Welcome to IGW Insights Issue 22!
Have you ever felt the frustration simmering beneath the surface of your team? Or caught yourself venting about some persistent issue, hoping that putting it out there would spark change? You’re not alone. Complaints, whether from team members or within ourselves, often come up as a natural response to friction or frustration. Yet, what if we could harness that energy and transform it into something productive, even strategic?
As leaders, we’re all too familiar with the constant pulse of complaints, big and small, that show up in our work environments. Some leaders might instinctively cringe at complaints, brushing them off as negativity. I used to feel that way myself, viewing complaining as disruptive noise rather than insight. But over time, I’ve come to understand that complaints — whether our own or those of our team — often point to real problems.
So, here’s the question: how do we turn this raw material into something meaningful? Click here to find out.
Recommended Reading and Listening
I, Pencil is a short read, and very much worth rereading regularly. It is the biography of the humble pencil, but it is also the story of the triumph of the entrepreneurial spirit and the capitalist ideal.
Journaling Exercise
Practice evolving a complaint into a strategic objective:
- Identify the complaint: What friction have you or your team surfaced over the last couple of weeks?
- Determine whether or not solving the problem is strategically necessary right now: Does solving the problem now move your company’s strategic objectives forward? If the answer is no, it’s time to set aside the complaint
- If, conversely, the problem must get solved now, it’s time to identify a solution, metrics, and ownership: Who can help me solve this problem? How will we know when we’ve succeeded?
- The final step is to rally the troops: Gather the people you identified in step 3, and challenge them to come up with the solution and take ownership of the results
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Onward and upward,
Dan Weiss, CEO
