Who hasn’t heard at one time during their career, from a boss, ‘don’t bring me problems, bring me a solution?’
How silly is this? If all your boss does is ratify a solution, what good is s/he? Further, if you have a solution, why the heck aren’t you out there implementing it?
Worse, what does this say about the organization that encourages this sort of behavior? That they don’t trust their people? That they are so risk averse that no one is encouraged to make a move because of fears of making mistakes? Think about what this does to employee motivation and engagement.
Instead, try telling your employees to stop bringing you solutions, and bring you problems instead. They’ll be skeptical at first, but if you’re firm in telling them ‘if you already know what to do, why are you asking me for permission?’, they’ll get the message pretty quickly. You’ll soon be amazed at changes in attitudes and increased energy levels.
And you’ll probably find that your job becomes a lot more interesting as well – the good ones are not going to bother you with trivia (and if they’re not good, why are they still working for you?) and the problems they bring you are likely to be really interesting – helping solve those will have a real impact.
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July 31, 2010 at 1:23 am
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August 1, 2010 at 12:35 pm
Rochelle Moulton
Nice turn of phrase David. What a dull job managing would be if all we ever did was approve the work of others!
August 2, 2010 at 11:54 am
Bader Aujan
Real Life suggest that the good leader should encourage his people to think of solutions before bringing them to discuss and experince suggest that we all regardless how high we are in the rank, needs to be encouraged to think of solutions and if we are good, then we will come with number of solutions that we need to discuss with someone to draw our attention to good points or otherwise in the different solutions we have thought about. We need our leaders to help us in making the proper choice as they are expected to be of more experince and some of the solutions we have thought about might have been experinced before but with little return so why repeate the same?!!
A good leader, i believe should encourage thinking of number of solutions and if he is really good, then his people will go back to him not for a permisson but a source of wise and experince feedback to make their “thought of” solutions even better.
September 18, 2010 at 7:19 am
Vijay
Quite an different view. I agree that it makes one’s job stultifying just approving others. However one has to be careful that people dont line up with problems that can solved otherwise from them and become too dependent on the Boss. It all matters how and who you approach and what you approach with…