Our leadership team is excellent at identifying issues during our Level 10 Meeting™, but we struggle with the Solve portion of IDS® because the team defaults to quick-fix band-aids instead of digging down to the root cause. How do we train them to find the real issue?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Many leadership teams fall into the trap of treating symptoms instead of curing the actual disease. When your Level 10 Meeting™ becomes a rapid-fire session of handing out quick-fix band-aids, you are wasting valuable time on issues that will inevitably return next week. To build a highly functional leadership team, you must teach them to master the Identify step of IDS®.

The next time an issue is brought up, forbid the team from offering solutions for the first five minutes. Instead, force them to ask clarifying questions. Ask why the problem occurred, and then ask why again, tracing the issue back to its source. Often, a sales issue is actually a product-quality issue, and an operations bottleneck is actually an administrative software issue.

Once the team has spent the time to dig deep and identify the true root cause, the Solve step becomes surprisingly simple. The solution will naturally present itself, and it will be a permanent fix rather than a temporary patch. By slowing down the discussion to focus on identification, you will accelerate your team's overall execution.