A few days ago, I felt pain in my wrist. Right at the hollow where my first metacarpal (where the hand bone meets the thumb) joins the wrist.

Because I broke this bone last year, I assumed something was flaring up. I started working on my wrist, mobilizing it and massaging it.

Nothing changed.

I quickly realized that although the pain was in my wrist, the solution wouldn’t be found by working on my wrist.

I began to explore “upstream” of where I found the pain. Once I started investigating, I noticed a muscle in my forearm that was tender all the way to my elbow.

Once I understood the source of the problem, I targeted my corrective actions on my upper forearm.  Within minutes I had addressed the pain in my wrist.

Without working on my wrist.

The Leadership Corollary

There are common “pain points” in most organizations. These pain points might look like:

• High turnover
• Poor sales
• Disappointing performance
• Lack of engagement or motivation
• Conflict or litigation
• Chronic confusion or miscommunication

Often, the leader will focus his or her efforts by attempting to directly address the pain point. Increase pay. More sales training. Fire poor performers. Team building retreats. More policies. More meetings.

Any one of those may be the right answer to the problem.

But too often, the desired change doesn’t happen.

The problem grows from being an incident to becoming chronic.

What should be done?

Learn to look upstream. Many problems in teams and organizations are felt downstream. But the causes are upstream:

Front-Line Conflict Problems

I once was a “regular” consultant to an organization. Every 12-16 months they’d ask me to come work with a front-line team or department that was in conflict.

I started to notice that while the specifics of each situation were different, the underlying dynamics were very similar. Specifically: A culture of conflict avoidance and a lack of accountability for behaviors and results.

Eventually, I was asked to help the executive team with a conflict. Not surprisingly, the executive team experienced exactly the same dynamics expressed at the front-line level. Even though they were separated by a dozen levels of management.

No progress could be made until the executive team was willing to learn to change their perspective on conflict and be willing to be accountable to the board and each other.

Sales Problems

Another client was going through a culture change process. They noticed that many customers continued to give negative feedback, contrary to the intended changes.

As this was tracked down, they found that their customer-facing staff did not treat their customers in ways that were aligned with company values.

While part of the solution might be found in better training and coaching for staff, the most powerful solution was upstream.

It was in the hiring process. Although company culture was changing – recruiting and hiring processes hadn’t. They hadn’t yet created alignment between the new company values and how new hires were selected.

As a result, they were hiring people who weren’t aligned to corporate values. This not only increased the management load in terms of coaching, training and redirecting behavior, but it created a dissonance between stated values and what the customer experienced.

Change was possible and easy, by Human Resources aligning their recruiting and hiring process to corporate values.

The Most Common Upstream Problems

In my last post, I identified the Top Fifteen Reasons for any organizational problem.  There are two main points of the article:

• Almost all organizational issues grow from the same set of common causes. One or more of which is yours.
• All of these issues can be directly addressed and changed by leadership.

The Two Questions To Get Upstream And Lead Change

Ultimately, it takes leadership to do the work necessary to create real change. Here is a set of three questions to help you identify where you need to focus your attention.

1. What Is The Highest Level Of Leadership Where This Issue Is Expressed? When diagnosing issues in organizations, particularly if they are repeat or chronic issues, I know we are dealing with something systemic or cultural.

This needs to be addressed at the highest level possible. The first thing I do is track the issues up to the highest level of decision making, responsibility or leadership that relates to that issue.

I know that I’ve found the highest level when I no longer can find evidence of that problem or issue at higher levels.

Once that is discovered, we examine the specific behaviors, at this level, that seem to be having the greatest influence downstream.

Most of the time, what is discovered is something that seems innocuous. For example, not considering that HR’s decisions and processes needed to be tied into strategy and culture change. Or patterns of avoiding conflict (which often looks like very friendly and “nice” people).

Unfortunately, once in a while, bad actors are uncovered as well. While difficult, it’s important to identify and remove toxicity or the system will never improve.

2. How Does The System Flow From Upstream to Downstream? The next step is to track the flow of decisions downstream.

In 2001, I spent the year in Kosovo working in disaster relief. Most of my work was to oversee the reconstruction of fifteen communities. It was a fascinating experience because I worked directly with the entire “chain” of decision making.

I met regularly with the highest level of leadership and was a part of the policy and decision-making process at that level. I worked with all of the mid-level leaders, all the way down to the front line and beneficiaries.

It afforded me a unique opportunity to see how feedback up the line would get changed, lost or misinterpreted. It helped me see how decisions moving down the line would get stuck, distorted or lose impact.

• Identify where system or structures support the overall success and health of the organization.
• Identify where systems or structures seem broken and accountability or energy is lost.
• Examine connections between intended results and actual results.

Wherever you find a “break” in the system (which could look like a process problem or a person problem) it is an opportunity to bring about corrective action and improve the system as a whole.

Your Next Steps

Examine a problem that you are facing. Look “upstream” to the highest level of leadership. Use the Fifteen Reasons to identify the issue. Then track decisions and results “downstream” to ensure that they have the intended impact.

Let me know how this tool has helped you!

Take good care,

Christian