Problem? No Problem! Curing Your Business Headache

Almost ten years ago, the Fortune 100 company that I worked for at that time pulled me from my day-to-day job to help them with a problem. Someone got wise to the fact that I had Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification and a strong ability to lead. Ok? And? Well, thank you to whoever spread that word around, because I got tasked with a gargantuan site-wide goal that belonged to someone else. Yep! Time was already lost, and the mess was already made by someone else. In basic project management theory, you need the same amount of time, resources, and scope in order to be successful with your goal. Indeed! That pharmaceutical site needed me to transition the manufacturing team from working one shift to working two shifts. That was no small order because knowledge and training lived with the 20% who did 80% of the work. The company now needed at least 50% of the people to know close to 100% of the work so we could split the team up. Oh, and we only had like 4 months to do it! There was a global manufacturing mandate to change the site's production rate through a ramp-up by that date in order to meet the company's annual goal that year. No pressure! All right, the long and short of it…it got done! I led the mess out of the project and collaborated a heck of a lot! I did have to readjust management's vision of what success would look like because of the constraint of time, but they met their overall goal to change the production pace by the D-date and I gave them a strategy to get to their original 2-shifts goal after an additional 6 weeks after D-Date.

I got tasked with a gargantuan site-wide goal that belonged to someone else.

When I retell that story and others like it to people, it brings about a sense of joy! As a leader, there's nothing like being given the near impossible and coming out with a working solution. It shows that you can think and develop a plan from scratch! That's exactly what I do for my clients. But I'm equipped. I am not just a natural thinker or something like that. There are several certifications and strategies that have been impounded in my head to methodically guide me. As I moved up in the corporate world, I realized that not all leaders have the same approach to problem-solving. Some struggle with how to start brainstorming, while others simply rely on what worked in the past. It's just a poor way to tackle problems in business. Please don’t bear through and guess that the problems will go away either.

It doesn't matter if you're dealing with a back-office backlog, struggling to find more time to engage with customers, or trying to improve your production rate. The answer is there, but you need to either equip yourself with problem-solving techniques or invest in the expertise that lies in someone else. Just having another set of eyes on that same problem by a trained professional is like BOOM! It really is! And you already know this because you do this every time you go to your medical doctor. You bring your problem to be seen by an expert set of eyes who can actually filter what they're seeing on you through their impounded years of training and knowledge. They can tell you that that minor pain that you've been bearing through this whole time was actually a migraine…that a migraine can be removed with a pill or with a few minutes of meditation a day (for your natural medicine providers). That doctor doesn't need to know anything about your non-profit business, or your designer fashion business, or your multi-media business. Still she just gave you a 50% production rate increase by relieving that migraine that you were bearing through over the past 3 years.

I'm that doctor! I love providing strategies. I love listening to clients' management problems and concerns because as they are talking, I'm mentally running a diagnostic tests and listening for information that could support the correct diagnosis and prognosis.