Mark Murphy explains why leaders shouldn't shoot the messenger or take over problems themselves. Instead, ask "What's your plan for solving this?" A study found constructive responses create a twelve-fold increase in employee love for the company.
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Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ. And listen, as a leader, there are going to be times when people are going to walk into your office and say, "Boss, we got a major problem." And when that happens, there's a right way to respond and unfortunately lots of really bad ways to respond. So let's take a look at this. Imagine one of our employees walks into our office and says, "Boss, we've got a huge problem with the Acme account. They're angry and I think we might lose their business." Okay, that's a problem. Imagine the Acme account is really important to you. Okay, so we got a huge problem with the Acme account. They're super angry with us. I think we might lose their business. What are you going to do? All right, well, there are a number of bad responses. Some of the classic ones would be some version of shoot the messenger. How could you have let this happen? You know how important this account is to us, and this is terrible. What were you thinking? Okay, listen, when somebody brings us a problem, jumping down their throat immediately is, generally speaking, a really terrible idea. A terrible way to go. Why? Well, for starters, they're gonna not bring us any more problems in the future, which means we're gonna get blindsided. We're not gonna know about Acme being angry until they fire us. That's really, really bad. So we're closing off that mode of communication. But the second thing is that we're basically telling everybody, I don't wanna know what's going on. I don't want an open flow of information. And when we kill the messenger, we basically stop getting messengers. Okay, so that one's pretty obvious. But the next one, Hey boss, Acme Account's angry with us. We could lose this business. The very natural leadership response, which still is very bad, is to say, you know what, I'm going to jump in. I'm going to take this over myself. I'm going to call them directly. I'll get this straightened out. Okay, now this is a very kind of typical, bad but typical leadership response. I'm going to jump in. I'm going to all hands on deck. I'm going to take point on this. I'm going to go fix this myself. Now, why is this bad? It's bad because Number one, it enfeebles the employee. We basically cut them off at the knees. We said, listen, I have no trust in you. I have no confidence that you're going to be able to handle this situation. I'm not going to let you grow and develop in any way as a result of this. Fine, you identified the problem, but I'm not going to let you figure out how to solve it. I'm not going to put this in your hands. I'm not going to use this as a growth experience. And so we basically, we enfeeble them. Plus, we put them into a cycle of what is known as parent-child relationship, which essentially means any time the, they identify a problem, we step in as the parent and say, "You are just a child. You must now sit down and you must be passive and you must be reactionary. I'm gonna take this over. You just sit down and do what I tell you to do." So we've lost any chance of developing proactivity and responsibility and further accountability from this employee. Now, people will say, "Well, I don't do that. That's not how I would respond at all." And yet, when we look at one of our studies, this was from a study tens of thousands of people that we did called The Risk of Ignoring Employee Feedback. And one of the questions we asked people was, when I share my work problems with my leader, he or she responds constructively. And you can see only 23% of people said that my leader always responds constructively, and another 22% said, well, frequently, not always, but, but frequently they're pretty good. But what that means is we got over 50% of leaders that are basically not responding constructively at all, if ever. And so this is a very serious problem. So even though a lot of leaders will look and say, well, I would never do that, I would never respond badly if somebody brought me a problem with the Acme account, the research suggests that there are a lot of leaders that are responding not so hot. Side note, by the way, another piece from one of our— from the same study that we did, we found that if your leader always responds constructively when you bring them problems, 60% of those people will love this company that they work for. If your boss never responds constructively, only 5% of people will love their company, which means if your boss responds constructively when you bring them a problem and doesn't do one of those other two things I just mentioned, you are 12 times more likely to love working for your company. Okay, so that's what not to do. What should we do when they come in and say, boss, Acme Count is really angry. I think we might lose them. Your immediate first response is going to be a simple 7 words. What's your plan for solving this issue? That's it. Now, what does this do? Well, number one, it assesses whether or not they've already thought through a plan for solving this issue. And here's the kicker. A lot of times people will, when they bring you a problem, they will have thought through the plan. But this gives you a quick simple test to figure out, is this a problem solver or is this a problem bringer? Is this somebody that actually thinks through and solves problems, or is this somebody that only brings me problems? Okay, well, I need to quickly identify who's who on my team. So when I ask them, what's your plan for solving this issue? I'm instantly assessing my whole team. Yeah, have you thought it through? A second thing that this does is it actually forces them to hone and develop their critical thinking skills. So they're learning how to take initiative, they're learning how to think through issues. You're also sending a not-so-subtle message that Listen, when you come to me with a problem, take a shot at thinking it through. It's good. I love it when you think things through. I love it when you come up with a plan. Come up with 2 or 3 plans for solving this issue. And it starts to very subtly but very powerfully communicate to your people, I want you to take that next step and actually think through tough issues. Doesn't mean you're always going to agree with their plan, but what it does is it puts them, instead of a parent-child role, it puts them in an adult-adult role. Which means we are two adults sitting down together trying to problem solve and come up with the best plan for solving this issue. But I'm not sitting you on the bench because now it's crunch time. I'm not yelling at you for bringing the problem. I'm just simply asking, okay, I understand the problem. I am calm, cool, and collected. What's your plan for solving this problem? The interesting thing about this is not only will this develop your employee that one time, but it really sets the stage for developing your team long term because you're not going to get sucked into every every single problem that comes along, the more they learn, the more your team learns to start to solve problems and come up with solutions before they enter your office, the more responsible and independent and accountable they ultimately become. And this becomes leading a team of, this is like leading a team of Navy SEALs. You got these smart, highly motivated problem-solving people who are used to thinking independently and critically coming into your office and saying, here's the problem, But also, I have a plan for— what do you think of this? Now we are two adults who are bouncing ideas around with one another, and that is just a radically different way of leading.
