Encouraging Employees to Bring Solutions, Not Problems: Leadership Tips (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Do employees bring you problems or solutions? I'll talk about how to get employees to bring solutions rather than problems in this video. Hello, I'm Steven Goldberg of Optimist Performance bringing you practical tips and ideas on leadership, team development, and employee performance in the workplace. If employees are bringing you problems for you to solve and you are taking the time to solve their problems, then you're taking on the role of problem solver for them. You become the hero, the savior. Now that may give you power, make you feel good, but it's very unproductive because rather than working on your own improvement projects for your department, for the company, you're spending your time doing what your employees should be doing. So you want them to bring you solutions, not problems, and in order for them to do that, they need to think out of the box or they need to think through whatever problem they're faced with. Now some employees just do that automatically, but others have a tendency to bring you their problems. So the thing to do to turn that around when an employee brings you a problem is not to tell them what to do, but to ask questions. Ask them what they think they could do to solve the problem. That will flow into other questions, but you want to get them thinking, use their skills, use their experience, build their confidence so that they come up with answers and then you formulate or help them formulate that into a plan of action. Now if you don't like what they're saying or if they haven't thought it through enough, keep questioning them. Challenge them. That's what you need to do. You need to get them comfortable with facing risk, facing change, tackling problems. It'll make them feel better. It'll make things much more productive and you won't get bogged down doing the work of your employees. So it's really about taking a coaching style of leadership. I talk about this all the time, rather than an autocratic or directive style of leadership. Now of course if the situation is such that it's really over their head or they don't have any authority, they lack resources, yes you have to step in and help them. But if it's somebody that keeps coming back time and again with problems that they should be solving on their own and you know who those people are, then you want to switch around how you react to them. So for a more detailed explanation of this, I have a blog article on my website. I'll put a link to that in the description of this video. Once you help them formulate their ideas of what they could do, you want to summarize that or have them summarize that in an action plan of maybe one or two or three steps. And then you want to set a date to follow up. And this gives you an opportunity to give recognition for the effort they're making and also just to provide some correction in case that's required as well. So it's important to take notes, set that follow up date, and make sure to follow through. Check out the article that accompanies this video on the blog section of our website. I'll put a link to that in the description of this video. Check out some of these related videos. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. Thank you for listening and we'll talk again soon.