Why you might be missing what’s lying beneath the surface
Most of the “business problems” I get asked about are not business problems.
They look like they are – the metrics are real, the impact is measurable. So it’s easy to reach for a business fix. But most of the time it doesn’t stick. Here’s why.
“My team can’t write emails like I do”
The open rates prove it and enquiries drop when someone else writes them. These are real numbers so it’s a real business problem – or so it seems.
Look closer and the question actually isn’t why the team writes worse emails than you. It’s why nobody has ever written down how you do it so that they could. The style exists in one head only. What if it was never going to transfer – because writing it down would mean someone else could do this bit without you? What if that being needed is significant on a whole different level.
That’s not a training gap. That’s the business needing you a little less, and something in you is not quite ready for that yet.
“My team can’t get things done”
Also true and measurable. Same instinct – manage harder, set deadlines, hold people to account.
But follow it one step further and we find this: a new idea lands, gets handed to the team, and before it’s built, a better one arrives. The first project stalls. The team starts the second. A third turns up by Wednesday.
From the outside, it looks like the team lacks discipline or they just can’t finish things or the systems they use are not right. Maybe drop Slack and install something else. But, when you look beneath the surface, nothing was ever left alone long enough to finish, let alone fail or succeed. The bottleneck was never follow-through in the team. It was an unstoppable flow of ideas that had them jumping from one thing to another.
Here’s the thing …
Neither of these gets fixed with a system, a KPI, or a stricter deadline. You can buy the software, write the SOP, run the training – and if the pattern underneath hasn’t shifted, none of it holds. And what that looks like is that six months later you’re back here, having fought to get the upgrade done and paid the fees and are still wondering why nothing changed.
It’s like the iceberg – what you see is often only a fraction of what is really there, and many business owners I speak with are only looking at the visible. If the problem isn’t there – if it’s hidden below the surface – it’ll never get resolved with the usual approach.
That’s the test I use now. Would the business fix actually work – or is there a pattern underneath it, still running the show?
Where do you recognise this? Not in your team. In yourself. What’s the thing you’ve been meaning to write down, hand over, or let go of – and haven’t? What’s the issue that persists in your business even after numerous attempts to fix it?
Most people who work with me say the same thing after the first call: I didn’t expect it to go there. If you’re curious what that means for you, let’s find out. https://neillawsoncoaching.as.me/clarity-call