Chad Silverstein argues leaders should stop solving problems for their teams. Instead, ask questions, have people propose three solutions, and let them fail and learn. The goal is making yourself less necessary so they grow into their roles.
Chapters
If you want to get the best out of the people that you're leading, if you want to get the best out of your family, your kids, anyone that you want to have influence over, then your job is to empower them. And so stop solving everybody's problems and stop giving them all the answers. In fact, if you're a leader, I would challenge you to stop giving answers at all. A lot of times you want to be the be all, end all, and you want to show people that you know your stuff, but if you're the leader, you don't have to. And you want basically to build up your people around you so that they can accomplish things that you couldn't do by yourself. And the way to do that is to empower them. And so the next time people walk into your desk space, the next time they walk into your office, the next time they jump on zoom with you and they're asking you a question that you can answer because you've answered it 10,000 times. Instead of answering them with the answer, answer them with a question. Answer all of the questions that you're asked with questions and empower your team to give you the answer. Ask them to give you three solutions to the problem that they're bringing to you because they know you can solve it and they can't. Ask them, of the three that they're going to choose, which one would you choose? If they can't answer you on the spot, tell them to come back tomorrow. Empower them by questioning their answers when they do give it to you so that they know why they're saying whatever they're saying. And over time, you'll see, they'll stop coming to you so much, and you have to be comfortable with that. But you empower them to do the work that they're hired to do. And if you're just going to answer everybody's questions all the time because you're the smartest person in the room, then you're basically crippling and enabling your team to stay idle, not grow and, and keep yourself perched up on the tree as the one who always has to be the go to for all the answers. It's not a way to sustain results. It's not a way to grow your company, it's not a way to grow your people. And it's important that you care enough that you want to help people around you grow. And that's one true way to do it. It's a discipline. Again, just stop answering and solving everybody's problems. Question their answers, have them come to you with three solutions. Pick one. Which one do you want to go with? Challenge people. Let people fail and come back and tell you what they learned. And, you know, it's not 100% of the time, but do your best to incorporate it.
