Shark Tank has been a staple on TV for nearly 15 years. How many episodes have you watched where you thought “I have had that idea! Why didn’t I think about it?”
That’s the premise of our topic today – see something, do something.
For those of us who have pointed at the TV and yelled out “I had that idea” we’ve learned a valuable lesson: ideas are cheap. The value is in doing something. In order to unleash potential, we must create a culture and environment that has a bias to action, to doing something.
Now, this isn’t a recommendation to take a shotgun approach to every idea and just execute, execute, execute. Sometimes ideas need to marinade. To breathe. In fact, at Wholestack Solutions – We have something we call the ‘Wine Cellar.’ This repository houses ideas that we don’t want to lose sight of, but aren’t quite ready for prime time.
But that being said, too many organizations work with a permissions-based premise. Meaning, if I see something, I need to run it up the chain of command. Form a committee. Submit a proposal. Have fifteen meetings to discuss the idea…and before we know it, two years have gone by and we’ve lost the reason for the idea in the first place.
Again, this isn’t dismissing the role of strategy and planning, but we apply this methodology to all ideas – great and small – leading to a culture of “not my problem.”
Empowering people is scary. What if they do something wrong? What if they don’t execute the way “I” would have? There is always fear in taking action, especially when anything ‘new’ is at hand. But the opposite of action isn’t inaction, it’s stagnation. And stagnation is the entry point for a decline.
To create an organization of problem solvers – we must accept the reality that solving a problem requires action. It requires seeing something (a problem) and doing something (solving the problem), else we create a team of problem-pointer-outters. People willing to point things out but doing nothing about it.
We must then coach and teach our team how to critically think through problem solving scenarios, using our company’s culture and goals to determine which path forward is the best.
And then we must empower the team to take action – while also being accountable for those actions.
But – super critical point, if we skip to holding our team accountable for the action…without coaching our team, teaching them how to critically think through the problems and evaluate solutions, we will be setting our team up for failure.
See Something, Do Something is how Wholestack teaches, coaches and empowers our team to be wonderful problem solvers and further unleash their potential.
