Rant & Fix

Overview

A “Rant and Fix” is a leadership technique that I [Sahil] picked up on from Cadets. It is a form of meeting that effectively controls “venting” and seeks to identify specific solutions to underlying issues that a team is facing. These should be used somewhat infrequently as they can be long and emotional affairs. Ideally, minor issues are addressed in 1:1’s that effectively follow a similar format but are not scheduled for the sole purpose of fixing problems.

Note: Originally, these meetings were referred to as “Pow Wow’s”. However, the term is culturally appropriated from indigenous culture and is thus no longer used. It is common to refer to this as a “Rant & Fix”.

When to use

This technique should be used when a team is starting to feel demotivated and feels like there’s an avalanche of stuff they need to do and not enough time to do it. It is easy to detect when frustration builds up - ideally this technique is applied before ‘it’ boils over, but okay to be applied when the “steam” all comes out.

The Technique

Start by scheduling a 1-1:30 hour meeting with the involved team members, a higher authority who can directly address issues (this is key - this technique will not work if you require buy-in from a higher authority. They work only if there is direct flexibility to discuss, debate, and apply solutions within the meeting), and a 3rd party. Note that this technique can be applied from just 1 person to a group of 15+, but the time taken increases exponentially.

In the meeting, follow these steps:

“Rant”

In this step, allow for your team members to let it all out. Don’t interrupt, take notes, nod. Write every key detail down (even if it seems like they’re repeating themselves). Start conversations with a gentle hand, lightly touch on issues they’ve brought up. Your goal is to get them to vent and let it all out.

Identify

After the venting is over, the next step is to identify key threads that the issues that are related to. The goal is to, in the end, identify the root cause of the issues - separating out issues into key categories will help identify the root case of the issue, so it’s good to split 'em up. Discussing what the key categories are and then what each root cause is should be a collaborative exercise - let them contribute their thoughts and pitch your perspective as to what is likely happening. By the end of it, you should have a small amount of “big issues” that you can now use to enter into the next stage.

Fix

Once you’ve identified root issues, start coming up with action items. You should know how to do this by now lol