How good are your employees at finding ways to streamline processes, increase sales, or reduce complaints? Hopefully great, because these represent everyday place of business problems - http://www.upein.edu.pe/forums/topic/stephen-reynolds/ . To solve them, employees must understand how to do aspects such as determine root causes of problems, develop contingency plans, and track the impact of solutions.

Unfortunately, employees do not always know or possess all the critical skills required to effectively solve problems. The result is they do a poor job of developing and implementing solutions. You can enhance the problem-solving capabilities of your employees by doing two things. To start with, identify which skills contribute to effective solutions. Second, and specifically, identify how those skills can help your organization as well as the employee.

Here are five critical problem-solving skills and ways you can explain the importance of each:

"You said that you want to find out more about the sort of projects other people within the organization are linked to (how desired problem-solving behavior will impact the individual). You can do that if you take the time to investigate how this problem impacts other stakeholders in our organization (your desired problem-solving behavior)."

"Let's look at all the viable options before settling on a solution (your desired problem-solving behavior). That way, we're going to have several possibilities for solving the problem (how desired problem-solving behavior will impact the organization)."

"If you take the time for you to identify the positives and negatives of solving problems (your desired problem-solving behavior), you could be able to develop solutions more quickly (how desired problem-solving behavior will impact the individual)."

"If we want to be successful, we have to make sure that our solutions give a long-term rather than a short-term fix (how desired problem-solving behavior will impact the organization). We can do that by taking the period to determine the root causes of our problems (your desired problem-solving behavior)."

"The idea that you always develop a step-by-step action plan when solving problems (your desired problem-solving behavior) implies that you don't overlook any critical steps (how desired problem-solving behavior will impact the organization). This approach also helps you solve problems more quickly (how desired problem-solving behavior will impact the person)."

Whenever you use this approach to speak to employees about solving problems, you don't just tell them to improve, you give them some suggestions on "how" to improve. This increases the likelihood that you're going to get the behavior you want. It may also stimulate your employee(s) to think of some additional positive behaviors also.