Sharing A Known Problem With Your Boss

If you are a proactive team player, sharing problems and concerns should be a common practice.

Sometimes, your manager or the CEO of the company is fully aware of the problem. The logical question is: Why do we have to deal with it?

It may seem trivial, but recognizing a problem is different from finding a reasonable solution. Different factors come into play. Sometimes, it’s not sustainable. Or there is no one who can handle the process – or define the strategy itself.

There are business dynamics worth reviewing and opportunities to step up – as discussed in the video.

Sharing A Known Problem With Your Boss

Highlight

00:00:34 – The Hiring Process is Very Complicated
00:01:25 – Developing Every Individual Is Expensive
00:02:42 – Proactive But Stuck?
00:03:39 – Figure Out The Actual Problem
00:05:30 – Who Is Going To Solve The Problem
00:07:05 – Find A Workaround
00:08:08 – The Bottom Line

Transcript

Hey, guys. Mario Peshev from DevriX here, and this is Mara.

Today’s topic is, what do you do when you share a work problem with your boss, or a set of problems, or something that’s more generically a problem, and they do agree with you 100%? Right? It doesn’t make sense. You share a problem, and the problem is out there, and your boss agrees with you. Then you’re, like, “Well, how come this is not fixed yet?”

The Hiring Process is Very Complicated

The reason I want to tackle this topic is the hiring process is very complicated, and building the right company culture is also extremely complicated as well. Most organizations do try to define some sort of protocols, guidelines, regulations, the company pillars] that are important to the team, and so on and so on.

Most people are generally not highly motivated to work in a team, by definition. So, motivation is something that you can either have it, or not have it, or be somewhere in the middle, and the middle may be a very broad, vast area, an abyss even, I would say.

So, it’s kind of a combination between an interesting job, and great colleagues, and great leadership that motivates you, the right pace of deadlines that would keep you exploring things that are of interest to you, and so on and so on.

Developing Every Individual Is Expensive

But, at some extent, this becomes … Developing every single individual is a very expensive effort, so people should meet somewhere in the middle. To some extent, like even for someone who is a mid-level skill, be it technician, manager, designer, so forth.

Being able to assign someone as a mentor, as a coach, as a leader, may be five times or even more expensive than retaining that particular person. Because you need someone who’s, like, five times more experienced than you, someone with interpersonal skills, with soft skills, communication skills, psychology background, leadership training, Six Sigma probably, and so on. So, you can see why most organizations can’t do that because it’s just completely not sustainable.

So, what they try to do is they hire a manager, some low-level manager working with a mid-level or a senior manager, who’s kind of in charge of the entire team of several people, could be three, could be 15 or 20 even, and that’s kind of how it works.

You usually have access to that leadership, but you need some sort of self-driven approach if you want to persist and succeed and so on.

Proactive But Stuck?

Sometimes when you work in an organization, you’re kind of the procreative, well, proactive type, not procreative, that’s weird in the workplace. So, if you’re working in that sort of organization, you want to be in charge of things. You come up with ideas, you want to overcome challenges and obstacles and so on.

What happens, though, is you explain the problem and say, “Hey, that’s ABC, but we are using that, too. That’s really shitty, and it’s taking three times longer to complete a basic task.” Or, “This is something that doesn’t support those things, but the other two does and so on.” Then your manager or your boss says, “Yeah, I know that. It’s really a problem,” and you’re kind of stuck.

You’ve shared a problem and not only nothing happens, but they don’t even disagree with you. They don’t even give you kind of a point of why does that happen in the first place. There are a lot of reasons for that to be happening.

Figure Out The Actual Problem

When we work with new people in our marketing or business development department or senior project managers when we are kind of discussing that during interviews or during the trial phase, many of them come up with some great ideas that we’ve been through seven times or 10 times they didn’t work. They seem like common sense at first, except that they don’t really work in our particular case. Sometimes they are very valid reasons to do something, but it’s just too expensive, the onboarding will take months, or they do have a pros and cons list, so we are going to lose on some specific features.

That’s kind of a tricky moment, right? So, ideally, if you fall into that sort of situation, you need to figure out what the actual problem is. You shouldn’t lose your motivation. You have to discuss a specific problem with your manager and say, “Okay. So, let’s say we do that, what’s going to happen?” or “Is there any reason why this is not happening?” or “What can I do in order to prevent those concerns or so on from actually happening?” Those kind of things are actually extremely important in order for you to get the context.

Obviously, great leaders, great managers and so on, they will try to explain that. But it’s not always possible, or it’s too complicated, or sometimes there are some proprietary information or something else that also takes place. But anyway, just try to be, first off, proactive. Try to be motivated. Try to be self-driven when discussing that sort of approaches, and when trying to understand the problem.

Who Is Going To Solve The Problem?

The second thing is it also depends on who’s going to solve that problem. For example, our new marketing hire, during a marketing meeting a month ago, said, “Hey, we should really get into producing tutorials and educational videos from our DevriX account, and so on and so on.”

I was like, “That’s a great idea. Who is going to do that?” She was, like, “Well, someone can probably handle that,” and I was like, “Yeah, but we don’t have a video producer and so on and so on.” I asked her to join and start preparing videos, but she was hesitant because she doesn’t have experience, and she doesn’t feel like that’s something that she can undertake.

That’s fine. That’s completely okay. But when you suggest an idea, there’s got to be a way to kind of reduce the number of steps until you reach into a conclusion or to a decision.

So, you should either kind of volunteer to do that yourself in order to step up in the organization, and to undertake a specific sort of activity. Or you should try to figure out, is there anyone on your team that can potentially help with that, or try to look, for example, for freelancers or suggest agencies, or something else so that it can bring you closer.

Because a lot of times, they’re kind of 15 to 20 steps to solve a problem, but at the same time, most people just say, “Well, yeah, let’s do X,” and they can probably do at least 10 steps ahead in order to give you some advantage, in order to have something to review, say yes, no, and move forward.

Find A Workaround

For example, one of our businesses assistants, we were discussing company culture again and so on. She said, “Well, okay. I found that, too, that’s kind of measuring mood sending kind of a daily email and just ask people, how do you feel, rank from terrible to excellent?” Instead of just asking us, “Hey, should we implement it, should we do it, should we this and that,” she just said, “I signed up for this account, I invited you, you are going to receive those emails. In a week from now, I’m going to share the results from you.”

So, it’s a problem, we know it’s a problem, we don’t have the resources to do that. They’re just far too many things, but someone can potentially find a workaround, at least for the time being.

For videos, for example, even if you can’t record videos yourself and so on, I found Lumen5 or there is Content Samurai, I think another tool for kind of video building based on content, that you can use at least to create some sort of video. So, you can use a script and, again, kind of show up for just five seconds and then show slides onward. There a lot of different activities that could be done.

The Bottom Line

But, again, the fact that you share a problem, and your boss agrees with you, which is again the main point of the video, doesn’t mean that your boss is stupid, or that they are unaware and don’t care about the problem. Most often, they’re not.

There is another reason that leads to actually having that problem in the first place. Or it’s clear that it will take time that the team doesn’t have right now. It’s not a high priority. But if someone steps in, they can potentially help solving the problem.

So, if you’re that person, if you’re proactive, especially if you’re new in the organization, spend the time, take the initiative, just work hard in order to prove yourself, undertake something, and become a valuable member in that team.

The first few months in an organization are crucial. People have to like each other, both the company liking the employee and the other way around. So, finding some sort of a bond, finding some sort of a kind of mutually group exercise in order to conduct, is a great way to make that happen and to make the next step into your kind of evolutionary career progress towards senior position or management or something else over the next few years.