Eric Siu explains how managers can avoid taking on their team's problems. Require people to bring 3 to 4 proposed solutions before coming to you, then pick one. This keeps the monkey off your back, reduces your cognitive load, and lets the organization scale.
So are people constantly bringing their problems to you? Could be in professional or personal settings. If so, do this. Now, usually what happens is people will come to you with their problems and that's it. They would just come to you with the problem, they'll drop it off, they'll drop off that monkey, and the monkey would just end up running around. And what inevitably ends up happening is more and more people would just come and do that. What happens is you just have a bunch of monkeys in your office, and that is what it is at the end of the day. You could stop it by doing this. Instead of people bringing their problems, just say, hey, look, if you're gonna bring me a problem, I'm gonna need you to come up with 3 or 4 solutions. And then I'm also gonna need you to pick the one solution that you like the most. And once they do that, that's actually going to make it a much more collaborative environment, and that is going to take a huge cognitive load off of you so you can do the things that you are good at. And I will tell you this, if you don't do this, you can't scale.
