“Just bring it to me. I'll take care of it.”
Sometimes that's exactly what good leadership requires.
A customer is upset.
A project is stuck.
An employee issue needs attention.
A decision needs to be made.
And the leader probably can solve it.
They may even solve it faster and better than anyone else.
That's how many leaders became successful in the first place.
But there's a catch:
Every problem you solve for someone is also a problem they didn't learn to solve themselves.
Do that often enough, and being the organization's best problem-solver can create the very dependency you're trying to eliminate.
Imagine a manager encounters a difficult situation.
They can:
A. Analyze it, consider alternatives, make a decision, and accept responsibility for the outcome.
Or:
B. Ask the executive who has 20 years of experience and can probably provide an answer in five minutes.
Option B is rational.
It's faster.
It reduces risk.
And if the leader routinely provides the answer, the organization learns something:
When the problem gets difficult, take it upstairs.
No policy is required.
No organizational chart needs to say it.
The behavior gets reinforced one solved problem at a time.
It often looks like this:
Problem → Escalate → Leader Solves → Immediate Relief → Repeat
Everybody gets something from the cycle.
The employee gets an answer.
The manager avoids a potentially bad decision.
The leader gets the satisfaction of helping – and the issue gets resolved quickly.
In the short term, it works remarkably well.
The problem appears over time.
The leader becomes increasingly busy while everyone around them becomes increasingly accustomed to bringing difficult problems upward.
The better the leader is at rescuing...
the more rescue calls they receive.
Suppose someone comes into your office and asks:
“What should I do?”
The fastest response is usually to tell them.
But what happens if instead you ask:
Now the conversation does something different.
It doesn't merely solve today's problem.
It develops tomorrow's problem-solver.
That may take longer today.
But it can save enormous amounts of leadership time tomorrow.
There is an opposite extreme.
A leader shouldn't respond to every question with:
“Figure it out.”
People sometimes genuinely need experience, context, coaching, or authority they don't yet possess.
The goal isn't to withhold help.
It's to change what help looks like.
Instead of automatically supplying the answer, the leader can provide:
Context. Questions. Boundaries. Coaching. Feedback.
And when appropriate, let the other person make the decision.
That's how judgment develops.
Not every escalation is evidence of dependency.
Some problems belong at senior levels because they involve:
The objective isn't to stop escalation.
It's to stop unnecessary escalation.
A healthy organization knows the difference.
The next time someone brings you a problem, resist immediately solving it.
Instead of:
“Here's what I would do.”
try:
“What do you recommend?”
Then listen.
You may discover that the person already knows the answer and simply wants permission.
Or that they have an approach you hadn't considered.
Or that there's a genuine gap in their judgment that you can coach.
All three are more useful discoveries than simply taking the problem back.
As an organization grows, leadership increasingly becomes less about personally producing answers and more about building an organization capable of producing good answers.
That means the measure of leadership begins to change.
Not:
How many problems did I solve?
But:
How many people became better at solving problems because of how I led them?
That's a much more scalable form of leadership.
Being the person everyone turns to can feel like evidence of value.
And sometimes it is.
But indispensability has a hidden cost.
If every difficult problem requires the leader, the organization's capacity can never grow much beyond that leader's capacity.
So the next time someone brings you a problem, consider whether the organization needs your answer...
or whether it needs you to help develop another person capable of finding one.
Part 6: What Should Only You Be Doing?
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Let's determine whether your leaders are building problem-solving capacity throughout the organization – or unintentionally creating greater dependency on themselves.