Chad Silverstein reflects on problem solving as a personal strength and a leadership responsibility. He argues leaders should stop solving every problem themselves, instead empowering team members to think, fail, and learn (using techniques like flipping questions back to the asker). He illustrates this with parenting parallels and a workplace anecdote where he encouraged staff to "think."
Chapters
I love solving problems. It's one of my unique abilities that I kind of really leaned on as I was building my company is I would look for problems. I would look for easier ways to do everything, find some complexity and turn it into something that everybody can understand. You know, kind of train to the least sophisticated individual who don't. Who doesn't know as much, so that no matter what you're sharing and what you're teaching, everybody can get it. It's another thing to be able to, like, empower the people around you to be able to solve the problems. And sometimes you gotta let people fall in their face. And this shows up obviously at home when you have kids, you gotta let your kids fail. I think every parent is guilty of trying to save their kid and doesn't wanna see their kid in pain. But unfortunately, it's what makes a man a man and a woman become a woman, is that they have to grow up and they have to learn the hard way through adversity. So sometimes you gotta let them fail. You know, our culture has literally put ribbons and medals on people who just participate. And it's a problem because people don't know how to fail. And when you can fail over and over and over and jump from one failure to the next with this enthusiasm because, you know, every, no, every fail gets you closer to the yes, gets you closer to the success. That's the attitude, that's the mindset. And solving problems at work and fixing everything yourself does not empower your team. It does not let your team grow. It holds them back. And as much as we may think, because we just solved the problem, we came up with a grand slam and it took us from A to B, you know, we may have just done our team the biggest disservice ever, you know, and not letting them figure it out for themselves. Because when the real test comes a year from now, are they going to be able to do it? And you don't want that to be their first time. So pick and choose where you're going to kind of win and lose those fights and figure out as a leader where you're going to let your team figure it out on their own and build that discipline in more often. And the easy way to do that is when people come and ask you questions, just flip it and ask them the question. At Build to Lead practice, we do this all the time. People will throw out a question and we just say, what do you think? And almost always they know the answer. And if they don't, they're close but then we just kind of maneuver with maybe another question, say it again, what about this? And then they come up with it. And when people come up with their own ideas and when people solve problems on their own, you're always going to have a more successful team and overall performance from everybody. Just because again, we're not depending on one person to kind of do it all. And so that could be very self serving. If you're solving all the problems and you feel good about being able to accomplish and that could be a problem. If you have no awareness of the fact that you're hurting your team because you're not letting them grow and figure out things for themselves. Your job as a leader is to teach others how to think. I remember one time I came into my office early in the morning and I cleared off everybody's desks and I put a card on everybody's desks in like a teepee and said, think. No one knew who did it and I didn't tell them I did it. And I just wanted them to think because people don't think. And it's just unbelievable how they just want other people to solve problems for them. And as a leader, you can't have that. If you're trying to grow and you're trying to be successful with a team of people, you got to get them thinking and them solving the problems.
