Leadership Drift This Week
Don’t Bring Me Problems Without Solutions
I've heard some version of “Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions” for most of my working life. I'm sure I've said it myself more times than I'd like to admit. And I understand the impulse. Leaders don't want to become the organizational dumping ground for every complaint, inconvenience, disagreement, or half-formed idea that crosses their desk. They want people to think. They want initiative. They want ownership. They don't want to solve every problem their employees encounter.
All good expectations.
The problem is that too many leaders fail to recognize that identifying a problem and resolving a problem are two different skill sets. Once you understand that, “bring me solutions” stops being a helpful management principle.
If you rigidly defend the mantra, you may build an organization where the problems that reach you are increasingly the ones people can solve themselves, leaving the problems that actually require leadership unresolved.
Imagine you manage ten people and one of them comes to you every afternoon with something that went wrong.
“The customer did this.”
“Accounting didn't do that.”
“Fred isn't responding.”
“The software isn't working.”
“We don't have enough time.”
If your response to every one of those things is to diagnose the issue, decide what should happen, and tell the employee what to do, you've created dependency.
At some point, a responsible manager should ask: “What do you think we should do?”
That's supportive development. It encourages critical thinking, initiative, and ownership. In many circumstances, the person closest to the work is best positioned to develop and implement the solution.
“Bring me solutions” isn't inherently bad advice. The problem is turning it into a written or unwritten rule.
The person who identifies a problem does not necessarily have the ability, authority, information, or resources to resolve it. That isn't their fault. It's an organizational reality.
The Authority Gap
Consider a frontline employee who notices that customers repeatedly receive incorrect information. She can tell you when it happens, which questions customers ask, and where the process seems to break down. But the underlying problem may be a policy she lacks the authority to change.
Perhaps the technology doesn't support the process, or two departments have conflicting procedures. Perhaps fixing it requires resources she doesn't control, or maybe the problem results from a decision made several levels above her. She may understand the problem exceptionally well. She may even have a good idea for solving it. But she can't resolve it by herself.
Now imagine her manager has trained the organization around one simple rule: Don't bring me problems without solutions. She has three choices. She can invent a solution she lacks the authority or resources to implement. She can spend considerable time trying to solve something outside her control. Or she can stop bringing the problem forward.
The third option is particularly dangerous because it can look like success. The manager receives fewer complaints. Fewer problems are escalated. Everyone seems to be taking more ownership. Except the problem is still there. The information about it has simply stopped moving.
Accountability ≠ Ownership
This is where accountability gets confused with ownership. A person can be responsible for reporting what they observe without being responsible for fixing the underlying condition.
A manager can investigate a problem without personally implementing the solution. An executive can decide without being the person who discovered the problem. Organizations distribute responsibility because people have different roles, authority, expertise, and access to information.
So when someone raises a problem, the first question shouldn't always be: “What's your solution?”
Sometimes it should be: “Tell me what you're seeing.”
What happened? Who does it affect? How often? What have you observed? What have you already tried? What do you think causes it? And then, when appropriate: “What do you think we should do?”
The solution question hasn't disappeared. It has moved to the right place in the conversation.
Diagnose First
Sometimes we don't understand the problem well enough to propose a responsible solution.
Someone says, “Communication is terrible.” So we schedule communication training.
Someone says, “People aren't accountable.” So we create an accountability policy.
Someone says, “The team is burned out.” So we launch a wellness initiative.
Those may or may not be the right solutions. The statement identified a condition. It didn't diagnose its cause.
If you require a solution before you engage with the problem seriously, you create an incentive to skip diagnosis. People learn to attach a plausible solution to their complaint because they know the complaint alone won't be taken seriously. Now the organization isn't necessarily solving problems. It's solving people's proposed explanations.
Those aren't the same thing.
The Bigger the Problem
If someone complains that the printer is inconvenient, asking them to figure out how to fix it is reasonable. If someone identifies a recurring breakdown that costs the organization customers, money, productivity, safety, trust, or capable employees, the equation changes. The bigger and more systemic the problem becomes, the less reasonable it is to assume that the person who identified it can also resolve it independently. In fact, one person's inability to solve the problem may suggest it belongs at a different level of the organization.
That's a leadership signal.
If a frontline employee keeps escalating the same issue because it requires a policy change, don't keep asking the employee for a better solution. Ask why the organization has placed a systemic problem inside an individual employee's span of control.
Silence Isn't Success
What happens when people learn not to bring problems? They learn which problems are safe to discuss, which problems fall on them to solve, and which problems will cause others to label them negative, difficult, or incompetent.
Eventually, they learn to keep quiet. This is where “problem avoidance” can masquerade as organizational health.
The leadership team sees fewer problems because employees report fewer problems. That's not necessarily improvement. It may be information loss. And information loss is expensive.
The problem doesn't disappear because nobody talks about it. The cost simply shifts elsewhere: productivity, morale, customer experience, turnover, missed opportunities, conflict, rework, or eventually a crisis.
Then someone asks: “Why didn't anybody tell us?”
Maybe they tried. Maybe you taught them not to.
So, Bring Solutions
Yes, have them bring solutions when they can, when they have the authority and information to develop one. And when it's reasonably part of their role. But don't make the ability to solve a problem the price of admission to identifying one. Because sometimes the most valuable thing someone can bring you isn't a solution. It's a problem you didn't know you had. And what you do with that information is where leadership begins.
Manage Better. Lead Well.
Drift Pattern of the Week:
Weak Accountability
Weak accountability often looks like pushing responsibility downward without giving people the authority, information, or resources required to act. Leaders may call this “ownership,” while employees experience it as being held responsible for conditions they cannot control.
It is easy to overlook because the language sounds empowering: Take ownership. Figure it out. Bring me a solution.
Left unchecked, people stop escalating legitimate problems, or manufacture solutions simply to avoid being seen as part of the problem. Accountability hasn't increased. Organizational information has decreased.
Leadership Practice
When someone brings you a problem, resist the urge to ask for the solution immediately. First ask: “What are you seeing, and what do you believe is within your control?” Then determine whether the problem belongs at their level or yours.
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Diagnostic Question
If your employees stopped bringing you problems tomorrow, would you know your organization had improved, or that they had learned what you don't want to hear?
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From My Desk
I’ve noticed that leaders sometimes use “ownership” to describe something very different from what they actually mean. They want employees to take responsibility, but what they really want is for employees to absorb problems the organization hasn't figured out how to solve.
The closer I get to a problem, the more I focus on who has the authority to change the conditions creating it. Sometimes the person complaining needs to step up. Sometimes the leader needs to step in. Sometimes the organization needs to change the system between them.
Effective leadership doesn't make every problem someone else's responsibility. It puts responsibility where it can produce results.
Recommended Resource
Leadership Clarity Session
Sometimes the problem being presented isn't the problem that actually needs to be solved. A symptom gets labeled, a solution gets proposed, and everyone moves forward without understanding what's really happening.
The Leadership Clarity Session is a focused, 90-minute working session for consequential leadership situations where the symptoms are visible but the underlying problem isn't yet clear.
Together, we examine what is actually happening, identify patterns and contributing factors, explore how leadership may be causing or perpetuating the problem, and determine what deserves attention next.
The goal isn't to manufacture a solution.
It's to understand the problem well enough to know what should happen next.
SCHEDULE A SESSION
Leadership Drift Quote
'Identifying a problem and resolving a problem are two different skill sets."
Karl Bimshas on Leadership Drift
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Leadership is a responsibility. Use it to strengthen others.