Leaders, use this framework to tackle any challenge thrown your way

What’s harder than being a leader? Being a good leader.

And even the best leaders have to evolve and learn new strategies, especially as organizational challenges continue to crop up. So, that’s why Katie Best, leadership coach and consultant, offers leaders a framework for tackling any challenge thrown their way in her book, The Ten Toughest Leadership Problems: And How to Solve Them.

Best shared with HR Brew the leadership framework she crafted to help leaders navigate any storm.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What will HR pros learn from your book?

What I would be hoping that they’d be getting from it is they’d be able to use the model that the book contains, so the problem-solving model that I’ve created, and be able to walk through that in order to coach themselves, or teach the leaders in their organizations to coach themselves, so they can handle their leadership problems going forward.

What is the problem-solving model you mentioned?

It’s called “solve,” because it’s S, O, L, V, E. So there’s five components to it. You work through them in order. The first one is: “S:” State your problem. So that’s where leaders will try and boil down even the most complicated problem into one or two sentences that talk about what they’ve observed with the problem and also what consequences they’re finding the problem has…If it’s a problem with employee engagement, they might say, “I’m finding that my team [is] really disengaged,” and the consequence is, “Our productivity has heavily dropped.”

Once they’ve got their one to two sentences, they move on to the second stage, which is: “O,” and that’s open the box. And, during this stage, they unpack the problem in more detail, and this is where they are looking for causes and what it is that might be going on. And, I really encourage people at this stage to slow down a bit and to go and have conversations with people, observe what’s happening.

Then, you go on to the third stage, which is: Lay out your solutions. This is where leaders start to try and build a possible solution to the problem. Often, they’ll have uncovered quite a lot of possible solutions in the earlier open-the-box stage, so it might be that they’ve got something ready to go…Then, you’ve got: “V,” which is venture forth!, and I put an exclamation mark at the end of that with the kind of idea of a rallying cry. So, you’ve got what you need and it’s time to start putting that plan into action.

Finally, “E” is elevate your learning, and that’s where the leaders will think about what they’ve learned as a result of this process, both about themselves, also about the problem, etc., and what they can do to then further that learning, or further that knowledge and that skills that they’ve developed.

Did anything change from when you started writing the book?

I actually looked back at the proposal the other day, and I thought, “Wow, it’s such a different book.”...One thing that changed was, because the framework was something that was in my head when I first started writing, it started off in the writing process as the five Es, and then we were like, that’s just not catchy enough. That’s not exciting. People aren’t going to remember that, so I worked really hard on how we could turn it into something that was more catchy and more memorable. Hence where we came up with SOLVE.

The other thing that changed was I had maybe seven or eight of the problems set when I started writing, and we intentionally kept a bit of flexibility to see what happened, and I hadn’t got hybrid and remote working on that list initially. Not because it wasn’t going to continue, but more, I just thought everyone is going to start to realize what the solutions to these problems are, and they weren’t realizing it. So, I decided that it was definitely going to be a good idea to include a chapter on that.