Are we treating the symptom or the cause? Leaders need to periodically ask this question when struggling with performance issues or less than optimal outcomes. Treating symptoms is important and cannot be ignored; however, it doesn’t take the place of finding the larger cause.
Symptoms are a sign to look deeper into what is occurring. A symptom can be due to a situation not being addressed soon enough or in some cases at all. Treating symptoms can take so much attention that there seems to be no time to dig deeper. Yet a single root cause can impact multiple outcomes…and often, there is more than one root cause. The payoff is always worth the effort of digging.
I was in an organization that had high employee turnover, especially in the first several months. In assessing the situation, leaders had not learned the best practices in employee selection. The root cause was poor hiring practices. This was part of the high early employee departures.
A few tips:
- Before accepting the first explanation for a less than desired result, dig deeper. For example, for turnover the quick response is compensation. But is this always true? An organization heard this explanation and adjusted the compensation…but turnover did not go down. A company was brought in to reach out to people who had left. The findings were that people left for reasons other than compensation. The company had quickly responded to the symptom (turnover), but the real causes were not addressed.
- Ask for help. Create an environment in which people feel comfortable providing input. When staff mention a problem, concern, or issue, reach out to the people closest to the situation and ask for advice.
- Hold up the mirror. Leaders have great passion and the desire to do a good job. Yet is the organization truly investing the needed dollars and time to build leader and frontline staff skillsets? Skill building is the main component of achieving great results.
A CEO shared with me that his employee turnover was due to competition, community location, labor shortage, and so forth. After some discussion he made a commitment to invest in skill building. The organization improved in how they hired, communicated, removed barriers, recognized staff and celebrated achievements, and more. A year later their employee engagement was up, employee turnover was down, and they had excellent results across the board.
As the CEO was sharing the results with me, I smiled, congratulating him. While I did not say anything, I thought about what had changed. The location, competition, and labor situation were the same. Clearly, those were not the causes of the staff issues. Once the leaders and frontline staff received the investment in how to create a great place to work, turnover naturally came down and other metrics improved as well.
Digging for the root cause takes some time, effort, and energy—but we rarely regret it when the long-term payoff comes in.
