How does problem solving affect effectiveness as a manager

To describe your plan to your team, you may choose to create a presentation with information about the problem and solution. However, for smaller issues, you may implement your solution on your own or hold a small, informal meeting discussing the changes. After you implement your solution, you may get additional information or encounter new challenges that require you to change your original idea.

Prepare for this situation by monitoring how your solution affects your workplace and whether it's successful at overcoming the obstacle. If you need to change your solution, reassess changes to the problem and follow these steps again to create a new list of solutions or additions to your original solution. Use the following tips to help you improve your problem-solving skills in the workplace:. Be transparent. Transparent communication with your colleagues allows you to establish bonds built on trust and commitment to success.

These bonds may help you create more successful solutions to workplace problems because a trusting team may be more likely to have confidence in your problem-solving skills and can offer their perspective on an issue for a more balanced solution. Encourage collaboration across teams.

You may not solve all problems with your team alone, so consider encouraging your team to contact colleagues in other departments or teams to increase your chances of creating a successful solution. This can help you find information about your problem and ask opinions about how your potential solution might affect others. Be open-minded. As you solve problems in the workplace, it's important to be open-minded about how to craft the most useful solution and how your solutions may change the work environment.

Listen to the concerns of your colleagues and encourage feedback about solutions, ideas for alternative solutions and suggestions for problems that your team can fix. Stay positive. Positivity can put you in a better mood and make your colleagues feel more at ease when communicating their ideas and concerns to you. Try to stay positive about challenging situations to show your colleagues you're in control and capable of solving the problems that affect your company. Observe everything.

Being observant can help you with many aspects of problem solving, like finding relevant information that others may have not noticed.

Observe all the details of a problem before you attempt to solve it so you can have a deep understanding of how the problem is affecting the workplace and what you need to do to solve it. Ask questions. To find the most useful information for solving your problem, you may need to ask certain questions to your teammates, managers or clients and customers.

It's useful to find out what information you need and to craft straightforward questions to help you fully understand which solutions work best for your situation. Be creative. Creativity is useful when problem-solving because you may encounter challenges you and your team haven't seen before or add to existing solutions for better outcomes. Practice your creativity by using brainstorming and inspiration from other situations and activities, like word association, that can inspire you to think differently and create innovative solutions.

Provide guidance rather than commands. As a manager, one of your goals in the workplace may be to lead your team to think for themselves and work with a certain level of independence. You can accomplish this by guiding them through the problem-solving process rather than telling them exactly what to do and how to do it. In the early stages of problem-solving, you need to have strong observational skills.

Rather than accepting issues at face value, you need to demonstrate lateral thinking and analytical abilities. These will help you properly assess what's going on and pinpoint the core cause of the issue. Define the Problem: Identify the issue that you're dealing with. Observe the problem area closely to form a detailed image of what's wrong. Delve into and explore employee behaviour, workplace policies, and operating procedures. Keep your focus on the problem at this point, and resist the urge to define the problem in terms of a solution.

Brainstorm Alternatives: This is one of the most important stages of problem-solving. It requires a careful balance of creativity and logical thinking.

Compare all possible alternatives. Calculate the cost, time, and resources necessary for each approach as well as the return that you can expect from various strategies. Choose the Best Strategy: Strong decision-making is essential at this stage. After carefully considering all your options, you must select the best strategy for your problem and stick with your choice. Employees who waver or struggle to commit to a single plan don't make good problem solvers because they get stuck at this essential point in the process.

Implement Your Solution: Implementation is the critical peak of the problem-solving process. This is where you draw up an action plan, share it with the appropriate personnel, and follow through with your chosen approach. As you explore potential solutions to the issue, you must demonstrate persistence. Finding the right approach to the issue won't come easily. Innovative thinking will serve you well.

Implementing your solution requires a careful balance of teamwork and leadership. You'll need to demonstrate resilience to withstand inevitable pushback from co-workers who resist change.

Problem-solving skills are important in every industry. There's no business that's immune to the regular onslaught of problems. Using established tools and techniques will help you improve your approach to solving problems that you, your team and your organisation face. You will become more successful at solving problems and therefore more successful at what you do. GBS Corporate Training offer a range of Problem Solving Training courses which help you make problem solving one of your core and essential skills.

You will learn a systematic process for problem solving; understanding and resolving them. The tools introduced will help you to problem solve much more effectively. Our Problem Solving Training is highly practical and has been designed for anyone in a managerial role and for teams that need to resolve problems or find new and better ways of achieving their goals. On this course, you will learn skills to help you gain a clear understanding of the problem faced, and the most appropriate problem solving methodology to follow.

There are a variety of problem solving methods used throughout business today, most of which use a team based approach. However to gain their maximum potential the selected approach needs to be correctly applied and managed. Quite often teams will be tasked to resolve a particular problem only to have the project stall or take longer than anticipated.

On our PT — Managing Problem Solving course, you will learn the skills such as understanding team roles, team dynamics, engagement methods and facilitation skills needed to effectively solve problems. This course provides an excellent foundation in the methodologies and tools commonly used in problem solving activities today. Completion of two of our Practitioner level courses including PT — Managing Problem Solving course, together with demonstrable work experience, can lead to the gold standard Chartered Quality Professional CQP status, which is recognised alongside other roles with Chartered status.

Remember, this is not about assigning blame. Instead, leaders should evaluate and understand all the angles of the issue so that action can be taken moving forward. Often, problems need to be explained to stakeholders along with a set of solutions if the problem is one that persists over time. By using data that you already have, you will be able to translate your discoveries into something tangible for others in your business.

Transparency is always a good start to communication. You need to be clear about your plan of action with the team you lead as well as with your key stakeholders. Remember, people who are supporting the solution need to stay motivated and invested in the task until it is resolved.

Once you have brainstormed a few solutions, you may want to start making those ideas actionable. You can do this by creating lists with accurate actions, timelines and prioritization. As a leader, you should be evaluating the cost and time for these results and communicating this info back to stakeholders.

Mistakes can only be evaluated from a hindsight perspective. Errors that occur should be part of a growth and development strategy. Leaders should use these mistakes to improve their overall approach, process and implementation plan.