During our weekly IDS sessions, our leadership team members tend to dance around the real root cause of our problems because they want to avoid hurting their peers' feelings, resulting in superficial solutions that fail to fix the actual issue. How do we push them to identify the real problem without creating personal animosity?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your team dances around the truth to protect feelings, they are actually hurting the business. This is artificial harmony, and it is a symptom of low trust. To solve issues permanently, you must get to the root cause, even if it points to a specific person or department.

The facilitator must lead this charge by being vulnerably confident. When an issue is introduced, do not accept the surface-level description. Ask the question, What is the real problem here, multiple times.

Push past the polite explanations. If an issue is framed as a communication problem, ask who is not communicating and why.

Remind the team that you are attacking the issue, not the person. Frame the discussion around roles and responsibilities on the Accountability Chart rather than personal identities.

If a leader gets defensive, redirect them to the facts. Use your scorecard data and measurable facts to ground the conversation.

Encourage the team to say hard things kindly. You can even use a preface like, To help us solve this, I need to say something hard. This prepares the team for honest feedback. If you do not push past the politeness, you will continue to solve the same symptoms every single week.