Before You Call It a People Problem, Identify the Actual Problem

Character, reputation, expertise, energy, impact, mistakes, and people are more connected than they initially appear.

I recently came across a page of Warren Buffett quotes organized around seven areas: character, reputation, expertise, energy, impact, mistakes, and people.

What interested me was not any individual quote.

It was seeing those ideas together.

Because when businesses talk about people, particularly when something is going wrong, we have a tendency to compress a complicated situation into a simple conclusion:

We have a people problem.

Maybe.

But what about the person is actually the problem?

Expertise is one part of performance. Someone either has the knowledge required for a role, can develop it, or there is a gap between their capabilities and what the position requires.

Character is different.

You can teach someone a system. Teaching judgment, integrity, accountability, or how they treat other people is a very different undertaking.

Then there is energy.

Someone can be incredibly productive individually while making everyone around them less effective. Another person may not be the loudest person in the room but consistently makes the people around them better.

That is impact.

Reputation enters the equation because behavior compounds. How someone consistently communicates, follows through, responds under pressure, and works with other people eventually becomes part of how others experience working with them.

And then there are mistakes.

Everyone makes them.

I am less interested in the existence of a mistake than what happens immediately after it.

Does the person acknowledge it?

Hide it?

Blame someone?

Fix it?

Learn from it?

Make the same mistake repeatedly?

Leaders should be willing to ask those same questions of themselves.

People are complicated, which means people problems usually require more diagnosis than the label suggests.

Sometimes you have the wrong person.

Sometimes you have the right person in the wrong role.

Sometimes there is an expertise gap.

Sometimes the person’s behavior is affecting the rest of the team.

Sometimes expectations were never clear.

Sometimes the process is broken.

And sometimes leadership created the conditions producing the behavior it is now trying to correct.

Before making a people decision, identify which problem you are actually solving.

Because changing the person will not fix a process problem.

Training will not fix a character problem.

And holding someone accountable for something leadership has not properly defined will not fix a management problem either.