Consistently choosing the right solution to better serve colleagues and clients is no easy task. First, the right solution is not necessarily the easiest or most popular. Next, you or your team can become comfortable choosing professionally comfortable solutions. Over time, your arsenal of comfortable solutions makes you myopic to selecting the best solutions for solving current problems.
Your daily professional habits continuously revolve around making decisions on behalf of colleagues and clients. To move one millimeter beyond making decisions about solutions which are comfortable for you, all you need to do is ask yourself that question. Who am I serving: myself or my client?
Continuously asking yourself that question is a solid means of taking yourself out of decision-making auto-pilot. As a result, you become open to reconsidering the long term value and impact of those comfortable solutions on the future of your own business and your clients’ businesses.
Choosing the right solution moves you one millimeter beyond choices which become professionally comfortable, ingrained habits.
Yes, I completely understand.
- Some days all you want to do is get check something off your professional To-Do list. Then, you move on to the next task on your list. That’s how your day goes, too, one task after another, in no particular order at all.
- Other days, all you want to do is arrive at team consensus for a proposed solution. Yet certain team members resist and push back on what is proposed: again.
Before you embark on creating one more solution, all I ask of you is to ask yourself one question. Are you choosing the right solution or just a professionally comfortable one? That is all.
Adding this one question creates greater professional perspective about the problem you are working on. Consequently, you “see” the problem with fresh eyes. Then you potentially reframe that problem. As a result, you are better able to connect that problem to similar problems you solve for that client and other clients. Allow a few more seconds of professional reflection and reconsideration. That oasis of time allows you to weigh the value of a professionally comfortable solution to your organization’s and your clients’ futures. As a result, you choose, and advocate for, the right solution instead.
When you view your daily workload as a To-Do list, you may underserve clients and short sell your own capabilities. Plus, if you observe team member pushback against proposed solutions, you may be witnessing people advocating for those right solutions, instead of the comfortable ones.
- Searching for a coaching catalyst to get you unstuck professionally? Looking for a meeting or event speaker focused on what is new and next? Then engage me to present a One Millimeter Mindset ™ program! Delivered virtually or in-person.
- Discover how to incorporate Complex / PMI-certified Wicked Problem Solving into your professional arsenal of awesomeness, contact me here. I will send you my affiliate link.
Change Agent | Collaboration Catalyst | Complex Problem Solver | Professional Innovation | Cross Functional Leadership | Speaker, Consultant, Coach, Author |
Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset™ programs catalyze people who solve problems differently to collaborate more successfully across business, HR, and operations silos. Become more professionally visible, cross-functionally relevant, and strategically valuable as you create and implement innovative and robust business outcomes together. Babette is a business-oriented STEM professional, qualitative Voice of the Customer facilitator, PMI-certified Complex / Wicked Problem Solver, Duke Corporate Education licensed Strategic Agility practitioner, and Six Sigma Green Belt (Quality). Babette is a member of the ASQ, SHRM, PMI, the National Speakers Association (NSA). Her playbook of cross-functional collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business? is available in soft cover and digital formats on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here. Image source: Adobe Stock.
Leave a Reply