"Isolated tactical problems are very rare, and if you are seeing any situation as "how do I respond to this email" or "what do I say in this meeting," chances are, are you misframing a broader problem and heading towards [a disaster.]" — from Venkat Rao's Be Slightly Evil
Indeed.
I see this commonly. Very commonly. My mix of work is with team members on nonprofit projects, collaborators on creative projects, clients on commercial work, and generally being the go-to person in my social circle whenever there's something complex and important that is hard to figure out.
So I see it across the spectrum. Employee-manager, manager-employee, company-customer, company-client, company-supplier, supplier-buyer, interdepartmental rivalries at larger companies, and so on.
I have a rule: Once the same problem happens three times, we must start looking for an upstream solution.
Now, the savvy person will pry at that. "What's a problem, exactly?"
Good question.
You could also say, "What is this 'must'?"
Good question.
Yes, those are good questions. The answer to both of them is the same: you have to put things in context.
If your sales staff are doing cold calls, a 2% closing rate might be fantastic and a source of great celebration. If you're closing 2% of qualified referrals, you probably have an unmitigated disaster on your hands, a gigantic leak from one of the most important buckets, and something that probably indicates a whole host of other problems.
You also have to look at resources on-hand. If it takes too long to do your annual taxes and wastes a couple days, that might be worth accepting for another year or two while you work on more pressing issues. Even if it happens a few years in a row, you can say: "That's something to work on at some point. Noted. Will revisit next year." You can keep making that judgment call. It's fine.
So long as you notice it.
Indeed, you need to know what's critical. Qualified referrals = almost always critical; being highly time-efficient in processing your taxes for a new business without very high revenues, without inventory, without depreciation, without anything else complicated = not critical.
You must know what's critical, and you need to have some sort of standard of what's somewhat realistic and possible in the critical area.
Then, of course, you have limited resources and nearly infinite possibilities for using them. So the must start looking for an upstream solution means, at least, acknowledging that there is probably an upstream problem, and considering giving it resources.
If fixing the upstream problem net-saves-time and pays for itself within a few months, and it's in a critical area, you should almost always fix it. Oh, but you're too busy? Yeah, yeah, you're super busy, you don't have the time or bandwidth to fix it. Oh, no, I totally understand. Yeah, I get it. You're busy.
That's what I hear a lot. People who run businesses or otherwise are high achievers often like to talk about how they're way too busy to make their life simpler and easier.
Well, fine. And I'm not in favor of overreacting to a single once-off occurrence. But the third time it happens, it's like: Okay, this is for real. This is a real problem. We can and do have to firefight this, but the time it takes to firefight this right now probably exceeds the time it takes to take a really solid crack at never having this problem ever again.
For instance, if you're offering expensive specialized technical services to large companies and very often at the end of the sales process, when the deal is "just about done," you then get "Okay, now you've just got to get added as an approved vendor..." — a process that takes 3 to 10 weeks — well, now I'd say you must improve your sales process to ask questions upfront about how internal authorizations work. If the company has "approved vendor status," you should see if you can find a way to get the qualified vendor authorization going earlier, maybe even during the first discussions. Or would it be possible and feasible to rebrand your services or re-price them such that approvals aren't necessary? It might make sense to always, as part of he sales process, have the prospective client (or one of their direct reports who specializes in it) walk you through precisely, step-by-step, in granular detail, the most successful and enjoyable onboarding/integration of a new supplier or provider they've had.
The answer will vary based on industries, of course. The first stab at fixing the problem might not be the right one. If you always need to get signing authority from the CEO on a certain type of purchase they're trying to push down spending on, or one area is budget controlled and another isn't, or if purchases over $4999.99 need to be signed off on, or...
It gets complicated. But, "Oh my God, we had the deal locked up, and now we're in approved-vendor-hell again..." — this is not a tactical problem any more. Yes, let's pull out our best political skills and figure out exactly what we need to to give them to get approved, and by whom, and how much we can oh-so-gently push them to have it happen very-slightly-faster.
But the game, at that point, is this tiptoeing sort of thing. The worst part is, there might even be some super-magical tactical thing possible to sail through the approval process, but the lack of addressing this as an issue upstream means we now have no clue, and we're at the mercy or their timetables and good luck as we try to figure this out from behind the 8-ball.
Use tactics, of course. Firefight when necessary. But once you notice regularly recurring problems, it's time to find a strategic or operational solution. Repeat problems are not to be dealt with tactically.