"I can’t standing listening to you go on and on about your problem", I finally interrupted a client the other day. "For the last 10 minutes you’ve told me about the entire situation and blamed all the people around you for the problem. I can’t stand it anymore. All I want to know is how are your going to fix it. Eliminate it. Get passed it. Move on."

Stunned, he tried to tell me that I needed to know all the details in order to understand the situation.

"I don’t want to understand the situation. Maybe you think its relevant. Or perhaps you feel a need to provide all the details but with all due respect, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are committed to solving the problem and you do so in an appropriate and effective manner."

I paused for a second and asked him how much time and energy he has spent over they years laboring over the problems in the business without eliminating them.

He admitted that it was a lot and he was tired.

"Then stop it." I challenged him.

Are you responding to problems and frustrations in your business in an appropriate and productive manner?

So often I find businesses caught up in the drama of discussing WHAT HAPPENED versus HOW DO WE FIX IT.

If you spend more than three minutes discussing what happened you are WASTING your time. What happened doesn’t’t matter. What matters is what the business is going to do to eliminate the frustration or problem from coming up again.

The most productive way of eliminating the problem or frustrations is to acknowledge that it is likely the result of a lack of a system. Fix the system. Fix the problem.

Belaboring on the problem and how it got there will not lead to a solution. In fact, it often results in finger pointing and placing blame. Stop it. It simply doesn’t’t work.

Great people, great leaders, great managers don’t point fingers and cast blame.

Have a problem or frustration? Begin by asking the question, what system do we need in place to eliminate it forever.