You will be able to sort a team problem into purpose, people or process before deciding what to do about it.
For the third month running, the weekly client report from Wei Ling's team went out late. It is due to clients every Monday by noon, and it keeps arriving on Monday evening or Tuesday morning. Two clients have complained. Wei Ling's first reaction was to have a word with Farid, who compiles it, and tell him it needs to be on time.
That might fix it. It might also make things worse, because she has not yet worked out why the report is late. A missed deadline is a symptom, and the same symptom can come from very different causes.
In lesson 1.1, Your output is now your team's output, you met Julie Zhuo's three levers from The Making of a Manager: purpose, people and process. They are also a useful way to diagnose problems. Before you decide what to do about something going wrong, ask which of the three it most likely lives in.
A late report could be any of them. It could be a purpose problem: nobody told Farid the report matters more than his other work, so it sits behind tasks he thinks are more urgent. It could be a people problem: Farid has never been shown how to pull the data quickly, or he is struggling with something outside work. Or it could be a process problem: the data he needs only arrives from the warehouse team on Monday morning, so the report cannot physically be ready by noon.
Each of those needs a different fix. Clarifying priorities does nothing about a broken handover. Training does nothing if the real issue is that two managers gave Farid conflicting instructions. Telling him to try harder fixes none of them, and it costs you some of his trust when it turns out the problem was never his effort.
Purpose problems show up as people working hard on the wrong things. Everyone is busy, nobody is idle, and yet the work that matters most is late or thin. You see effort without the results you wanted. Ask people what they think the top priority is this week, and you get different answers. The usual fix is clarity from you: what matters most, why, and what can slip.
People problems show up as one person or one role repeatedly at the centre of trouble. The same name keeps appearing. When that person is on leave, the problem goes away, and when they come back, it returns. The cause might be skill, workload, fit for the role, motivation, or something in their life you know nothing about. The fix starts with a private conversation, and later modules cover how to have it: feedback in module 5, motivation in module 6.
Process problems show up as the same mistake happening no matter who does the work. Hui Min covered the client report once while Farid was on leave, and it was late that week too. Errors cluster at handovers between people or teams. New joiners hit the same snags in their first month. The fix is to change how the work flows: a different deadline, a checklist, a handover moved earlier, a tool that removes a manual step.
You will rarely know which lever a problem lives in from your desk. The quickest way to find out is to ask the people closest to it, with genuine curiosity rather than an accusation already loaded.
Wei Ling asked Farid what usually held the report up. He told her that the warehouse data lands in his inbox at about 10:30 on Monday, he needs three hours to clean and check it, and he had assumed everyone knew. He had raised it with her predecessor once and nothing changed, so he stopped mentioning it. Then she checked the week Hui Min covered. Same delay, same reason.
That made it mostly a process problem, with a small purpose problem underneath: nobody had decided whether noon on Monday was a real client requirement or a habit. Wei Ling asked two clients, and both said Monday end of day was fine. She also asked the warehouse lead whether the data could come on Friday afternoon instead. It could, for most of the fields. The report has been on time for five weeks.
Had she gone straight to Farid with "this needs to be on time", he would have worked late every Monday to hit a deadline nobody needed, and probably started looking for another job.
Real problems often touch two levers, as this one did. That is fine. The point of the sorting is to stop you defaulting to the fix you are most comfortable with. Managers promoted for their own skill tend to see every problem as a people problem, because they would have done the work better themselves. Managers who like systems tend to see process everywhere. Writing out all three explanations, even the ones you doubt, makes you check.
It also changes the conversation you have. "I want to understand what's slowing the report down" opens a discussion. "You need to be faster" closes one.
Pick the problem that has frustrated you most on your team this month, and give each of the three levers a fair hearing before you decide which one to act on.
Take the biggest frustration on your team this month and write one sentence each on how it could be a purpose, people or process problem.
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