How I Overcame a Toxic Management Belief to Unleash Team Autonomy

My 5 proven steps for building a problem-solving culture.

Let’s be open about this—most of today’s corporations have a transparency problem.

• Managers don’t know a team’s true status.
• Employees cover over the ugly truth to avoid blame.
• Pervasive, blind faith in, “The way things we’ve always done things.”

The sores (problems) lurking under the surface stay hidden until an infection festers. When the alarms sound at the 11th hour, it’s too late, too expensive, and too widespread to remedy. Companies end up in the ditch like this every day. And teams, stakeholders, and customers suffer the pain.

Think this is rare? Think again.

Why is situational awareness so poor?

The easy answer? Most of us work in a broken system.

• Top-down decision-making dilutes team autonomy.
• Fear of blame from making mistakes hides the truth.
• Employees and managers don’t play in the same sandbox.
• Mass acceptance of the current reality as the permanent reality.
• Rampant deadlines, multitasking, and dependencies obscure progress.

This is an environment that cultivates long-lived, hidden problems.

And many managers ignore (accept) this broken system.

You can’t blame them. Managers today are more disconnected from the ground truth than ever. And the divide between managers and teams has widened with the rise in remote work.

In turn, many managers delegate problem-solving to their people.

They expect teams to figure out solutions to their problems on their own. Managers believe they are empowering their teams. Teams feel managers send them to fend off attack from a lion with a butter knife.

Despite the slim odds, teams try to navigate this chaos, but often fail and feel powerless to change their situation. They end up accepting their plight. It’s easier than braving the headwinds (behaviors and norms) that keep the broken system in place.

Management is out of touch, and the teams throw up their hands in defeat.

The empowerment angle backfires.

Employees often don’t have managers who invest time to help them with the solution. So, problems remain hidden and unsolved.

You should read that again.

The management belief in employees “bringing solutions, not problems” wreaks havoc on transparency. Today’s problems don’t have an easy solution. And when employees aren’t allowed to bring you problems, you won’t see them until it’s too late.

I’m not claiming innocence to never having held this misplaced belief.

I used to pride myself in being Socratic when teams brought me a problem.

I would ask my team many questions, hoping they would find the solution on their own. My teams suffered through the inquiry and left empty-handed with homework, no solution. This felt noble to me at the time; I assumed I was being a good manager and empowering my team.

But I ended up with disengaged team members.

I found out when people don’t know the answer, many times, they don’t want a flurry of questions thrown back at them.

This is especially true when operating amidst chaos and uncertainty. In these cases, your people have frustration and actually need your help. The worst thing you can do is to return their questions with more questions.

My method wasn’t helpful, and it came across as insensitive.

Before long, I quit hearing about problems from my teams.

At first, I thought this was a good thing—that I had empowered them and built their problem-solving chops.

I had not: the problems lived on, hidden, not solved, and festering.

My Five Proven Steps To Building A Problem-Solving Culture

What you actually want is a problem-solving culture.

I know because it’s the change I had to make. My Socratic, “asking questions” approach had to die.

And I replaced it with a systematic method of building my team’s capability to solve problems. I realized I needed to equip those closest to the work to experiment and solve problems. This meant removing the dependence on me. But a new skill is like a muscle, and my team needed to build this capability. I had to become the trainer and coach.

The shift: I had to be a part of the resolution process and stop demanding solutions without guidance.

Here are the 5 steps I took that worked to build a problem-solving culture.

Step 1: Make problems a good thing.

We have to celebrate problems, not fear them.

While I built my problem-solving culture, the first thing I had to do was make problems visible. If they weren’t visible, nothing else really mattered. No problem-solving skills I built up in my team would make a difference.

The faster you know about a problem, the faster you can act on it and squash it before it gets out of control.

So, I made it safe for my team to bring me problems.

I reversed the old (outdated) adage, “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” Now, I told my team:

“Bring me any problem, regardless of size or severity. We will solve it together.”

This solved the problem visibility issue fast.

Be warned, you will see now what hid beneath the surface. And it will likely be a flood of problems. My team was crumbling under the heavy burden of these problems, and it was a shock to see them rush in. So, be ready for a giant wave of issues.

Now that you have situational awareness, you need to visit where the work happens.

Step 2: Managers visit the team sandbox.

Managing from an office or report is not a strategy for understanding ground truth.

Instead of waiting for problems, I figured I’d go to where they emerged. To know a problem is to see why it happens, the root cause. Witnessing problems emerge first-hand would give me better insight during the problem-solving process.

So, I essentially became a part of the team.

How I showed up for this was crucial.

I did not manage the team. Instead, my goal was one of support and observation. I made this clear with the team up-front. Plus, now they knew from the prior step I wanted to see the problems, no matter how thorny.

The policy of “bring me the problems” made the team comfortable with me around to see the good, bad, and ugly.

Now that my team and I were in it together, I needed to start building the problem-solving practice with them.

Step 3: Mentor and model problem-solving behavior (“I do”).

This step does not exist in a “bring me solutions” model.

With any new skill development, a pattern of “I do,” “We do,” and “You do,” is highly effective and fast.

Early on in building my team’s problem-solving habit, I used this technique. And it accelerated the learning process. It gave the team an example to follow, allowed them to practice with my help, and provided a safe place to try it.

Showing how “I do” it was the missing link in my Socratic method. Here is what I did:

1. The team would select a problem hot off the press.
2. I would show the team how I solve it, step-by-step.
3. I would solve the problem.
4. The team would observe, ask questions, and take notes.

This could have devolved into an ongoing show of my skills for every surfaced problem. And no team likes a showboat manager.

So, it is crucial to progress at a quick clip into “We do,” and, ultimately, “You do.”

The next two steps outline how I practice this progression with my teams.

Step 4: Practice collaborative problem-solving (“We do”).

A collaborative problem-solving approach is the perfect stepping stone to independent practice.

As my team started to practice problem-solving on its own, it was struggling to find its footing. They did not know where to look or whom to talk to. Their muscles had not yet developed.

So, I took a collaborative approach.

1. Ask questions to clarify the problem (different from asking about how they would solve it).
2. Put my ideas on the table (this is a bit of “I do” thrown in the mix).
3. Ask the team if they have ideas to add (to get them thinking and riffing off my ideas).
4. Let the team pick a solution and try it out. Don’t interfere with this step unless the team is about to step into danger.
5. Wait for questions or asks for help from the team.

This joint approach eased their first tries at using the behavior I modeled. I didn’t throw the team immediately into the deep end. Instead, I co-created the solution with them. But I still let them spread their wings.

Once they gained their footing, we moved on to the final stage.

Step 5: Practice Intent-Driven Leadership (“You do”).

Now, it was time for my team to take flight.

The final stage of building my team’s problem-solving habit was exciting. I had watched their confidence grow to this point. And I couldn’t wait to see them go at it alone.

But I didn’t just rip the Band-Aid. I gave them one final stepping stone through a technique called Intent-Driven Leadership. This follows the Intent-driven Leadership method as developed by David Marquet.¹

David Marquet is a retired US Navy Captain.

In his book, Turn the Ship Around, he shows how he changed the culture on a nuclear submarine. He used a technique he calls Intent-Driven Leadership. It allowed him to put control of his ship out of his hands as the captain and into his crew’s hands.

As you can imagine, this is not a common practice in the Navy.

But it worked. His method built his confidence in his crew. And it built his crew’s problem-solving competence and confidence in their abilities.

Intent-Driven Leadership puts control into the team’s hands.

Here’s how it works in 4 easy steps:

1 – Outline the experiment.

Discuss with your team why problem-solving capability at the team level is critical.

Develop a shared understanding. Then, ensure your team has the desire to move forward with the experiment. If they commit to the experiment, outline the experiment together.

Define the expected results, when to check the results with them, and how to measure the results.

2 – Promise not to decide for the team.

Minimal guidance is crucial for this stage of the learning journey.

If your team comes to you with a decision, you will not answer. You may recognize this is how I acted before. Now, it is OK to be Socratic because you have built their capability up to this point.

Tell your team this is how you will behave, to set their expectations.

3 – Define allowed decision types.

Clarify with the team which decisions apply to the experiment.

You may choose to have certain decisions remain with you for the experiment duration. This is a valid thing to do. David Marquet kept the decision to launch weapons as his own. He did not want the lives of others to have to be on his team’s shoulders.

After the experiment, you can expand the decision-making scope if you wish. This is up to you and your team as you progress on your problem-solving journey.

4 – Ask your team to use “Intent” language

“We intend to…” was a crucial aspect of Marquet’s technique.

When the team approaches you with a decision they would like to make, ask them to start with, “We intend to…” This simple tweak builds the team’s confidence. They realize they are controlling the decision.

This use of language is an autonomy builder.

But you should still have a two-way dialogue.

Ask any clarifying questions to the team to ensure they are deciding safely. Assess their decision-making confidence. Tell them to let you know if they are not comfortable deciding. If all is safe, you will say something like, “Sounds good, carry on,” or “Please let me know how it goes.”

Then, stay out of the way, and watch them take flight and practice problem-solving on their own.

Any result is good here—success or failure.

The cool side effect of building a problem-solving culture: it improves the system, too.

You know that broken system we talked about?

Partnering with your team to create a problem-solving culture naturally improves the system. It’s a win-win.

• Autonomy builds.
• Fear of problems dissipates.
• Employees and managers build relationships.
• The reality of day-to-day work is now up to every employee.
• The problems of deadlines, multitasking, and dependencies get solved and transparency thrives.

Building a problem-solving culture changes the system, for the better.

So, will you embrace problems to your advantage? Will you create the conditions for transparency to thrive? Will you steal my steps to building a problem-solving culture?

What do you intend to do today? There’s no problem with that.

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References

1. Turn the Ship Around, L. David Marquet, 2013