Bring Me A Solution

I was seated in a circle with a group I had worked with many times before. They had committed to the long haul of team development, the kind of work that isn’t solved in a single workshop, but over time, layer by layer.

When I first met them, things weren’t good. You could feel it in the room. If something didn’t change, people were going to lose their jobs.

But session after session, they began to grow. They started naming the hard things. They brought unresolved conflict to the surface. They admitted their pain, their mistakes, and the role they played in the culture they had co-created. And slowly, they rebuilt trust.

It was remarkable to witness. Yet even as they grew, it became clear that there was one thing holding them back: their leader.

He seemed frustrated with his people. It was like their needs were a burden to him. And by this point, the team was healthy enough to notice it too. They could see that his distance was becoming their ceiling.

In this particular session, the group made an unspoken decision to rip off the Band-Aid and talk about some really hard things. The conversation included some needs that their leader was failing to address.

The leader grew visibly uncomfortable, and then he said what so many leaders before him have said, “Just don’t bring me a problem without bringing me a solution.”

I get it. As leaders, we don’t have magic wands. It can feel overwhelming when it seems like people just want us to fix their problems for them. And there are absolutely times when it’s wise to invite our people into the problem-solving process.

I’ve been there myself. Someone brought me a problem, and I knew they could help solve it. In those moments, I leaned on their wisdom, asked better questions, and in many ways empowered them to become leaders of the solution. That can be really healthy for a team.

But here’s the danger: when “bring me a solution” becomes the default, we forget our role. If people can only come to you when they have a solution, eventually they will stop coming to you at all, and that is a problem.

Sometimes people bring us an issue not because they’re lazy or incapable, but because they trust us. They trust that we have the bigger picture, the relationships, the wisdom, or the resources to see what they can’t. And in those moments, when we brush them off with, “Bring me a solution,” we miss the honor of being trusted to lead.

Let’s think about it this way. You are sick. You have a fever, a raw throat, clogged ears, and a pounding headache. You don’t know if it is a cold, a sinus infection, an ear infection, Strep, COVID, or something else. You drag yourself to the doctor, list every miserable symptom, and the doctor leans back and says, “Well, what do you want to do about this? What’s your solution?”

If that happened to me, I think I’d cry. I might try to say something like, “I came to you because you went to Med School. You know how to schedule tests and call in prescriptions. I came to you because I believed you could help me!”

Leadership is no different. Sometimes people bring us a problem because they believe we can help. That should be an honor, not a burden.

So, in that circle, I had to make a decision. Do I pull the leader aside and talk about it later, or do I say something in the moment? I felt like the team needed to hear my response, and I chose to address it as a group.

I said to the leader, as gently as I could, “Sometimes your people bring you problems without solutions because what they really need is you. Sometimes you are the solution.”

He could have gotten angry. He could have doubled down. He could have fired me on the spot. But he didn’t.

Instead, his shoulders dropped. He took a deep breath. And maybe for the first time, he realized his team wasn’t trying to make his job harder. They were asking him to do the very thing they wanted most–for him to lead.

Leadership is situational. You have to discern when to invite others into the process and when to step into the gap yourself. Both require courage. Both require humility. And both remind people they can trust you.

And remember, if your people could solve every problem on their own, they wouldn’t need a leader.

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