As a kid, I loved playing Whac-A-Mole at the arcade (yes, I was a child of the 80s). In this game, moles pop up randomly out of various holes in the ground, and you have to smash them on the head with a mallet before they go back underground. The longer you play, the faster and more frequently they pop up, which makes the game as challenging as it is fun.
For the purpose of this post, let’s let the moles represent problems that pop up in our leadership. When problems rear their ugly head, many leaders simply knock them back underground (i.e., make them go away temporarily) vs figuring out how to kill them (i.e., make them go away permanently). And this is what Sam Carpenter, is his book Work the System, calls Whac-A-Mole leadership.
About a year ago I realized I was practicing Whac-A-Mole leadership related to my weekly post-sermon work. You see, after I write my sermon each week, my work is far from done. After I write the sermon, I then have to…
- Confirm every verse has a translation
- Have Jon create any needed slides
- Confirm I have indicated when a slide is to appear and be taken down
- Create lesson notes
- Confirm I have indicated where the pads are to come in
- Add the sermon & lesson notes to Google Drive
- Make a video preview of the sermon for the weekly email and social media
- Post a question about the sermon to the “sermon-survey” channel in Slack
There’s more but you get the idea. As this list grew over time it became harder and harder to remember all the steps, and each week I would miss something. One week I’d miss item 1, the following week item 3, the week after that items 6 & 8, so on and so forth. This created a problem for the Creative Arts Department, who had to keep coming back to me asking for the translation for a certain verse or asking me to upload the video that was supposed to be in Drive, etc. In response, I would smash the mole back underground (i.e., I would get them the translation, I would upload the video). But when it kept happening, to the point of embarrassment, I finally decided to kill the mole (i.e., come up with a plan for how to permanently fix the problem). I thought about it and realized that a checklist (if followed) would permanently fix the problem. So I went into Asana and created a task called “Sermon Follow Up” and added the above items as subtasks. Now, every week, when I finish my sermon, I go through each and every item, checking them off one by one, until I’ve completed everything on the list. Problem solved!
This is an illustration of what we should do anytime a problem pops up. Don’t just solve it for now. Solve it for all time! Many leaders don’t do this because it’s time-consuming. Let me be clear, it does take time to permanently fix a problem. But let me be equally clear that it never takes as much time as solving the same problem ad infinitum. So even though fixing a problem may require us to hit pause and take time out of our busy day, it’s totally worth it. A leader who doesn’t permanently fix problems will find him/herself busier and busier. Conversely, a leader who takes the time to permanently fix problems with find him/herself freer and freer. In this way, the benefit far outweighs the cost.
DISCUSSION QUESTION: Where are you practicing Whac-A-Mole leadership and which specific problem will you choose to permanently fix today?
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