Hards Things First

Excellence is unlikely to happen if you don’t address the hard problems early in project execution. Habits for cultivating excellence won’t form unless you shed light on hard problems from the start. Excellence requires practice, and you need the team to work through the strenuous parts to build endurance. Psychologically speaking, teams build confidence in themselves when they solve the hard parts early. Self-efficacy enhances a team’s morale and attitude, creating a positive feedback loop that fosters high performance. Simply put, when you lead a team to confront challenging aspects, the team will cultivate the right habits for excellence, and their efficacy levels increase, ultimately leading to improved team performance.

Many project ideas fail to reach their full potential for excellence because people either overlook the challenging aspects or assume that those issues will be addressed in some unspecified future. Unfortunately, hard problems rarely become easy over time unless you act. When you or your team formulates a new idea or goal, most get excited about starting something new. There is hope of achieving remarkable success, driving value for your customers or stakeholders, and thereby reaping personal benefits, such as recognition or career growth. As people work on those ideas, more often than not, reality sets in, excitement fades, and the team performance gradually reaches its level of mediocrity.

Even when you build a minimum viable product (MVP) and want to incrementally improve it, unless you make principled choices early and create the proper infrastructure to practice incremental improvements, you may struggle to enhance your product beyond its MVP.

Often, the hard things may be technical, specific to the systems you work with. Let me give you an example from my personal experience to illustrate the point. At one point, in an enterprise-level transformation project, addressing a massive, yet critical, legacy piece of software was the hard problem. In the first incarnation of that transformation project, the project founders didn’t diagnose the current state to identify the hard problems. They started the project and asked the people to run. The project picked up pace, but folks began solving smaller and more convenient aspects of the project. The hard problem remained. Some people became skeptical and didn’t believe in the project’s success because they knew the hard parts, but they were not forthcoming or influential in changing the course. Several months later, the project had to be paused and restructured to address the hard problem and reignite the fire in the project.

However, sometimes the hard problem may be the organization’s readiness or the necessary alignment required for the project to be successful. In one particular case, I had to delay the tactical execution of a project since the team was not ready. The hard problem was finding the right leader and then fixing the team structure. In a more recent situation, there was a struggle to integrate AI into a team’s ways of working. But the hard part was not AI — it involved (a) teams not having the time due to the current busyness, (b) some debt that was contributing to their busyness, and (c) not knowing where to employ and benefit from AI. The team began leveraging AI once we started addressing those hard parts.

I hope I persuaded you of the benefits of tackling the hard problems early. But how do you get going?

First, start with a thorough diagnosis of the situation to identify the hard problems. Diagnosis is one of my favorite leadership tools. Most leaders and teams are persuaded and sometimes misled by the words and phrases used to describe outcomes, and fail to take the time to question why success is guaranteed. It’s no wonder projects fail or never rise above mediocrity. Diagnosis helps identify potential blockers for success. It can help reveal organizational, technical, and cultural obstacles.

Second, you must then have the backbone to acknowledge and have the power to influence others to focus on the hard parts. Acknowledging the hard parts privately is one thing, but influencing others to recognize them takes work. People may ignore you and mistake you for a naysayer who does not believe in the leadership or the organization. This brings me to my third point.

Third, practice surfacing and solving hard problems. Start small and gradually build a track record and credibility. Work hard at building the track record early in your career. Recognizing, acknowledging, and solving hard problems is a hallmark of leadership excellence. Such excellence, too, requires practice over time.