Bruce Eckfeldt 1/18/15 Bruce Eckfeldt 1/18/15

The right answer won't help if you don't know this first

As an executive and team coach, I spend a lot of time helping people develop solutions to problems. What to do with a problem employee? How to develop the right strategy? When to start a new initiative?

Core to the coaching process is developing plans and execution strategies and then guiding people to take action and implement. However, I’ve found that often times, the most value I add is not in helping find the answer, but helping find the right question.

Albert Einstein famously said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask.” He knew that before you can find the right answer, you first need to find the right question.

Often, once you find the right question, the answer follows much more naturally. The right question brings about clarity and focus to the issue, which helps to illuminate the path to resolution. More importantly, time and energy spent arriving at the right answer to the wrong question is wasted. The perfect answer to the wrong question is still the wrong answer.

Finding the perfect question, however, can be difficult (which is why I get paid the big bucks). By asking, or thinking, the following to yourself, you can refine your question before you start investing in finding an answer.

Is this the biggest problem you have?

The first thing to consider is that this might not be the biggest problem you have. What are your other problems? What are the impacts of all of your problems? How might you discover what other problems you have? How should you prioritize these problems? Going through these questions will help ensure your focus is on the right issue, or help you to refocus your attention to where your effort will yield a better return.

A great technique at this phase is to conduct a retrospective. This will systematically review the recent past to gather data and generate insights that otherwise might have been forgotten or missed. Get the right people together and dig into the right discussions to unearth these valuable gems.

What is causing this problem?

I’m a big Lean advocate, which uses the great technique of root cause analysis. By tracing a problem back down the causal path, you can find more fundamental issues that are driving the surface level effects. The customer service problem can quickly become a problem of operational standards, quality assurance or even defective raw materials.

Making changes to the call center script will never improve the quality of the core components. I liken it to finding a leak in a house: you might see the water in the basement, but the problem is the flashing in the chimney.

What new problems might surface if I solve this problem?

Another consideration is what will happen if you fix the problem being considering? Will that just cause other, potentially worse problems? Not solving the issue at the core means you’re applying band-aids at best, but worse, you could be introducing even more trouble. In the early days of antibiotics, treatments would stop infections but end up poisoning the patient. Make sure that what you’re considering doesn’t have adverse effects at the higher level.

Are there other ways to phrase this problem?

Lastly, even a rewriting of the problem can lead to a different type of thinking, subsequently leading to different types of solutions. In the best cases, a good writing can turn a problem into a creative solution.

Bruce Eckfeldt is an entrepreneur, a former Inc 500 CEO, and member of the New York City Chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. He is an expert in organizational performance and coaches startups and high-growth companies on leadership and management. You can reach him at bruce@eckfeldt.com or visit his website at http://www.eckfeldt.com.

This post originally appeared in Business Insider:http://www.businessinsider.com/the-right-question-comes-before-the-right-answer-2015-6#ixzz3dAGeNDa0

Bruce Eckfeldt 1/10/15 Bruce Eckfeldt 1/10/15

If you want to be a leader, get comfortable with doubt

I’ve been coaching a young, freshly-minted executive who has been selected for a high-potential development program. Recently, we’ve been exploring what it truly means to be a leader. She said to me that she believed that being a leader means always knowing what to do and to “never be in doubt”. Having been a CEO myself and having worked with many executives, I knew that the answer she provided wasn’t quite right. However, rather than challenging her directly, I asked her to validate this belief by speaking to three different executives in her company whom she trusted. Her assignment was to ask them how often they know exactly what to do and if they ever have any doubt.

Two weeks later we met again for our coaching session. She had spoken with three executives as promised and was surprised by what she had learned. Contrary to her assumptions, all three freely admitted that they don’t always know exactly what to do and often experience doubt; in fact, more often than not. Regardless of this, they functioned very well. All were well-respected as exceptional leaders in the company. And all three were perfectly comfortable with the fact that they had doubts much of the time.

When I asked how this changed her thinking, she told me about three key lessons she learned in her conversations which had shifted her beliefs.

Doubt is a natural part of the decision making process

All executives have doubt. In fact, dealing with doubt is a key function of leadership. A decision that has no risk or uncertainty should be made at a low level without getting executives involved. Leadership is not about acting without doubt. Leadership is about intelligently managing doubt so you are free to act boldly and confidently.

Doubt is a guide to seek information and ask questions

Experienced leaders use doubt as an informational divining rod. Their doubt serves as a tool they use to point to areas that need investigating and research. Years of experience and dozens of projects have given them intuition about uncertainty, risks and impact. Doubt illuminates the path to clarity.

Good decision making quantifies the risks with costs of delays

We live in a messy and imperfect world. No big decision comes without uncertainty. Opportunities have a narrow window and competitors are always looking to eat your lunch. Successful executives learn to balance the risk of acting with uncertainty against the opportunity cost of not acting. By continually assessing and quantifying these two forces, the tipping point of decisiveness can be found and action subsequently taken.

As a young executive, my client was still, understandably, acting as a manager, squeezing out every last drop of risk she could find in a situation. As a result of this behavior, she was missing out on good opportunities. To grow, she learned to become comfortable with doubt and to strike the right balance in her decision making process.

To become a leader, embrace your doubt and use it to hone your decision making. Understand that big decisions will involve some level of uncertainty. Focus your energy by being mindful of your doubts. And calibrate your scale for weighing the risk and reward of taking timely action.

This post originally appeared on the Forbes blog:http://www.forbes.com/sites/entrepreneursorganization/2015/06/08/if-you-want-to-be-a-leader-get-comfortable-with-doubt/