754: Five Steps to Solve a Problem, with Monica Chartier

Coaching for Leaders

Dave Stachowiak

Education, Business, Management, Self-improvement, Careers

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Monica Chartier: Coaching for Leaders Fellow
Monica Chartier is a group product manager in the technology industry. Her work has centered on supporting a global product experience, getting a million visitors a day. In addition to her e-commerce and technical experience, she indexes heavily on coach-like leadership with her team and also inside our community as one of our Coaching for Leaders Fellows.

In this conversation, Monica and I explore a need inside the Coaching for Leaders membership community and how we used the design thinking process to approach it. We outline the five key steps we followed and how you might do the same to address a problem inside your own organization.
Key Points
Five steps to solve a problem using design thinking:

Empathy: Start with Intentional Listening and Observation.
Define: Clarify the Real Problem to Solve.
Ideate: Co-Create Ideas and Form Testable Hypotheses.
Prototype: Start Small, Learn Fast.
Test, Learn, and Adapt: Make Iteration a Leadership Habit.

Access Monica’s detailed guide (PDF download)
Resources Mentioned

Monica Chartier on LinkedIn

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Discover More
Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic. To accelerate your learning, uncover more inside Coaching for Leaders Plus.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're trying to address a problem inside your organization and who among us isn't, but you're
0:06.3	not sure where to start. In this Saturday cast, Monica Chartier, one of our fellows, and I,
0:12.7	turn the tables a bit to look inside the Coaching for Leaders membership community at how we
0:18.9	addressed a problem, the five steps we took, and the opportunity
0:22.8	that emerged. This is Coaching for Leaders, Episode 754.
0:28.6	Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.
0:37.0	Greetings to you from Orange County, California.
0:40.3	This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stahoviac.
0:45.1	Leaders aren't born.
0:46.8	They're made.
0:47.7	And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations.
0:53.3	One of the things that we all face as leaders is how to
0:56.8	solve a problem. How do we run in, how do we use a framework? How do we start to approach
1:02.4	something that does emerge as a problem in our work, within our teams, with an employee,
1:08.0	with a stakeholder, whoever? And problem solving is one of the major
1:13.6	tenants that we do need to address as leaders. And how to do it is a question that comes up a lot
1:19.2	in our community. Where to begin? What process to follow? Today, we're going to outline a process
1:24.8	five steps. One way to solve a problem, at least to address it and to
1:28.7	begin to create some movement toward it. And I'm so glad to be able to welcome one of our
1:33.3	fellows who is going to help us walk through this framework and, more importantly, to
1:38.4	actually provide an example that her and I have used over the last year or two together intimately to solve a problem
1:45.7	within our community. I'm pleased to introduce to you Monica Chartier. She is a group
	...

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