Every worthwhile career journey will meet roadblocks, which may require a detour. Regrettably, far too many people succumb to frustration. Moreover, they give up their quest prematurely. Often, they blame themselves: “I guess I do not have what it takes to be a leader.” The negative self-talk applies equally to other positions. Reframing your problems and challenges as opportunities are essential to finding solutions that you have yet to consider.

“If a problem can't be solved within the frame it was conceived, the solution lies in reframing the problem.” ― Brian McGreevy

Sometimes you may blame the business world, as it seems to throw up barriers for leaders who do not fit the traditional mould. This group includes introverts, women, people of colour, First Nations people, and those with unique educational and career histories. Also, the business world does not recognize the hidden power of multipotentialites.

Most Limitations Are Self-Created

People rarely recognize that most of the limitations that they experience in business and life were self-created. The way you think defines the box in which you have placed yourselves. Therefore, you are capable of overcoming the challenges and pivoting to a new role. Often your mindset makes it impossible for you to escape that box. So, short-term setbacks seem like insurmountable obstacles.

We encourage our clients to have a growth mindset. It is best if your reframing is about creating a new mental landscape with a broader scope of freedom, a higher degree of flexibility, and a set of alternative ways of approaching any problem. This mindset often leads to new and unexpected solutions.

So, in many cases, reframing is about seeing yourself in a new light. Perhaps when you were young, you did not see yourself as a potential business leader. After college, you accepted a position that aligned with your major. You assumed it would provide you with a steady income. Today, you think that something is missing. You may think it is a lack of career advancement. However, it is a lack of fulfillment.

Find the Black Swan

I have worked with people who did not consider leadership as a career trajectory in because of their background. They may come from a minority-group heritage or an inner-city neighbourhood. They view that they do not match up with the conventional image of a leader. However, once they understood that their performance traits align with those of high performing leaders, everything changed —  and the “black swan” was revealed.

These individuals were both surprised and impressed that they are well suited to assume a leadership role. This gap in understanding regarding leadership exists widely in the business. I encourage everyone to read The CEO Next Door. You will learn that dyed-in-the-wool introverts can make excellent leaders. Like every top performer, they use their strengths in the right situations — situational strengths and implement strategies where missing performance traits are not strong.

In retrospect, some stereotypes influence many people’s thinking.  They assume that all future business leaders come from privileged backgrounds attend high-ranked suburban schools or fancy preparatory academies. Also that leaders need to be naturally gregarious and fun-loving extroverts. However, these are false assumptions. Moreover, to their detriment, many executives and boards continue to have firm beliefs that severely limited the pool of candidates that they interview.  Decision makers must be open to the full talent pool when seeking the next generation of leaders. In other words, the culturally reinforced concept of business leadership is false. It needs reframing.

Progress

Social changes from the civil rights movement, the women’s march and the gay rights revolution have broadened the way we think about leaders. Millennials are lucky to have role models of all genders and ethnic backgrounds. They exist in the arts, sports, business, science, technology, and politics.

Globalization has brought fresh insights that dramatically reframed our understanding of the world. You need to know yourself if you want to progress. You need to understand your performance traits and micro-motives.

Making An Organization Tick

I am fascinated by organizational dynamics. I study the shaping, enforcing, and the changing culture and norms of enterprises and the impact these changes have on its performance. Moreover, it explains why some organizations are productive, creative, and progressive, while others are inefficient, slow-moving, and stagnant.

Furthermore, understanding how the best leaders develop and communicate a vision that inspires people, enabling individuals and groups to achieve far results beyond their expectations is essential in today’s competitive environment.

Organizations are living organisms. The processes, people, and technologies link together in complex interrelationships to shape the organization. Our business provides strategic insights to organizations and individuals about people, money, and governance — the foundation of organizational culture — to help them succeed.

However, mastering the art of leading people from chaos to order takes time. We call this style of leadership — agile leadership. Moreover, fewer than five percent of people are naturally high performing agile leaders.

Strategic Insights

“For any single thing of importance, there are multiple reasons.” ― M. Scott Peck

Most important, studying organizational dynamics offers me disruptive ways to think about business leadership. So, a manager or executive does not have to be a charismatic person who leads their colleagues through the power of personal charm, flamboyant oratory, or social status. Interestingly, he or she may be someone with analytical skills, an engineering bent, a multipotentialite, a gift for accurate observation, a powerful sense of logic, much common sense, and patience and determination.

Once people see the performance traits that shape their self-definition through fresh eyes, they can make rapid progress. They no longer relegate weaknesses that may have them sitting on the sidelines. Instead, they understand the strengths they have that that could parlay into a career and even a leader where they will find fulfilment. Without realizing it, I had reframed myself. As a result, the doors that I had assumed were locked began to swing open wide.

So, reframing is a way of thinking. It comes naturally to some people. More importantly, it is a learnable skill.  Through the years, I have helped many colleagues, team members, and clients master the reframing competency.

Trapped in Your Box

Your antenna should go up if you find yourself surrounded by people who define problems using expressions like:

• “Everybody knows . . .”
• “It’s obvious that . . .”
• “We have always done . . .”

These are signs that you and your team are trapped in a box of your own making. Moreover, you are in desperate need of reframing. So, you need to take steps to shake up your thinking and that of your group.

As you learn and practice the art of reframing, you will find a growth opportunity in almost any problem.

Customer Service Solution

At a young age, I had the chance to practice reframing on a big scale when I was named the CEO of Scarborough Public Utilities (SPUC), a $400 million water and electric utility, in 1992. At the time, the utility was deeply troubled. It had suffered through a 13-week strike. As a result, SPUC’s long-standing service culture had severely deteriorated. Its reputation among residential, commercial, institutional, and industrial customers had plummeted.

As one can imagine, there was a lengthy list of systemic problems that had to be addressed to begin a turnaround at SPUC. One of the most urgent was regarding a flood of complaints about slow and inaccurate responses by SPUC customer service representatives. These folks were our front-line employees charged with solving problems and answering questions for customers.

The obvious solution—one applied by most organizations (and frequently pitched by consultants) —would be to retrain our customer service representatives. Once retrained, the playbook is to increase the pressure on reps to respond to questions more quickly. That might have improved things a bit. We would shave response times by a few seconds, and our representatives could do a slightly better job of finding the right information from our database.

However, I realized that merely pressuring team members to do better without fundamentally improving the process is a short-term fix. It could easily backfire. Morale would likely suffer. Moreover, when reps got single-mindedly fixated on speed, they would not hear what customers need.

I sensed that fixing the problem would call for reframing it.

Get the Team Onside

When I met with our leadership team. I set out that my focus was on improving customer service processes and systems. I intentionally refrained from asking the obvious question: What can you do to induce our service reps to respond more quickly to questions? Instead, I asked:

• What kinds of questions are our customers asking us?
• What type of information is needed to respond to those questions?
• How can we do to provide better information more accurately and quickly?

My reframing of the problem led us in a new, more fruitful direction. The leaders in charge of customer service spent some time talking with their front-line team members to determine the roadblocks that were making it hard for team members to help customers with their concerns. They found that the real problem was not the training, talent, or motivation of the service reps—it was a structural problem.

We organized the SPUC’s service teams around customer groups. Interestingly it made sense from an internal perspective and the customer perspective. It meant that service reps could concentrate on mastering the details of service for a particular group of customers.

Not having our service reps organized by customer groups often meant that customers would be shunted around from one customer rep to another before finding one who could help with a simple question. Moreover, when a customer called with questions about several concerns, the calls were even more convoluted and time-consuming.

Reframe With an External Perspective

By reframing the problem of response time to one of considering it from the external perspective rather than from the inside view of our service team showed us that our organizational structure was backward. By reorganizing our service system into customer-centred units, we created groups of reps who worked consistently with specific customers. They became well equipped to answer their questions no matter what the issue involved. Customers could call SPUC and expect to speak with a familiar representative who knew them and was prepared to answer their questions with speed and accuracy.

While redesigning our service system and retraining our reps was a complicated and costly undertaking—but its improved SPUC’s relationships with customers in a way that is merely cracking the whip on our employees could never have done. It would never have happened without our first reframing of the problem from the customer perspective.

Develop Your Reframing Skills

Multipotentialites are natural reframers. However, reframing is a powerful tool for jumpstarting your career and solving the challenges you will face as a business leader. So, you are likely wondering what you can do to develop your reframing skills.

The most effective way to acquire a talent for reframing is to open yourself up to new perspectives deliberately. Do not just talk to people from inside your organization or even from your industry. Expose yourself to diverse sources of innovative ideas. It would be best if you met, swap ideas with, and learn from people who come from different occupations, cultures, and apply vastly different perspectives to the problems and opportunities of life.

Involve Your Team

If you are a leader, involve your team members as well. Moreover, there are lots of ways to do this. Some firms stir up their team members’ thinking and suggest new contexts in which to view their work. They organize periodic field trips to movies, concerts, sports events, art exhibits, food festivals, and other off-the-beaten-track experiences too.

For example, Google invites authors to visit its headquarters to discuss their books—most of which deal with social and cultural topics that are unrelated to the company’s web-based business activities. At SPUC, we would invite customers to come in to tell us about their business and the impact (good and bad) that our service was having on them.

Our reframing was if the customers expect service, what does it cost them when they do not have it, or it is not at the quality they expect. This reframing led us to measure power outages in terms of customer impact costs rather than duration, and frequency. We used this for establishing capital and maintenance investments on behalf of our customers. An interruption for a residential customer was more than ten times what they paid for electricity and nearly 500 times for an office during business hours. It changed our maintenance programs and drove us to build smart grids 25 years ago.

Learn From Others

So, if you do not have the facilities to host an author appearance, attend a reading by a domain expert in some field that may have a unique relationship to your work. Another option is to ask your customer to host you and give your team a tour of their facilities.

Also, you can swap site visits with well-managed organizations from fields that that may be nearby. You will learn from each other. For example, if you work for a provider of business services, such as law, advertising, or accounting, consider visiting a local craft brewer or fashion design house. If you work for an organization that makes and markets consumer products, you could ask for a behind-the-scenes tour at a science museum, theatre, or nearby hotel.

Later, debrief your colleagues over lunch. It is best if you chat about such questions as:

• Are our hosts creating any forms of value that we could create as well?
• Are there things that they are doing that we could adapt to our business?
• Did you notice any activities or practices that were relevant to the work we do?
• Are they serving customer needs in ways that we have never thought about, but that our customers might also share?

Concluding Thoughts

From now on, I want you to practice reframing other people's negativity as a reminder of how not to be.” — T. Harv Eker

Consciously seeking new ways of thinking about the challenges you face is the art of reframing. These may be related to your career journey or in your daily work. The more you do this practice, the sooner it will turn into a regular habit, and the more instinctive it becomes. Furthermore, you will discover yourself experiencing a steady stream of creative ideas. More importantly, these ideas can turn seemingly insoluble problems into opportunities for innovation and growth.