Why Thinking you Need to Have All the Answers is Counterproductive for your Team
When I stand in a room full of senior leaders and ask, “Who here values collaboration?”, every hand goes up. When I ask, “Who here collaborates with their team?”, every hand will most likely stay up. But when I ask, “Who here seeks the answers to the most difficult and complex issues directly from their team?”, the dynamic shifts. If people are being really honest, the number of hands raised will go down — by a lot.
Here’s the thing: when our teams raise issues or challenges that are happening in the organization, it’s really easy for leaders to get hooked into immediate problem solving. As leaders, you’re likely used to being looked at for answers, and you may have a lot invested in being the one to come up with solutions.
But it’s important to remember three things:
- Not every issue, as it’s first described or identified, is the real issue
- Complex cultural challenges rarely have simple solutions
- Your team likely has the answer it needs — it just needs a group culture that will enable it to emerge
It takes trust, and it takes time
If you’re just tuning in, welcome to the Leader’s Edge, a multi-part story exploring the challenges and growth potential of expanding your leadership range and communicative competence.
Throughout this series, we’ve been following a cohort of leaders from the fictionalized Horizons Tech organization as they engage in a leadership development program. The program was designed to increase their ability to navigate behavioral change and communicate effectively amidst complex interpersonal dynamics — in other words, their “communicative competence.”
For the last few episodes, we’ve been following along with various leaders in the program as they wrestled with their complex relationships and patterns around inviting opposition from their teams.
This week, we’re joining Angie, who found her edge as a leader in the space of collaboration.
Like so many of the leaders I poll when giving talks and workshops, Angie would absolutely have raised her hand when asked if she values collaboration. But, if she were being honest, she would be the first to admit that she does not actively collaborate with her team. Moreover, until her participation in the leadership program at Horizons Tech, she would likely not have realized that her unwillingness to collaborate with her team was to the detriment of her team’s productivity and the quality of their work product.
In fact, prior to her participation in the leadership development program, she generally felt very positive about her personal problem-solving abilities.
Over the course the six-month-long program, she learned more than she would have thought possible about how to build trust — trust in herself to revisit some of her assumptions about what make a strong leader, trust in her team to be able to work through difficult conversations, and trust that taking the time to develop a high-functioning group dynamic is worth every second.
What follows is the story of how she learned that you have to go slow to go fast — and bringing the answers is rarely the solution.
Personal Stories Take a Toll on Teams
During the course of the leadership development program, Angie had many powerful opportunities to experience how valuable conversations about process, behavior change, and interpersonal communication can be in team settings.
We first met Angie in Part 2 of The Leader’s Edge, when she made the decision to stick with the program despite her initial skepticism. In that episode, her colleague Mike had voiced concern that the time spent in workshops was taking away from his other priorities. At the time, she had felt similarly.
In fact, Angie’s entire M.O. was wanting to take action, move quickly, and get things done. Angie was a “fixer” — she was known in the organization for stepping in and solving complex issues. Part of what enabled her to do this was her ability to look at a problem, identify a solution, and get her team to execute on it. And that’s what she had consistently been rewarded for throughout her career.
The first time she questioned this leadership style was Day 1 of the leadership program, when she heard a story from another participant about how, at a previous organization, they’d been on a team where the leader had displayed these kinds of patterns and beliefs. He described the negative impact this approach had had on the team’s dynamic, recalling how disempowering it felt to just be told what to do.
He described the team he’d been on feeling frustrated, unheard, creatively stifled, and increasingly burned out.
The whole story took Angie aback. Shocked her, really. She realized that when her team seemed behind the ball in terms of delivering, she would just tell them what to do and how to do — and that would be the end of the conversation.
She never took the time to ask what was going on for them — what they thought the problem was or what they thought might solve it. Notably, Angie was not uncomfortable with hearing pushback or feedback. In fact, she valued feedback in principle — she just didn’t think it was worth the time to solicit feedback when she could just apply a solution and see results.
That said, when Angie really thought about how she’d been feeling in her role — a process she explored through journaling throughout the duration of the leadership development program — she realized that her approach was taking a toll on her. Her team had grown exponentially over the past year, and she was spending a lot of her time in high stakes — worried about meeting deadlines and keeping her team aligned when it felt like all the pressure was on her to have the answers.
Moreover, she was beginning to realize that her propensity for swift and fast action made it hard for her team to give her feedback or suggest different ideas. Generally, she didn’t worry about — as long as they got results, everything was okay, right? — but she hadn’t really considered the invisible costs.
What Angie was now seeing more clearly was a dynamic in which she would shut down or be dismissive of others opinions or perspectives, simply because she wanted to keep moving at a fast pace. As a result, she was missing ideas from others about how to make things better. The team just stayed in constant action, rarely pausing to take time to reflect or invite constraint, concern, or opposition to the direction Angie was setting.
Over time, Angie’s belief that she had to have the answers and her unwillingness to slow down and hear alternatives was making a major impact on her team: she was short-circuiting the team’s potential to innovate and find better solutions, she was leaving the team feeling unheard and unmotivated.
And, boy oh boy, she was heaping an unsustainable (and unproductive) amount of pressure on herself as a leader. By onboarding the role of “sole decision maker,” she felt increasingly responsible for bringing more energy and determination to keep it up across a quickly growing team. She felt like it was just her doing all the work, and she realized that it was, in a sense, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
She was overwhelmed, it felt like it was her against the world with so much of the burden of her department resting on her shoulders. And as the department scaled and became even larger, the burden of “being the hero who gets things done and has all the answers” was drowning her.
These were the invisible costs of her leadership style.
As the leadership development program progressed, Angie came to understand that this was an unsustainable or scalable path. The wisdom of the group was being lost, and, as a team, they could only ever rise to the best that Angie had to offer.
Letting go of having all the answers
One thing that Angie noticed in her leadership development program is that her team conversations were nothing like the conversations she and her peers were having in their sessions. The program cohort even talked about the topic of exclusion and bias in the company and how it was showing up in their work — a topic was never talked about in such a real, candid, and authentic way at Horizons Tech. In that conversation, she noticed, everyone was able to name their different experiences: some thought that their focus on D&I was all talk and no real action, others shared very personal stories of where they had experienced exclusion, and others shared that they were sick of talking about it and felt wrongly accused of not being inclusive. Not only had very honest perspectives been brought into the conversation, but no one was judging anyone else for saying what they really thought or expecting one person to have all the answers.
They were simply asking curious questions and talking with one another — and that was probably the most remarkable difference Angie was experiencing in terms of how their conversations flowed. Because real, hard issues were brought up in the group, and because they discussed their perspectives openly and fully, she found her own thinking on topics changing — sometimes right in the middle of the conversation! It felt freeing to talk with others like this.
For once, she didn’t feel like she needed to have all the answers. In fact, it felt like the most productive thing she could do in these conversations was ask questions!
Soon, her purpose in the leadership development program became to grow her leadership range, take more responsibility for her impact on her team, and figure out a way to help her team have the kinds of necessary and collaborative conversations that she was finding so impactful with the leadership program.
It wasn’t easy.
After the second phase of the program, Angie came to realize that her tendency to solve problems was connected to some of her early memories growing up and being rewarded for “stepping up in her family system.” She was often praised for taking action — so much so that, as an adult, she was highly driven to “win or succeed at all costs.” In reflection, she could trace so many of her career promotions to her behavior of stepping forward and getting things done.
It is always hard (and often uneven) work to shift the core beliefs that we hold and re-train the unproductive patterns and behaviors associated with them. Especially when we have been rewarded for them in the past! But Angie found that the more she understood about herself — and the more awareness she developed around her actions as a leader — the more change she was able to invite in herself and on her team.
It took time, and it wasn’t always straightforward, but with her intentions set, she brought her new insights into her work with her team and saw their collective potential grow more than she could have imagined.
Meaningful change takes time, not tools
One morning, in the midst of her ongoing ah-ha realizations about her core beliefs and behaviors as a leader, Angie was presented with a new sticky challenge to an upcoming delivery. As she read through her email, that familiar sense of dread and overwhelm emerged. Immediately, she began crafting an email to her team telling them what they needed to do.
But, as she got to the second paragraph, she stopped. “What am I doing?” she asked herself. “Here I go again! I’m solving the problem on my own.”
She recalled one of the cornerstone concepts of her leadership development program (“Awareness precedes Choice precedes Change”) and she made a choice.
She deleted her draft email to the team and started a new one. Two of her team leaders were trained group facilitators and she decided she would ask them to pull together a facilitated meeting with the team. She described the challenge they were facing, and she asked them to design a session for the team to quickly brainstorm some solutions.
As she requested, the team met and crafted an okay solution to the problem, but Angie recognized that there were still some holes.
One of the team facilitators who had led the meeting, Jada, stopped by to talk with her about the meeting. “How are you feeling about the meeting outcome?” Jada asked.
Angie needed to consider her response. She was known for her forthrightness and honesty, and she decided now was not the time to change that. So she said, “I’m feeling okay. It’s not really what I was hoping for. It feels like a surface-level solution, and I think we might be missing something really important if we move forward with this. I’m not sure why we don’t seem to be able to get to really thoughtful solutions in this team. I was really trying to turn this over to the team, but I’m left feeling like maybe I need to find some solutions to this problem on my own.”
Jada was a bit surprised by Angie’s response. Jada had a hypothesis about what might be happening, but she was not sure how much she could say to Angie and still keep her job. In fact, Jada had tried to give Angie feedback in the past, but it often felt like it was either not well received or just didn’t even register with Angie.
But Angie seemed deflated, so Jada decided to give it a try. She asked, “Are you open to hearing some feedback about this?”
Angie replied, “Absolutely. You know you can say anything to me. I always want feedback.”
Jada smiled, thinking about how different her experience of that had been in the past. Courageously, she decided to go with Angie’s stated intention anyway. She said, “Angie I believe you always have the team’s and the organization’s best interest in mind. And I know that being responsive and timely is a core value of yours. But I think that your desire for pace comes at the cost of creating some space for people to think more deeply together. We all know that you can grow impatient with longer conversations. I know this as well. When I was designing that session, I wanted to try some different things, but I was pretty sure you would get impatient. That’s why I just went with our old familiar process of asking people to brainstorm ideas on sticky notes and then voting to see which ones people agreed with most. I honestly think if I had designed a different process — one that invited more conversation instead of just the sticky notes and dot voting — we would have had a different conversation.”
In that moment, Angie had yet another one of her insight moments — she’d been having so many recently! But here it was again: her value of pace was causing others to design processes that suited her preference, NOT processes that would foster better solutions. Ugh!
In real time, she was starting to realize something pivotal: just how much influence leaders have in the systems they work in, and just how much teams and team dynamics calibrate to the standards and preferences — spoken and unspoken — of team leaders.
And she actually felt a sense of relief. She asked Jada, “Will you facilitate another meeting? And this time, will you design a process that you think will help us reach a better outcome?” Then, she remembered a strategy she’d learned about in her leadership development program. This seemed like a perfect time to try it out! She said, “You have my permission to ask me to sit out of the conversation and just listen. I promise I will show up with an open mind and willingness to give this as much time as the team needs.”
It was a daunting moment, but she was putting into practice the realizations she’d been having about how to help bring real change in the team culture:
- By focusing on creating the environment, the team would be able to find their own answers — they didn’t need (or want) her to bring all the solutions
- The team needed permission to speak honestly after such a long-established pattern of staying silent
- Together, they needed to build some trust that the team would not be punished for a mistake or voicing a different opinion
- Her team needed to know that she would support them — and that might sometimes looks like stepping to the sidelines
In other words, she was implementing what the leadership program co-leaders called “creating a container” — and it was the thing that made the cohort conversations so rich and generative.
Part of the program gave Angie access to a leadership coach for one-on-one individual coaching. At first, Angie hadn’t thought she’d need it, but by now she could see that it would likely be really valuable to have someone to think with about the changes she wanted to make in her leadership presence and approach.
So she reached out to her assigned coach and set up bi-monthly coaching sessions. She booked them out for the next 3 months and made a personal commitment to show up to those sessions, regardless of whatever emergency came up at work.
Sometimes, she caught herself feeling shocked that she was spending what felt like so much time on changing her approach to leadership. Sometimes she’d even feel resentful — after all, she’d been getting things done just fine before. Was this all really worth it?
But she stayed with it, and, over time, started to see big gains from small changes.
- She asked one of her direct reports to facilitate a team restart for them where they would define how they wanted to work together
- They started every day with a check-in
- She actively encouraged people to oppose her, and when someone did, she set her intention to listening and adapting based on different perspectives
- She addressed her tendency to go too fast by actively and intentionally slowing down conversations in some instances, and then only pick up the pace when all the relevant information seemed to be on the table
At first this process was painfully slow for Angie, but she could see herself developing range in her leadership, and she could see the team responding well as time went by.
- As a group, they were hearing a greater diversity of ideas and opinions — and the ideas that emerged only got stronger through the group conversations
- They were addressing challenges before they became problems
- They were learning to collaborate with each other more effectively rather than only looking to Angie to have the answers
- They were becoming more innovative and efficient as a team
This, Angie realized, is what it looks like to truly collaborate with one’s team. In fact, I have no doubt that if she were in one of my workshops today and I asked “Who here seeks the answers to the most difficult and complex issues directly from their team?”, she would be able to honestly and proudly keep her hand raised.
Do you seek the answers to the most difficult and complex issues directly from your team? If not, what belief do you hold about yourself or about them that is stopping you from doing so? What impact has it had on you as a leader to feel the pressure of always needing to come up with a solution?
