People have a phobia for solving real problems

Takeaway: build trust early or people won't be able to talk about the hard problems.

One of the fascinating things about people is we have a phobia of talking about the hard things that actually matter… some sort of psychological taboo. When asked "what is wrong", we have answers like:

Soda ran out last week.
So and so was gossiping.
I got interrupted a bunch.

Instead of:

There is an HR problem which is causing a team to not be functional.
The underlying architecture of system X is severely broken.
I don't think I have the skills to solve this problem.
Our business model seems flawed.
I am unclear on my job so am filling many of my hours with busy work.

At my previous company, this caused some items to go unaddressed for many times longer than was healthy. After identifying the problem, our CEO started focused on fixing it through:

Honest monthly updates - 1 hour presenting everything that happened in the 4 weeks before. Both the good and the bad.
Asked about issues - Asked every team to answer what they felt was truly wrong and needed improvement.
Started solving them - Twice a week meetings between the managers to address the top issues.

It can be a challenge to not focus too much only on the failures or only on the successes and get tunnel vision. If you focus too much on the failures, people internally loose morale and think of themselves and the company as failures. If the only thing that matters is success, the problems which will become large in the the next year are not fixed when it is easy.

The best way to solve this is to build strong trust in the whole team and challenge everyone weekly to improve and flag things they think need to be fixed while giving solutions for each.

Hans Lee | Design and Life