Managing With What is There

The Power of Internal Solutions

© 2004, Coert Visser

When your organization is not functioning well you hire a consultant. When the workload in your team is too high you hire a new employee. When team members don’t perform well you send them to a training program. All of that sounds logical but it isn’t. Very often problems can be solved without help from outside of the organization by making better use of what is already there. Managers can learn to utilize more effectively the chances, strengths, resources that are already available in the organization. That is not only cheaper than to rely on external help but often also more effective. Moreover, the organization becomes more independent.

Internal Solutions

When confronted with problems many managers tend to reach out for external solutions, solutions that are not yet available with in the organization. External solutions, like hiring a consultant, implementing a new management tool or hiring a new employee, often seem required to solve problems. That seems logical: the fact that there is a problem proves that the organization is not capable of solving it without external help, doesn’t it? This article defies this logic. In many cases the organization actually is capable of solving its problems, even serious problems. That the organization has a problem and has not yet been able to solve it is frequently because the organization makes too little use of internal solutions, solutions that are already there but are often overlooked. The organization often underestimates its own competence because many strengths, chances, and resources are not used fully and even remain largely unnoticed. Often, circumstances and characteristics are considered irrelevant or are even unjustly seen as weaknesses and limitations while they can often be useful for the achievement of goals.

How do you identify internal solutions?

There are roughly two reasons to start focusing deliberately on making better use of what is there. The first reason can be that that you are eager to achieve goals and are looking for more ways to do this. A second reason might be that something or someone is bothering you. Here is what you can do in both situations.

Achieving Goals

When you are eager to achieve goals and are looking for ways to make progress it often helps to take the following sequence of steps:

1. Desired results: visualize what you want to achieve. Which concrete results do you want to achieve? What will be different when you will have achieved these? How is this an advantage to you and the organization?
2. Past success: when have you experienced that the desired results have already been showing up to some extent? Even slight successes or just beginnings of successes count. When were things going reasonably well or maybe even very well? What was happening then? What was different?
3. What worked? What helped in that situation of past success? What made it possible? What worked well?
4. Action: How can I apply this again? How can I use in the current situation what has worked before?

Case: Improving Productivity

Charles wants to improve the productivity of his team because it has been far too low the last few months. The team is now performing on a 49 % productivity while the monthly target is 63%. Charles short-term goal is to get back on target within three months. That way everybody will clearly see the team is back on the right track. It would mean more job security for everyone within the team. Also, it would mean that the business unit manager would worry less about the team and get more off Charles’ back. It would also be good for Charles’ reputation. It would prove that he is able to turn a bad-performing team into a well-performing team. Charles thinks of how he has managed before to turn a lesser team performance into a better one. He had organized a team meeting in which he discussed all available information with his team and expressed his worry. He had asked the team to come up with ideas to improve the financial performance. In response to this several good ideas were brought forward. Charles noticed that the team members made more appointments with customers and that sales increased quickly. Charles realizes that the following things worked well: informing the team fully, sharing his worries, and activating every team member to come up with improvements without telling them specifically what to do. Charles again arranges a team meeting and does the same things. This time too, it leads to a quick recovery of the financial performance. The solutions turned out to be already there within the team but they were not fully utilized. By the intervention Charles made they have become more available so that they could used to improve the results.

Dealing with Difficult People or Situations

Everyone will frequently be confronted with people or situations that are difficult, hard and annoying. This can distract you so much that you want to do something about it. It is very useful to be able to turn a thing or a person that is bothering you into something or someone helpful. How to do this? Often it helps to link the difficult aspect of the person or the situation explicitly to your goals. Following these steps might help:

1. Hindrance: make explicit for yourself what it is precisely that hinders you in the person or the situation.
2. Desired results: Make explicit what you want to achieve. Which visible results do you want to achieve?
3. From hindrance to helpful: Ask yourself the question: how could what is bothering, hindering me be useful for achieving my goal?
4. Action: What could I do to make more use of that?

Case: Devil’s Advocate

A management team developed a new strategic marketing policy. As the leader of the team, Peter had been slightly irritated by Ed, the controller. What bothered him in Ed’s behavior was that he seemed to be negative and critical whatever the topic of the discussion seemed to be. The team members viewed Ed as overly critical and thought he was slowing the team down. Peter wanted to the coming session to be successful. That required everyone to be actively involved in designing the new marketing strategy so that there would be a broad foundation for whatever new policy would come out. Peter explicitly asked himself how he could use Ed’s critical attitude in this strategy design process. He realized that the new strategy would have to be communicated to all stakeholders of the organization, like the personnel and the board. Peter knew t hose stakeholders would ask many critical questions about the new strategy. Ed’s critical approach could help the team to prepare well for any possible objections and critical questions. He arranged the process so that the first phase was aimed at identifying strengths, weaknesses, chances and threats and the formulation of a draft strategy. In the second phase he asked Ed to play the role of the Devil’s advocate. Ed played this role very convincingly and to everyone’s satisfaction this helped to significantly improve the strategy and the way it had to be explained.

Advantages

Managing with what is there comes down to using internal solutions. Internal solutions often work better than external solutions. This is why. External solutions often evoke the following questions with many people within the organization: Will that really work here? Do we know how to apply that? Are we capable of implementing it? In many cases the answer to all three questions is: no! The consequence is cautiousness and reluctance if not downright resistance; and understandably so. Internal solutions create much less resistance. They have been applied before and have proven their usefulness. While external solutions often lead to insecurity and hesitation, internal solutions lead to the opposite: trust and avidity to try them out. Briefly said, the advantage of internal solutions is: they fit!

Conclusion

The principle of ‘managing with what is there’ can help managers well to achieve their goals and solve frustrating situations. It helps to bring out the best in the organization and its people. Strengths, chances and resources can be used fully while it often won’t be necessary to look for outside help. And even weaknesses, disadvantages and obstacles can often be made useful.