How is it possible that I learned one of life’s greatest leadership lessons from doing yard work as a kid? Like most kids, I hated doing yard work. I grew up in a beautiful house with an incredible landscape with a huge yard that my father insisted we could maintain ourselves. My father’s attention to detail was unprecedented. My brothers and I used to joke that he would make us cut the grass with scissors if he could. The worst part was, he was adamant that the yard had to be free of weeds at all times and I hated pulling weeds. But the truth is, I have come to realize in life that we often learn the most valuable lessons by doing and experiencing the things we like the least and for me, that was pulling weeds…
It wasn’t that pulling weeds was such as physically demanding task that made me despise it the way I do. It was the fact that my father would walk the yard after I was “done” and inspect my work with more scrutiny than my drill sergeant did after I made my bed in basic training…
Let me reiterate how frustrating it was that my father was so persistent that the weeds must be pulled “the right way”. After spending what seemed like an eternity on my hands and knees filling trash bags with pulled weeds he would walk up behind me and say “Nope, you did it wrong. Start over.” And every time, I would stand up in protest only for him to tell me why I did it wrong…
He would tell me how the weeds would only grow back by the next day if I didn’t pull the weeds out from the bottom to make sure the roots came up with it. Without fail, I would argue how much easier it was to just pull up the part that of the weed that I could see so I could move on to the next weed. Of course, as a kid I just wanted to find the fastest way to do my chores and I didn’t care about doing it the “right way”. It wasn’t until I bought my first house that I began to appreciate why yard work is so important. Better yet, it wasn’t until I started to transition into leadership roles that I finally started to realize just how important that lesson about pulling weeds the “right way” truly was…
The reality is, whether we are in leadership roles or not, we face problems every day. We face problems with finances, relationships, careers, hobbies and so much more. The problems that we face are everywhere and that makes learning to effectively solve those problems so important. Just like pulling weeds, if we just focus that the part of the problem that we can easily see, we fail to find the root and the same problems just seem to keep coming back.
This is where the “Give a man to fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime” adage comes in handy…
Sure, if a man is hungry it’s easier to just give him a fish and “solve” that problem but won’t he just be hungry again the next day?
But if we take the time to realize that the man is hungry because of an underlying root cause (his lacks to skills to provide food for himself) we can better address the problem at hand and more importantly, prevent the same problem from coming back again…
But here’s the thing, it takes more time to solve problems the “right way” way and that is why so often, leaders fail to effectively solve the problems that they face. Effective problem solving relies on our ability to identify the root cause of a problem and focus our time, energy and resources towards fixing that root issue. Only then, do we provide long-lasting solutions to the problems that we face.
This is also where the “three why’s” is extremely helpful. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the “three why’s” is a concept I learned during my undergraduate studies of conflict management that helps us identify root causes of conflict. Essentially, once you have identified a perceived problem or source of conflict, you ask yourself why that problem exists three times. So let’s use the example of the man hungry for fish again. We’ve identified that the man is hungry but why (1) is he hungry? Well, he hasn’t eaten. Well, why (2) hasn’t he eaten? He doesn’t have any fish to eat. Why (3) doesn’t he have any fish to eat? Because he doesn’t know how to fish for himself and that is our root cause. If we address that root issue, we have the best chance of effectively solving the problem…
Realistically, it may take a few more “why’s” to identify a root cause of a real world problem but you get the idea. If we fight the urge to take the easy way out and focus only on the problems most visible to us, we become exponentially better at solving the problems we face as leaders.
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