How to solve workplace problems by focusing on success

So I was one of those kids, and I know I'm not alone here, who would come home with the 98 on the test, and my parents immediately wanted to know what happened to the other two points. Can you relate? The thing is my parents were great, really, and they were joking mostly. But the truth is the human eye and mind are drawn to what's wrong or what's missing over what's right and what's working.

You know when your boss says 10 amazing things about you, and one piece of here's something you can work on feedback, we all know which of those 11 things takes up the most real estate in your brain. I'm sure there's an evolutionary reason for this, something about saving ourselves from the saber tooth tiger and all. But given that saber-tooth tiger sightings in the workplace have been pretty low this year, don't we all wish we could focus just a little more on the positives?

And the good news is this isn't just about protecting ourselves emotionally. It's actually a really strong problem solving approach. The craft of appreciative inquiry, or as I sometimes call it the other AI, has been around for years and it's something I use a lot with clients when we're trying to activate stronger results, we dive deep not into what's broken, but into what's already working, and we explore what those things have to teach us.

So today, let's talk about how you might use this mindset or approach to make wonderful things happen for you and your workplace. Let's start with the basics of appreciative inquiry. Like what does it look like in practice? It actually follows a structured five phase process that helps organizations unlock their strengths and build on them. We start with define. Instead of jumping into problem solving mode, we take a step back and decide what do we actually wanna create more of?

Like if you're struggling with low engagement, rather than asking how do we fix engagement, we reframe the question to how can we build a culture where people feel excited to contribute? This is where we begin. Then we move to discover, and here's where we dig into what's already working. We look for stories and examples and moments of success. Even tiny ones are fine, that give us clues about what's driving positive outcomes.

Maybe it's a leader who makes people feel heard, or a process that makes collaboration easier, or a team dynamic that just clicks these insights become the foundation for the next phase, which is dream. And here's where we get creative. Imagine if everything was working at its best, what would that look like? What would people be saying and how would work feel?

I once led a team through this exercise and someone describe their ideal workplace as a place where meetings feel energizing and clarifying rather than draining and soul sucking. That vision helped us build a strategy to rethink how meetings were designed. Speaking of which next up is design. We take the best of what we discover and what we dreamed up, and we map out tangible ways to bring them to life.

Maybe it's a new way of running meetings or a shift in our communication norms, or a simple change in how recognition happens. This is where the ideas start to become real. And finally, we deliver. Here's where we bring it to life. Appreciative inquiry isn't about launching a big initiative and hoping it works, but it's about running small experiments, testing what sticks, and making adjustments along the way. You know, being agile.

So let's talk about some ways that you might apply a bit of an appreciative inquiry mindset in your workplace. Here are a handful of practices that you might play with. First. Start meetings with wins. I mean, super quick. Spend five minutes at the beginning of a meeting just shouting out a few things that went well this week. Something that delivered a result or taught you something new or just felt fresh and fun. Even infuse a little gratitude into it.

Getting people into the mindset of looking for wins puts us all in a collective mindset of winning, which kind of makes us winners. Next, focus on finding your right spots. We spend so much time fixing weaknesses that we forget to harness our strengths. One of my clients right now is a chief technology officer, and he is frustrated with the varying degrees of successful collaboration he's seeing between his engineers and his architects.

He's tried a bunch of interventions, but the work that we'll be doing together, I'm gonna spend time with some of the most successful collaborators on his team to get under the hood of why it works when it works. From there, we turn specifics into more general principles that will ultimately get shared and practiced by the rest of the team.

Granted, if it comes naturally to them, it may be hard for them to articulate exactly what they're doing to make it work, but my job is to push and probe until we hit insight and you can do the same Next try. Flipping the problem statement. I've worked with teams on this as they try to problem solve low employee engagement. They tend to come at it with questions like, why are people so disengaged? Or what problems do we most need to solve?

But sometimes the simple flip to something like when we have all felt motivated and connected, what was happening in those moments? What has made work feel good? These questions can really shift the energy of the conversation. It may sound silly, but try it with something really simple like, I did this recently when I had a bad workout at the gym. When that happens, I tend to beat myself up.

But this time I managed to pause and to ask myself when I last did this particular workout and it felt good, what was different? And I realized there was a little bit of a nutritional thing at play here. So a few days later when I had the same workout planned, well, you know where this one's going. I ate the thing I knew my body needed and the game changed. It's about pulling your brain out of that negative zone and moving it into the realm of solutions. And finally, focus on creating together.

Chances are you've heard me talk before about the power of co-created solutions. I just believe in this, so I'm gonna bang this drum again. Appreciative inquiry is participatory by nature. Unlike traditional problem solving where leaders diagnose issues and prescribe solutions, the other AI thrives on broad participation. The design phase isn't about a single person deciding how to build on strengths. It's about collaborating with those who experience success firsthand.

To shape the best path forward. Dreaming is about imagining the best possible future. And when we create it together, we ensure bits of the best come from all of us. So back to my technology client. I'll be interviewing team members one at a time, but when it comes to designing the way forward, I'll pull them all into a room together.

I'll present back all the pieces they've told me are working, and I'll invite them all to choose their favorite elements, the bits and pieces that serve each of them to bake into the final solution we land on. So when all is said and done, everyone's contributed and there's a shared sense of ownership. I hope you're feeling inspired to find a challenge and attack it with goodness and positivity. If you try it or you have other ideas to share, I'd love to hear from you.

Shoot me a note anytime at rachel@leadabovenoise.com. And if your organization needs a boost, whether it's through a workshop, a keynote, a pulse check, let's talk. You can find me@leadabovenoise.com. And if you're loving the show, don't forget to follow Modern Mentor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a review. Thanks so much for listening and have a successful week. Modern Mentor is a quick and Dirty Tips podcast. It's audio engineered by Dan Fand.

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