desk, don't waste the lesson just to ask yourself what is this problem trying to teach me that question changes the conversation because now you're hunting

5:48 for information instead of hunting for somebody to blame and leaders love to say they want resilient organizations well resilience isn't built by having an easy answer resilience is built when something goes wrong and your organization discovers a that it can handle it. Your team learned something important about themselves.

6:10 They survived. They adapted. They solved something difficult. They figured it out. And now the next big problem doesn't look quite as big. I've seen this happen over and over again. A team walks into a crisis thinking there is no way we can handle this. And then they handle it. Six months later, something else happens and the conversation changes.

6:33 We've dealt with worse. That sentence matters because confidence built through experience is different from confidence printed on a motivational poster. Your team earned it. And there is another part of this that leaders need to understand. Your people are watching how you react when the problem arrives. If you feel panic, they feel the panic. If you start looking for somebody to blame, everybody starts protecting themselves. If you disappear, people start creating their own version of reality. But if you walk in and say, okay, here's what happened. Here's what we know. Here's what we need to figure out. Let's get to work. You create stability. You don't have to pretend everything is fine. Your team isn't stupid. If the

7:22 building is metaphorically on fire, don't stand there telling everybody how wonderful the temperature is. Tell them the truth. Then give them direction. And here's something else. Don't waste a good crisis by rebuilding exactly what existed before it. If something broke, study why it broke. If a process failed, don't automatically put the same process back together. If your staffing model collapsed, rethink the staffing model. If your communication failed, rebuild communication. If a customer complaint exposed a weakness, fix the weakness. And if you lost money because your business was vulnerable, remove the vulnerability. The goal isn't returning to normal.

8:09 The goal is coming out smarter because sometimes normal was the problem. Think about the biggest problem facing you right now, the one sitting in the back of your mind while you're listening to this. Maybe you've been losing sleep over it. I want you to write that problem down and then underneath it write, what can this problem power? Can I power a better process? Can it force a decision you've been avoiding? Can it expose a weakness you need to fix?

8:39 Can it create an opportunity to train someone? Can it push your organization towards something you've talked about doing for years? Now the problem has a purpose. And I want to be clear about something. Turning problems into fuel doesn't mean pretending problems are good. Some problems are terrible. They cost money.

9:01 They hurt people. They damage relationships. They create sleepless nights. You don't have to celebrate the problem. Use it. There's a difference. The leader who spends all of their energy wishing the problem hadn't happened has no energy left to solve it. The leader who accepts reality can start moving.

9:22 It happened. We're here. Now what? Those four words can change an organization. Now what? That's leadership. So the next time a massive problem lands on your desk, don't immediately ask, why is this happening to me? Ask a better question. What can I build with this? Pressure can crush an organization when nobody knows what to do with it. In the hands of a capable leader, pressure becomes fuel. Contain it.

9:58 Direct it. Learn from it, then use it to move your people somewhere they might never have gotten without it. This has been the 7-Minute Leadership Podcast, and I thank you for listening.