Back in my consulting days, one of our cultural mantras was “Bring solutions, not problems.”
I understood the appeal. If you know the work better than your boss does, chances are you have a few ideas about how to fix what’s going wrong. Asking for your take encourages you to use your judgment and take ownership. It also keeps your boss from becoming the person everyone waits on.
The exact origin of the phrase is murky, but the management thinking behind it goes back decades. In a 1974 Harvard Business Review article, William Oncken Jr. and Donald Wass argued that managers who took over every problem that came their way could spend all day doing work their teams were capable of handling. By 2005, Richard Templar had made “Train Them to Bring You Solutions, Not Problems” a chapter title in The Rules of Management.
After years of coaching leaders, I’ve watched that advice have a very different effect. People keep quiet and let problems fester while they try to figure them out alone. They put off asking for support or insight. It breeds a fiercely individualistic way of thinking, even when the problem needs more than one person’s perspective.
“Bring solutions” makes two big assumptions. First, that the person bringing the solution has correctly diagnosed the problem. Second, that they’ve had a fair shot at considering all the options.
But how do you know whether work can move to another department if you can’t see how stretched that department already is? How do you weigh hiring against cutting back on a priority when you can’t see the budget or know what the board has committed to? In my experience, the problems leaders struggle with most are often the ones that require a decision, information, or help from someone beyond their own team.
And here’s the worst part. When someone is really struggling with a complex problem, they may bring forward a half-baked solution because that’s the price of getting the conversation started. But their boss shoots it down, sometimes for good reason. Then they go back to their desk furious, still responsible for a problem they feel completely powerless to solve.
One of my clients leads a team that’s exhausted and buried in work. He’s terrified he’ll lose some of his best people. So he asks to hire more staff. Bring solutions, right?
“We can’t just hire people,” his boss says.
End of conversation. The work is still piling up, the team is still exhausted, and he’s back at the drawing board trying to come up with something else she might say yes to.
What I’d ask him and his boss to try is a completely different dance. Bring symptoms, not solutions.
He’d book time with her and explain exactly what he’s noticing. What is he seeing and hearing from the team? What work is backlogged? What deadlines are they up against? What makes him worried that some of his best people might leave?
He knows where the team is feeling the strain. She may know which deadlines can move, which commitments came from the board, and whether another group actually has capacity. Once they put what they each know on the table, they can ask a better question. Is the team short on people, or is it trying to deliver on too many commitments at once?
From there, they can brainstorm. Do we hire people? Change our priorities? Move work to another group? Pause a process that isn’t mission-critical? Consider letting go of a few customers whose accounts take up a disproportionate amount of the team’s time?
Then they can compare the benefits and risks. Hiring could be the right answer and still take too long to help with the deadlines in front of them. Moving work buys his team some breathing room if the other group has room to take it on. He might see a way through without hiring. She might see why he asked to hire in the first place. They might come up with an option neither of them saw walking into the room.
Maybe they prototype a solution by pausing one process for two weeks and seeing what happens. Maybe she helps escalate a decision about priorities to the C-suite. Either way, he goes back to his desk knowing his concerns were taken seriously. The next time an exhausted team member raises the issue, he can say, “I raised it. Here’s what we’re looking at, and here’s when I’ll know more.”
This only works when both people understand the dance they’re entering. He comes prepared to share what he’s seeing and help work through the options. She brings what she knows and helps make the decisions he can’t make on his own. If she still expects a finished proposal she can approve or reject, showing up with symptoms will send him right back to the drawing board.
If you’re the boss who’s been asking for solutions, you can change that expectation out loud. The next time someone brings you a proposal you’re about to turn down, ask, “What are you seeing that made you think we needed to do this?” Then stay in the conversation long enough to understand what they’re dealing with and what you can do about it together.
Bring symptoms, not solutions.