What are the symptoms telling us?
This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers
Earlier, we discussed the process of looking at symptoms as the route to finding the problem. The danger here is that we become too focused on the symptoms. Treating the symptoms will often make us feel better in the short term, but only serves to mask the real problem. For example, if your car is making a weird knocking noise from one wheel, you can simply deal with the symptom by closing the windows and turning the music up. As they said on Car Talk, this approach works great until your axle breaks and the wheel comes off.
Of course, knowing that we get focused on symptoms isn’t the real question. The real question at this point is, why do we get focused on symptoms? The answer is because they’re there. Symptoms are easy to see and they seem easy to deal with. Making a symptom go away feels good. For a short time, everything appears to be working.
In one technology company, one of the engineering teams couldn’t make decisions. Now, we’ve looked at decision making from several different angles, and we therefore know that we’re looking at a symptom. There are any number of factors that can cause this symptom to appear:
- We could be looking at a so-called leaderless team. As we’ve discussed, leaderless teams don’t work. This is one of the reasons why.
- The team could be using wrong decision making method for the organizational culture or for the team’s stage of development. Stage one teams that attempt to use voting systems often end up stuck. Stage two teams are particularly resistant to directive leadership.
- Lack of engagement: if the team isn’t committed, it isn’t really taking the decision seriously. As a result, and note that this is an additional symptom, no one is asking questions or pushing back on ideas.
- Perceived lack of control: if the team doesn’t believe that their actions will matter, they won’t try. Decisions are a ritual they go through even though they “know” it won’t matter.
Indeed, even the basic problem, “can’t make decisions,” can mean different things: are decisions being made but not implemented? Are decisions not being made at all? Are they being made and then revisited and second-guessed? Each of these scenarios present different symptoms and point to different underlying problems.
