What Are the Top 10 Ways to Solve Management Problems?
The top ten ways to solve management problems are to prioritize problems with the Pareto Principle, focus on problems you control, utilize root cause analysis, make decisions with facts, break the problem down, use your team, break out of your paradigm, obtain objective input, consider all possibilities, and hire a consultant. Solving problems is not specifically a management task, but managers are faced with a lot of daily problems that need to be solved. As a manager you have a slightly different set of resources than your employees.
Each of the ten is a filter as much as a fix. The hard part of management is rarely a shortage of problems, it is deciding which of the hundred things going wrong this week deserve your attention today. So how do you, as a manager, go about solving your issues? What are the ten ways to solve management problems?
10 Ways to Solve Management Problems
Although solving issues is not strictly a management responsibility, managers are confronted with a large number of them on a daily basis. You have a somewhat different number of capabilities as a manager than your employees.
Management’s objective is to reduce the recurrence of issues, which means we must confront them head-on before circumstances compel us to do so. The ten methods run in order for a reason. The first two narrow the list down to what matters and what you can act on, the middle six give you a way to work the problem, and the last two tell you when to look outside your own department. Here are ten methods to use to solve management problems.
1. Prioritize Problems
Start by separating the problems into categories. Use the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) to prioritize problems and separate the trivial many from the vital few. Sure 100 things are going wrong, but if you can concentrate on the most important problems first, some of the rest will just go away in the process.
Make the ranking concrete rather than intuitive. List every open problem, estimate what each one costs you per month if you leave it alone, then rank descending and draw a line where the cumulative cost reaches roughly 80 percent of the total. Work above the line this month and leave the rest on the list where you can still see it. A long list is not a failure, an unranked list is.
2. Focus on Problems You Control
Next, sort the issues based on how much control you have in order to focus on problems you can control. Why worry about problems that are out of your control?
For example, break them into groups: full control, partial control or no control.
Use a simple test for which group a problem lands in. If you can fix it with your own budget and your own people, it is full control. If you need one other department to agree, it is partial control. If it needs a customer, a regulator or an executive decision, it is no control. Partial control problems get a named owner and a named counterpart in the other department before they get a solution.
Focus first on those problems you have full control over and ignore those you have no control over. You have to fix your department problems first. Don’t try to solve management problems in other areas before you have made sure your area is totally under control.
3. Utilize Root Cause Analysis
Using a structured problem solving methodology like root cause analysis (RCA) ensures you are solving the right problem right. If you try to solve the wrong problems, this will not help you.
RCA also keeps the investigation off the people and on the process. A central tenet of root cause analysis is to identify underlying problems that increase the likelihood of errors while avoiding the trap of focusing on mistakes by individuals, as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality puts it in its primer on the method. That distinction matters, because a fix aimed at a person disappears the moment that person is on leave.
Work a real example. Invoices are going out late. Why? The billing clerk gets the timesheets late. Why? Supervisors approve them on Monday instead of Friday. Why? Nobody told them the cut-off changed. Why? The change was announced in a meeting and never written down. Why? There is no procedure covering the approval cut-off. The root cause is a missing procedure, not a slow supervisor, and only one of those is worth fixing.
4. Make Decisions with Facts
Opinions can lead you astray. Be sure to collect data and make decisions by hard facts. Use the many modern IT tools that can be used to improve business intelligence, data collection, and analysis. Fact based decision making is a core principle of ISO 9001.
Set a floor before you act. Require at least 30 days of data or 20 occurrences, whichever comes first, and write down the number you expect to change and by how much. Structured management frameworks work the same way. The Baldrige Excellence Framework published by NIST includes the Criteria for Performance Excellence, a set of questions that represent the leading edge of validated leadership and management practice, and those questions ask what your results actually are, not what you believe them to be.
5. Break the Problem Down
It is a lot harder to solve big business problems. Divide and conquer. Break the problem down into separate manageable parts that can more easily be solved.
Keep splitting until each part can be finished by one person in one week. If a piece still needs three departments and a quarter of the year, it is not a task, it is a project, and it needs a plan rather than a volunteer.
6. Use Your Team
You are smarter as a group than as any one individual, so empower your employees to involve your whole team to solve management problems.
Give the session a format or the loudest voice will set the agenda. Run 45 minutes. Spend the first 10 in silent written idea generation, then read every idea out, then dot vote. Assign one owner and one date to each idea that survives the vote.
7. Break out of Your Paradigm
Any problem can be solved using the right paradigm. If you are up against an impossible problem then change your paradigm to find the solution. Learn to recognize your own paradigms and break free from them.
Three questions do most of the work here. What would you do if the budget were zero? What would you do if the team were half the size? What would a new manager arriving on Monday, with no history and no loyalty to the current method, do first?
8. Obtain Objective Input
Sometimes a fresh new look at the problem from someone outside of your area can provide the insight missing to solve your problem. This is one way to solve problems by thinking outside the box.
Pick the right outsider. Ask someone who feels the output of your process but does not report to you, and hand them the symptom without your diagnosis attached. The moment you lead with your theory, you get agreement instead of information.
9. Consider All Possibilities
Solutions that may not have worked in the past may work today. Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking that if it was tried before it can’t work. Conditions may have changed enough that it might just work this time. Consider all of your possibilities when trying to solve problems or improve the process.
Give yourself a reopening trigger so this is a decision and not a mood. Revisit any rejected solution once the cost, the technology or the team that rejected it has materially changed. This only works if you recorded why each option was rejected at the time, so write the reason down when you kill an idea.
10. Hire a Consultant
If all else fails, then maybe it’s time to hire a consultant. Consultants bring an objective viewpoint free of your internal politics. Consultants have a wider range of tools to use like value stream mapping and process maps. And consultants have experience solving problems encountered at other companies.
Use a threshold rather than exhaustion. Bring in outside help when the problem has survived two genuine internal attempts, when it crosses three or more departments, or when it needs a certification skill set such as ISO 9001 or lean that nobody on staff holds.
A Management Problem Triage Scorecard
Steps 1, 2 and 10 fit on a single page. Fill one row per open problem in one sitting, then apply the scoring rule underneath. The figures below are an illustrative example, not benchmark data.
| Problem | Cost per month if ignored | Times in last 30 days | Control level | Departments involved | Prior fix attempts | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Invoices going out late | $4,000 | 6 | Full | 1 | 1 | Work now, run RCA |
| Shipping errors on rush orders | $2,500 | 4 | Partial | 2 | 2 | Name a counterpart, then escalate |
| Supplier price changes | $3,000 | 2 | None | 3 | 0 | Monitor only |
| Recurring quality defect | $1,800 | 9 | Partial | 3 | 2 | Route to outside help |
Scoring rule: rank by cost per month, then delete every row marked no control. Work the top three rows that remain, and only the top one if it crosses departments. Any row with two prior failed attempts or three or more departments involved goes to step 10 rather than back to your own team. Anything that recurred three or more times in 30 days is a problem rather than a symptom, so it earns a root cause analysis instead of a workaround.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you tell a management problem from a symptom you should ignore?
A symptom shows up once and costs you an afternoon. A problem repeats on a predictable cycle and costs you that same afternoon every month. Track how often the issue returns over 30 days and treat anything recurring three or more times as a problem that needs root cause analysis rather than a workaround.
What do you do when the real cause sits in another department?
Sort it as partial control and stop trying to fix it alone. Document the effect on your own numbers, name a single counterpart in that department, and bring evidence rather than blame to the first conversation. If the other department will not engage, escalate the documented cost rather than the personality issue.
How many problems should you work on at once?
Most managers can genuinely move three at a time, and one if the problem crosses departments. Everything else stays on the ranked list where you can see it, which is the point of using the Pareto Principle in the first place.
What do you do when a problem keeps coming back after you fixed it?
A recurring problem means you solved a symptom, so go back to the root cause analysis and check whether your fix changed the process or only changed one person’s behavior. Write the change into the procedure, then confirm it held at 30 days and at 90 days.
Is solving management problems the same as managing performance?
They overlap but they are not the same. The US Office of Personnel Management notes that performance management involves much more than just assigning ratings and runs as a continuous cycle of planning, monitoring, developing, rating and rewarding. Problem solving is what you do inside that cycle when monitoring shows something is off.
Ways to Solve Management Problems
If you are having trouble improving your processes, certifying to ISO standards, or implementing lean, then contact Bizmanualz. We will be happy to bring an objective viewpoint, improvement tools and experience gained from solving problems encountered at other companies. We have a lot of ways to solve management problems.
