Helping People to 'Figure It Out'

A couple of months ago, the Harvard Business Review featured a guest article from Beth Comstock, Chief Marketing Officer at GE which reflected the reality that employees today will be asked to come up with solutions to problems that weren't even on the radar when they were hired

Big companies should keep their eyes on start-ups, and not only because of the disruptive innovations they unleash. It also pays to learn from how they work. For example, we (at GE) have been inspired by an ethos we’ve seen in the world of social enterprise: the belief that if you hire smart people, they should be able to “figure it out.”

That’s a favourite phrase of Angela Blanchard, the CEO of Neighborhood Centres, a Houston-based nonprofit that provides services for 340,000 people along the Gulf Coast. Every week her organization faces new problems for which road maps to a solution don’t yet exist and resources are never ample. Blanchard needs her people to be inventive, capable, and enterprising. Above all, they must be able to improvise - to take whatever they have to work with and make the most of it.

Sometimes when candidates who want to join Neighborhood Centres learn of Blanchard’s expectations, they start to worry that they lack the training to take on such complex challenges. Blanchard’s standard reply is tough but empowering: No one has the training. Figure it out.

Angela Blanchard’s management challenge is similar to the reality facing all organisations. As leaders and managers, we have to motivate our people to come up with workable solutions to problems that weren’t even on the radar screen when they were hired. There’s no operator’s manual for most of what we’ll ask people to work on. But somehow, together, we’ll figure it out. 

To achieve this, Comstock recognises that as well as the individuals themselves, there is a role for management in making this happen - "Top managers at a large enterprise like GE need to honour their side of the bargain with this new imperative. Smart employees should be able to figure it out, but they also must be enabled to do so. The organisational culture around them should celebrate ingenuity. Systems must not lock people into narrow roles." - and FranklinCovey's work to enable the conditions for 'figuring it out' also applies at both levels

• at the level of the individual, we work on creating the instinct and the ability for people to respond proactively, to push the boundaries of their influence and to act like 'transition figures'
• for team leaders, we help them to recognise and release the resourcefulness and initiative that can sometimes lay dormant within their teams with an approach that balance support and accountability around mutually agreed upon goals