Coaching is the most effective means of unleashing leadership ability and aligning people with their aspirations. As we have heard so many times, the number one job of leaders is to build more leaders.
So then, why is it a problem to be a good problem solver?
Imagine you hired a fitness coach to help you be more physically toned. At your first training session, the fitness coach says, “I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have. I’m a lot stronger than you are. I have more experience in this area of fitness. I can get this done a lot faster than you can. I’ll just lift the weights for you.”
We can laugh at this example knowing the arrangement doesn’t make any sense. I won’t get any stronger if my fitness coach lifts all the weights for me. But that’s what we’re doing in organizations right now.
For example, there’s knock on the door of the boss’ office. An employee says, “Hey boss, I’ve got a problem.”
What happens immediately is that most bosses, and leaders, without even thinking, say, “Tell me all the details,” and then, “Here’s the answer. Away you go.”
When instead, what they could do is use this as an opportunity to grow and develop the employee’s capacity to make good decisions.
We’re missing the opportunity to build long-term capacity in our organizations so that we can grow and develop talent. We’re subconsciously grabbing every problem that’s presented to us and becoming the sole source of solutions for those problems.
Faster is Slower
When Brent and I present this idea to leaders, the push-back we get is always the same. “We haven’t got time to coach. I know the answer and it’s just a lot faster to give the answer to my employee.”
We agree that it IS a lot faster to give the answer!
But if we borrow the notion that faster is slower (from Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline), and use this opportunity to switch from solving the problem ourselves to unleashing the potential of the person in front of us to solve it, then in the long run we are going to be able to free up our own time. Which is good news because organizations are time-starved.
We pay big prices for the problem solving mindset.
The danger of problem solving is that we position ourselves as a bottleneck if we are the sole source of answers to problems and the only place to go to for solutions. The minute the boss isn’t there, then the problem doesn’t get solved or people get distracted because they don’t know what to do and/or they don’t know if they should take action.
Organizations have a lot of problems and people who solve problems often get rewarded for that with promotions etc. One of the factors that goes into someone’s success is that it’s recognized that they are good at solving problems. They become a go to person because there’s no shortage of problems that need solving.
But over time the difficulty with this is that if I become known as the person who solves problems all the time, what it can mean is that besides the fact that I’m not growing other people’s capacity, it could also mean that I’m doing other people’s jobs. And I’m not doing the job that I get paid for.
While my head is down looking at problems, my head’s not lifted up looking at the horizon to see what opportunities are out there for our business and also what needs to be done for myself and my own personal and professional development.
People are often surprised to hear that by maintaining a problem solving mindset they are getting in the way of their own success.
When we scratch the surface and get people to be honest about why they hang onto this behaviour, leaders have several answers; they say it’s a form of job security. “If I’m the one you can’t do without, when there are redundancies it won’t happen to me because I’m so valuable.” It’s job security and survival. So the focus is internal rather than external. However an external focus would be better for the long-term growth of the organization to be delegating and developing other that are coming behind.
A Subconscious Reflex
There is a degree of satisfaction that human beings experience when they solve problems.
It was in my work with IT that I first started to notice this pattern.
I was working with a newly appointed manager that the organization had great hopes for. He was what we would call a ‘high potential’ employee. I asked if I could shadow this person for a day and see what I could learn so that when we began our work together, as a coach I would have a shortcut to understanding the company culture and the person.
Here’s what I saw: this young man went from being a programmer to being a manager of programmers. He had a non-stop queue outside his door of people with problems. They often had pieces of paper in their hands showing computer code. He listened, asked questions, investigated, and eventually pointed to the code that was the problem on the papers his direct reports brought to him. And here’s the thing; his face beamed every time he solved another one. It was his joy to solve problems.
However, when everyone else went home at the end of the day, he now had the full workload of his new job as manager still to do.
So when we talked about that, it occurred to me that his pleasure came from solving problems. That’s human nature. We love to solve problems! We do sudoku and crossword puzzles and jigsaw puzzles. There is a definite personal satisfaction that human beings feel when we solve problems.
When leaders work on developing their coaching skills and developing others, I ask them why coaching hasn’t caught fire in organizations yet.
They say:
- We haven’t got time
- We don’t know how
- It’s too hard
- I can’t be bothered
- Nobody coached me
I think the real answer is that people don’t want to coach because they love solving the problems themselves.
Leading vs. Solving Problems
People who are good problem-solvers are really valued. And then they’re promoted because of that skill, not necessarily because they have good management potential.
However, we often promote people who have lived inside a problem-solving environment but we don’t educate, empower and train them that they’re new job is to create leaders, not to do the job they did before.
Beginning in the 1980s and ’90s organizations stripped out layers of middle management and the leap from one job level to another became larger and, more importantly, we lost our mentors. We’ve now given our managers a full time job plus the task of developing others.
Breaking the Pattern of Problem Solving to Develop Leaders
The easiest way to coach is what I call ‘Knock Knock Coaching’.
A direct report comes and says, “Hey boss, I’ve got a problem.”
The boss can handle this one of two ways:
1. Solve the problem. “This is what I want you to do.”
OR
2. Ask a question. “Let’s talk about this. Before I give you my answer, what would you like to have happen? If you were making the decision what would it be?”
We can start coaching instantly!
But that love of problem-solving kicks in subconsciously and away we go solving the problem.
Once people start to document the advantages and disadvantages of the problem solving mindset, the disadvantages column brings forth a lot of discomfort. They notice the extra work that has to be done and how their own promotion might be limited because people wouldn’t want to lose them in this job because no one else can do it.
When people see for themselves the trap that they’ve created, then they are able to lift their heads up and ask how they can get out of that pattern.
That’s when we start to shift from solving the problem to unleashing potential. Thinking differently. Rather than answering a question – ask a question!
Rather than focus on the facts because you need to educate yourself about the problem, focus on the possibilities. Ask, “What’s possible here? What would you like to see happen?”
It’s as simple as changing the first words that come out of your mouth.
Imagine the conversation is a volleyball. Your job, as a leader, is to get that ball on the other side of the net as quickly as possible and to leave it there. Because if that ball stays with you, then that is one more piece of work that has shown up on your desk.
These small strategies typically are what cause people to be successful at breaking the habit of the problem solving mindset.
