Teaching Others to Fish: Ruminations of a Recovering “Fixer”

by Joe Schroeder, PhD, AWSA Associate Executive Director

“Hi, Everyone. My name is Joe, and I’m a fixer. ”

“Hi, Joe!” those seated around the circle replied. . . .

If you are a servant leader, chances are that you also are a “fixer.” And while being a fixer may often make things a bit more tidy, doing so doesn’t often really serve others or the institution all that well. That’s because fixing things for others typically stymies development and diminishes potential in them -- and in you! And as leaders, our biggest ultimate legacy are those we leave behind. So for these reasons, I now consider myself a recovering fixer, who will need to work on this for the rest of my life. And that’s because our own perfectionistic tendencies and habitual service to “the urgent” can keep us locked into such an unproductive routine that underserves others. So if this moniker of “fixer” might describe you as well, welcome to my little intervention group today. You are among friends!

Practically described, being a fixer is akin to giving others a fish when what you really ought to do is teach them to fish. So as a recovering “fixer,” I would like to humbly offer a tool I learned a couple years back from Dr. Fred Johnson from Initiative One that I believe can help lots of leaders serve others a whole lot better, by teaching them how to solve their own problems productively. In other words, you can use this tool to teach others how to fish!

The tool is called the Decision-Making Process, and it is particularly useful in the following common situations that any school leader will easily recognize:

Helping a group move from problem-identification to problem-solving mode
Showing an underperformer what he/she can really do
Re-focusing someone who wants you to solve his/her problem

The process should never take more than 20 minutes to work through and involves the following five steps whenever one of these scenarios above presents itself to you:

Evaluation

What is the issue or challenge?

The Goal

What is the fix for the issue or challenge? Be specific!

The Obstacles

What are the challenges that I/we will face in trying to achieve this goal?

Action Plans

Create 3 action plans for each obstacle

Who will carry out the action plan?
When will the action plan be completed?

Accountability

Who will be responsible for the goal or for the individual action plans?
When will I/we review the goal for progress?
What is the target date for completion?
How will I/we know that I/we have succeeded?

As a very simple example to explain how the process might work, let’s say an employee is regularly late for work. So you sit down with the person to work through this process. The upshot of the discussion is that the person identifies three potential actions/solutions to the goal of being regularly on time for work:

Get to bed earlier
Purchase an alarm clock
Move the clock ten feet away from bed

With these actions (i.e., potential solutions) identified, then you coach the person to choose the one plan (if that will suffice) that is most likely to achieve the goal and build the accountability steps around that.

The first time a person or group is stuck, I can work through this process with them from start to finish (i.e., teach them to fish) After that, anytime that person comes to me with a problem to discuss, I ask/require if he/she first worked through the decision-making process. If so, then we are ready to discuss the merit of the potential actions/solutions under consideration. If not, then I politely ask that he/she works through the process first so that our conversation can be solution- rather than problem-focused and so that we can increase the likelihood of achieving a successful outcome for the time and effort invested.

There are several benefits for implementing this process frequently and well. The Decision-Making Process:

Helps people give power to the goal, rather than to the obstacle
Generates creativity and root cause thinking by seeking multiple ways to solve a problem
Reinforces follow through and reciprocal accountability
Provides a tangible way to have people bring potential solutions to discuss, rather than just problems to identify
Puts the leader most times in a coaching stance, from which most influence occurs.

And for those of you who have ever stated the expectation that you want people coming to you not only with problems but also with potential solutions to the problems in hand, you now have a common process to teach and consistently implement in order to put legs to such an expectation.

In summary, arguably our biggest work and our lasting legacy as leaders is to coach others to reach their potential and increasingly solve their own problems, rather than to try to solve them for them. The Decision-Making Process can be a helpful tool that any fixer can learn to use with others to shift increasingly to a more productive and impactful mode for all involved.

“And with that, this meeting of Fixers Anonymous is now adjourned. . . . Anyone interested in doing a little fishing?”

References

“The Decision-Making Process.” Leadership Transformation. Green Bay, WI: Initiative One Leadership Institute, 2016.