Don’t bring me your solutions - bring me your problems

I understand the idea, and the intention behind having people bring you solutions, but often it means we as leaders are not taking on our role and responsibility, and completely misunderstand the visibility we have across systems.

Too many times I have seen people bring me their solutions, or bring solutions to the table that solve their problem. That solves a problem related to their objectives, a problem related to their outcomes. But what they often fail to either understand, or appreciate, or care about, is that by implementing a solution they’ve selected it will have a negative impact on someone else.

Leaders and managers sit in a position of privilege and oversight. We have the ability to connect the dots, see connections in the system, and see interdependencies that others might not be able to see. If we simply respond to the solutions that others bring us then we will continually make more problems for others elsewhere in our organisation. All this is doing is creating fake work/busy work, because then we go on to solve another problem somewhere else. 

We are also at risk of failing to understand what the problem actually is. This is because often there are many contributing factors to issues. Sometimes we can’t actually easily see what the causes is, but it’s easy to put a solution on the table to solve an immediate discomfort.

So rather than only asking people to bring you solutions ask people to bring you well articulated problems. In doing so you’re going get a better understanding of our organisation, the interconnections and the codependencies.

That does, of course, take time, and it may be frustrating for some people who are sitting with their own personal frustrations, but as leaders and managers we have to oversee the whole system. Even if we don’t sit at the very top, our responsibility is to the whole organisation not just be selfish about resolving our immediate pain.