Week 4 Day 3: You Are Not Responsible for Solving Every Problem

When a problem surfaces and you feel the pull to jump in, pause. Ask yourself three questions: Is this mine to solve? Does someone on my team own this? Am I stepping in because they need help or because I am uncomfortable with the uncertainty of letting them work through it? Most of the time, the answer to that last question is the one that matters. Leaders over-involve themselves not because the team needs them but because waiting feels harder than doing.

There is a tactical move I learned from a VP I worked under early in my career. When someone brought her a problem, she would listen carefully and then ask one question: 'What do you think we should do?' Not 'what are the options' -- that is too open-ended. Not 'let me think about it' -- that takes ownership back. Just 'what do you think we should do?' Nine times out of ten, they had a good answer. She would say, 'That sounds right. Go do it.' The whole interaction took two minutes, and the person walked away owning the solution. Compare that to the leader who takes the problem, thinks about it overnight, and sends a detailed plan the next morning. The second leader did more work, took longer, and the team learned nothing. The first leader did almost nothing and built capability. That is the difference between leading and doing.

Michael Bungay Stanier's 'The Coaching Habit' identifies seven essential coaching questions, but argues that the single most powerful shift a leader can make is learning to stay curious longer before jumping to advice. His research across thousands of coaching interactions shows that the average leader moves from listening to solving in under 30 seconds. David Marquet, former submarine commander and author of 'Turn the Ship Around!,' took this further by eliminating the phrase 'request permission to' from his submarine's vocabulary and replacing it with 'I intend to.' This single language change shifted decision-making from the captain to the crew, and the USS Santa Fe went from worst-performing to best-performing submarine in the fleet within a year. The principle is consistent across contexts: leaders who resist the urge to solve and instead create structures for distributed problem-solving build organizations that scale beyond their personal capacity.