My research suggests that leaders spend 30-40% of their time working on decisions and tasks their people should be doing.  That’s 30-40% of their time that they are not spending on more strategic work, commensurate with their paygrade.  Does that sound like you?  The way that people lead is not working!

Building a coaching culture will help.

You may be thinking that your employees need to get better at solving their own problems.  You perhaps use the expression ‘bring me solutions, not problems’.

The difficulty is that your people need some help to think things through, to find possible solutions.  It’s hard to sit down alone and resolve things that need a bit of thinking out loud.  So, they come to you and ask for your help.

They tend to ask in a way that suggests that they want you to solve the problem for them.  In the interests of time, and because you like being the expert, you give them a solution and send them away to implement it.

There are multiple downsides to this:

1. You are not building their thinking muscles, so those muscles will atrophy over time and serve them even less
2. They haven’t thought through how to implement your suggestion, so they will likely come back with more questions
3. You are setting yourself up for a continuous loop of them asking you what to do and how to do it
4. That short-term fix becomes a long-term burden for you, as they keep coming back over and over again
5. You get frustrated and start to see them as underperforming.

The thing is, you created this cycle by giving them the answer.

It’s not them, it’s you.

Click through to the eBook for more…