It feels good to be able to solve the problems that people bring to you. Right? It makes you feel needed and helpful, and you can tangibly see the value that you're adding. So it makes sense that if you are brilliant at problem solving, you've always seen that as a huge strength. But there is a point when being the problem solver becomes a problem. It comes at a cost, which could be holding back your career and hindering the growth of your team members. In this episode, I'm going to share why being a problem solver could be holding you back in your career. Then I'm going to share how you can elevate your level of working and empower your team. I'm gonna help you analyze why your team aren't currently solving problems themselves and look at strategies you can use to empower them to become problem solvers.

And then finally, I'm going to help you retrain your team to think for themselves using one of my favorite questions. This is the Influence and Impact podcast for women leaders, helping you confidently navigate the ups and downs of leadership and feel less alone on your journey as a leader. My name's Carla Miller. I've been coaching leaders for the past 15 years, and I am your leadership bestie. And as your bestie, I'm here to remind you of the value that you bring to your organization. To help you believe in yourself, and to share practical tools and insights from myself and my brilliant guests that will help you to succeed in your career. Now it's been a really exciting couple of weeks for me. I've got something new that I am bringing to the world that I'm going to tell you about later.

So stay tuned for that. But let's jump straight in to why being the problem solver could actually be holding you back in your career. So the first thing to think about is if you're busy solving everybody's problems, otherwise known as doing parts of their job for them, you've probably not got enough time to do your own work. And that has consequences because you have to catch up on that somehow or you're going to face criticism from the people above you. So you end up working longer hours, Work ends up passing through those boundaries that you've set yourself around work life hours. You end up with more stress and more overwhelm because there's a steady stream of problems coming at you all the time. And this can look different for different people. So I've got one client, for example, who's been in her organization for a really long time.

So she knows how things work and she gets asked questions constantly. And on the one hand, it's quite nice to be asked questions, but actually, she's spending way too much of her time answering these questions for other people because they have learned that it's just easier to go to her than to try and work it out for themselves. She had too much work to do anyway and now she's being constantly distracted. And then I've got another client who is an amazing problem solver and she really likes to help her team, so she's constantly available to her team. And what's happening is even though they're pretty senior themselves, they're coming to her every time they don't immediately know the answer. So she's not training them to think for herself, and it is taking up, again, a lot of her time. She's not getting any of that focus time to work on the strategic level thinking and projects that are an absolutely core part of her role. And she's not getting time to look outside her team and to build those relationships, to navigate internally, to influence senior stakeholders.

All the things that we know are really important for progressing in your career and being successful at senior levels. Now, there's a couple of other reasons why it's not serving you to always be the problem solver. The second one is that you might become totally irreplaceable at your level. Meaning, you're not likely to get promoted because they can't imagine anyone being capable of taking your place. Also, they might label you as being really, really effective at an operational level, but they're not seeing you do enough of the strategic stuff or they're thinking, well, we're just never gonna replace her. So we can't really afford to promote her. And also, it makes it harder for you to go somewhere else as well because if you think about leaving your team and leaving the organization, but you know that it's not really gonna function without you. They can't cope without you because, actually, you're doing most of the really tricky thinking and problem solving, then you're just gonna feel really guilty every time you think about leaving, and you're not gonna put your needs first.

And in fact, a lot of this circles back to being able to put your needs first, doesn't it? Because it is really quite hard to say no to people when they're asking you for help. But the third and final point, which I think will really help shift your mindset on this, is I know you think you're helping them, but you're not. You're not actually helping someone by solving their problems for them on a regular basis because you're not training them to think for themselves. And therefore, they're not getting the chance to develop the problem solving skills that you have. They're not getting the chance to fully inhabit and excel in their role because they're relying on you to do a percentage of their role. If they went and got a job somewhere else, they're gonna really, really struggle because they'll realize that there's a gap in their skills development. Because we don't learn to solve problems until we face problems that we're stuck with and we have to deal with. They're not learning and therefore, they're going to struggle to progress.

So in the moment, it feels like you're helping them, but actually, long term, you're not. And I often refer to this as spoon feeding your team. They come to you and you want to make it easy for them, so you spoon feed them. And anyone that has had a child or has watched someone try and teach their child to eat. Kids are very, very messy eaters. And it would be much easier and cleaner and much less arguments and stress if you just kept spoon feeding your toddler, wouldn't it? It's just much easier than getting the mess everywhere, but then they never learn how to eat solid foods properly. They never learn how to look after themselves, and and it's exactly the same. We think that we're helping them, but, actually, we're getting we're keeping them stuck at a level of their development, and they need to break through that level of development.

They need to learn how to be problem solvers. So that's the first thing that I wanted to cover, why it's actually problematic being the person who solves all the problems. I'm not saying never do it, but if you are the person, the go to person for every problem in your team or even for people across other teams within your department or your organization, it's not quite the magnificent situation that you might think it is at the moment. Okay. So let's think about now how can you empower your team to start solving these problems themselves. And the first thing you need to do is to do some analysis and think about what problems are they coming to you to solve. So start to map those out. Look for the themes and trends, and what's stopping them from solving those problems themselves? And we're gonna go through that second part in a moment and look at the various things that people might lack, which is causing them to struggle with problem solving themselves.

But going to the first point of analyzing what problems they're coming to you to solve, that's really, really useful because if you're firefighting all the time, well, you can keep on firefighting or you can go to the cause and work out what is starting these fires in the first place. And that is the strategic level thinking that you as a manager or leader should be doing. So you don't want to be just putting out the fires. You wanna be the person that is preventing fires. That's working out right. Why are these issues arising in the 1st place? Why am I seeing a trend or theme here? And what conversations do I need to have? What processes do I need to put in place? How do I need to engage people in order to stop those problems happening in the first place? So that is a problem that you can solve and work on that is completely appropriate and is establishing you as a strategic level thinker. So, now let's look at why they might not be solving these problems themselves. And I've identified 5 reasons that may be stopping them.

Okay. So the first reason is they may have a lack of authority. So they may not feel that they have the authority to make the decisions that will solve those problems. So you need to look at that and look at it very honestly. So some of this is gonna involve self awareness, which is never all that comfortable, but is worth it in the end. And look at it and think, if I want them to solve this problem, have I delegated them the authority to be able to solve this problem? Or am I holding on very tightly to things? Am I not really letting go? So have a think about what authority would they need? What decision making authority, or can they speak on your behalf or on behalf of the team in order to be able to solve those problems? And start to delegate that. And if that feels uncomfortable, then do it gradually. Start with a small element of that.

Let them build up their confidence in that. Because also, they might find it a bit scary to suddenly go from you're solving all their problems to here you go, here's the authority to sort it out yourself. You may well have to take a stepped gradual approach. Some of them will probably be like, hey, and some of them will not be. So look at how you can delegate that authority to them. And if it's impossible for you to delegate that authority to them, well, then fine. You've established that that is a problem that you should be solving. And you might be able to look some other ways like using processes to avoid it coming up quite so much.

So the second reason why they may be struggling to solve problems themselves is a lack of knowledge about how to solve them. So things that seem completely obvious to you aren't obvious to them or they'd be doing them. Wouldn't they? And, yes, you may have a natural ability to solve problems, but also you've had the chance to learn how to do them. You're getting lots of practice. You're evolving your problem solving skills. And so what can be really useful is to work out, well, how can you train them in solving these problems that are coming up consistently. So if they aren't experienced enough to do it, let's say you've been there 5 years and they've been there 6 months, a year, and they just don't have the level of experience that you have, then work out how to train them. And I would suggest mapping out where they are now in terms of their knowledge and experience and where they need to be in order to be able to make these decisions well, solve these problems well.

And then look at, right, where are the gaps and how am I going to get them there? And also think about, right, what is your thought process when you're solving these problems? And can you have that thought process with them out loud? Can you take them through it step by step so they understand what's going on in your head? They will learn so much more from that than if they go, here's the problem and you go, ping. Here's the answer. They're not learning anything from that at all. But if you say, right. Okay. Well, I'm considering this and this, and I know that this will come into play. And I'm thinking about the implications for this person or in this area or with this stakeholder, and I'm weighing that up. And these are the weightings that I'm giving to those different elements, and this is the conclusion that I'm coming to.

They will learn a huge amount from that. So you've got to be a great coach, I think to be a great leader, but sometimes you've also got to be a great teacher or trainer. If you really want to develop people, it's brilliant sending people on courses. Obviously, I'm a fan of that. But you can get really good at training them and developing their problem solving skills as well. So if it's lack of knowledge about how to solve things, then talk them through it. Now the third reason they may not be solving problems is a lack of information. So it may be that there is information that only you have because of the level that you operate at.

In many organizations, information is power. I think we've probably all worked with people in the past who really know that and keep hold of information. And you may unconsciously be keeping hold of information, or you may just be thinking, well, it's not that relevant to them. I don't want to bombard them with more information. But, actually, if a lack of information is holding them back from doing their jobs, then think about what can you give them access to or what can you what information can you pass on to them on a regular basis so that they have all the information they need in order to be able to solve those problems. And just check yourself and check that you're not holding on to all the information and therefore, unconsciously holding back their ability to problem solve. Okay. Number 4 could be around a lack of autonomy.

And by this, what I mean is, are you allowing them to problem solve in their own way? So they're not going to be a clone of you. I hope you don't have a whole team who are a clone of you. You're missing out in terms of diverse thinking if you do. They will think differently from you. And it's really, really hard to think like somebody else. Really hard. And we need people if they're gonna become problem solvers, they need to do it in a way that makes sense for them. And and they may well have a different thinking style to you.

They may well go about things in a different way. But if they're getting a solution in the end that's a good solution, then that's a result. So they may not come to the same conclusions as you. They might go through the same thought processes and come to different conclusions, or they might go through different thought processes and come to different conclusions. So you sort of have to let go of the idea that you're always right. And when you're used to solving problems and you're getting that, dopamine hit from, yes, I've solved a problem, That's boosting your ego. You know, you are human. Definitely boosts my ego if I can solve a problem for someone.

And I find that with coaching, actually, it's very tempting to go, here are all the solutions, and that's not really serving them. And it's not what coaching's meant to be about. They're supposed to be finding the solutions themselves. You're supposed to be helping them create the space to do the thinking themselves. And exact exactly the same here. So you kind of have to let go of a little bit of control here. Allow them to problem solve in their own way. Allow them to come up with solutions that are different from yours.

And even if ultimately, maybe you do have the final say on whether those solutions implemented, really listen with an open mind. There's something called cognitive flexibility, which is this ability to hear the different viewpoints before coming to judgement, rather than going in with your own, this is the best solution. I'll see if they can come up with anything And if they do, then I'll think about it, which I think many of us do, particularly if we're in an area where we are a specialist. We feel like we really know our stuff. So are you willing to let go of control and doing it your way and empower them? Because it could be a lack of autonomy that is holding them back. And then the final reason why they might not be problem solving themselves could be cultural. So if you have a blame culture in your organization or in your department, then, a, they could be covering their backs because they're thinking, well, I do not want to go down for this. I don't feel comfortable And, And, actually, that's a very natural response in that kind of environment.

Or if it's a blame culture, then you may be very fearful of your team making mistakes, and you being held accountable for those. So if you are very fearful of mistakes, then that can make you quite controlling and micromanaging because you're thinking, well, if this goes wrong, it's going to be me that gets in trouble, or you're just trying to protect your team and you're really conscious that, you might have a line manager who's hypercritical, for example, and you're actually trying to protect your team. So sometimes it can be cultural reasons why there's they're not taking it on. And then I said 5, but there's actually a 6th, which is just that train them to be a little bit lazy in their thinking because it is going to be easier to come to you than to try and work it out themselves. If I had someone I could go to that would give me an easy solution to every problem I came across in my working life, I would be on the phone to them all the time. So that could be another reason. It's it's just how you've always done it, and they've got used to it. And changing that is going to mean creating a shift.

And I'm gonna tell you about how you can overcome that in just a moment. But first, I want to tell you about the exciting new thing that is now out in the world, which is my community called women leading. This has come about because I have listened to lots of women have been saying when I interact with them. I'm luckily interacting with hundreds of women every month and listening to what's holding them back, what's making them unhappy. I also look at each of the episodes that I release and which ones are the most popular, and it's really, really interesting. Some are super, super popular, and you can see that it is a real issue. So I know that a lot of you are working incredibly hard, are trying your best to be leaders. I mean, the fact that you're listening to this podcast tells me that you're really committed to being the best leader that you can be.

And also that you recognize that ongoing learning and getting some support with that is a really positive thing. I also know many of us, we're tired, we're overwhelmed, we're overworked, and that can be exacerbated for women because we often have a much higher mental load at home. We're also often doing the office house work at work. And it can be really hard to keep feeling resilient and motivated in that situation. So I've created women leading, and it has a few elements. The first element is support and community. So we are gonna be bringing people together once a month onto peer coaching calls where you'll be in groups of 3, and you'll be supporting each other. It's a chance to talk.

It's a chance to get a sounding board for any issues that you've got going on. It's a chance to just sit down with 2 people who care and want to support you and help you, which is really nice when you're used to being the leader and having to do everything yourself. So there's peer calls. There's also a monthly q and a with me because I love interacting with you. I love getting to know you. I really hope the podcast is serving you, but I'd love to to get to know you myself, to have that relationship with you, to be able to point you towards resources or ask a useful coaching question, or just hold a space where other people can share their experiences and what's helped them. I used to do this on our influence and impact program, and absolutely love it. So there'll be a monthly q and a with me as well.

And then the final piece of support we're putting in place is for those of you going through the perimenopause or menopause. So for some of you that won't yet be relevant or may have been something in the past. But for those of you in your forties fifties, perimenopause is a big disruptive some advice and tools to help with that. So that's the support piece. Then there's also the skills development piece and strategies. So you get access to my leadership skills lab, which is 9 modules on brilliant stuff about being an effective manager and leader, and you can just dip into that when you want. It's bite sized learning with some great expert interviews in there as well. And then there's a monthly live workshop.

And these are on topics like supporting an overwhelmed team, how to say no, how and when to coach your team, dealing with drama in your team. The things that basically stress us out, make our life harder, that we learn strategies to make them easier. Now, I can't remove all your workload, but can I help you to cope with it better? Absolutely. What I really noticed from talking to a coaching client recently, she had a lot on her plate. And it started to feel like that was never gonna change. And then we got on a call 2 weeks later, and she said, actually, I've I've taken more control. I've started saying no. I've started delegating.

I've started pushing back a little bit, and my working days transformed as a result. So we can change things. So that's women leading. Really excited about this. It's a community, so I need lots of people to join so that you can support each other. Now each of those workshops that I just talked about would normally sell for a £199. What I'm doing instead is, at the moment, a whole year's worth of membership, and we're only selling it as annual membership because we want you to get engaged and support each other and keep learning. A whole year's worth of membership at the moment is if you work for a corporate organization, it's £399 plus VAT.

If you are self funding or you work for a charity, it's just a 199 plus VAT for a whole year. And that price is gonna stay like that until the 1st May, and then that goes up to 299 and 499 for corporates. Eventually, this is going to be a program that's probably gonna cost about £1,000 a year because I have put as well over £3,000 worth of value in there, and I don't wanna undervalue that. But I want to help you. I want to be able to support you. I want to get to know you and work more closely with you. And so I've tried to do it at a price that is more accessible. So if you want to join, you need to before the 1st May, you need to go to carlamillertraining.com forward slash women leading.

So that is actually my old website because that's where the page is up. Carlamillertraining.comforward/womenleading, all one word, and you can grab yourself a bargain there. That page is aimed at you as an individual, so it talks a lot about overwhelm. But you can also download a PDF that you can share with your employer, which doesn't talk about overwhelm. It talks about resilience and leadership skills and makes the case of why it's good for them that you join and that they pay for it. So I would love to see you in there. Okay. So let's go on to the final point of today's podcast, which is what do you do when you're like, well, this is all great, Carla, but I've actually I I have this ongoing dynamic with my team or with other people where they are asking me to solve their problems.

And I can't just suddenly stop doing it. Well, what you want to do is to start encouraging them to think for themselves. And so my favorite question for doing this is when someone comes to you with a problem that they want you to solve, the first thing you do is reflect it back to them. And you say something like, what have you already considered? Or what's your thinking on this so far? Something that basically says, don't come to me without doing any thinking of your own. I want you to do some pre thinking rather than just coming to me and asking me to solve your problems, to answer your questions. Now the first few times you do it, they're not gonna be overly happy because they're used to you solving their problems for them. And now they've got to do some thinking and hard work, and, well, no one really, really wants to do hard work. So at first, I look a bit confused, and you can say, I've realized I've been thinking I'm helping by solving problems, but, actually, what I'm not doing is enabling you to develop your problem solving skills that are gonna help you in your career.

So I want to support you with that. So from now on, when you come to me with a problem, the first thing I'm going to do is to ask you to outline what you've thought of so far. It also stops me telling you something that's completely obvious. Now if you consistently do that, what you will find is people will stop coming to you with problems as frequently because they will run through in their head. Okay. I'm going to go and talk to Joanne about my problem. She's gonna ask me what have I thought of so far. And I'm gonna say I thought of this, this, this, this, and this, and this is what I think the solution is.

Oh, actually, I don't really need to talk to her about it. I've worked it through myself. And then eventually, they won't even think about coming to you because they're just working it out for themselves. And then reward them and celebrate when they do solve problems themselves. And like I said earlier, embrace solutions that you might not necessarily have come up with. So just to reiterate that, when they come to you to solve a problem, then you want to ask them what have you already considered? What have you thought of so far? It's a really, really good way of training your team. And effectively, it's a coaching question. And I think it's a really powerful thing to be able to do to coach your team.

And that's why we're including quite a bit of that within the women leading workshops for you. Okay. So we've covered quite a lot today. So just to recap, it isn't helping you or other people if you are solving problems that other people should actually be solving for themselves. Then what you need to do is analyze what problems are they coming to you to solve and look at if there's any that you can proactively prevent arising in the first place. And then look at what's stopping them from solving them themselves. And we looked at lack of authority, lack of knowledge about how to solve them, lack of information, lack of autonomy, and culture, and blame culture. And also people just being a little bit lazy because it's easier.

And then finally, we looked at the question that you can use to help them to start doing more of the thinking themselves. Go put this into practice. It's gonna revolutionize your working life. It's going to empower your team once they get through that initial resistance to having to do something they didn't have to do before. And I would love to hear about it. Do send me a message on LinkedIn or join women leading and tell me all about it. Have a great week. We've got some fantastic episodes coming up for you with guest experts in the coming weeks on all sorts of topics from leadership to, career and personal development.

So don't forget to tune in in 2 weeks time for the next episode. Now, if you listen to this episode and you would like to work with me, there's a few ways to do that. Firstly, if you work in an organization that brings in coaches, trainers, runs workshops, I do that. And I love doing that. So if you work in HR or l and d, I'd love to have a chat with you. Could you introduce me to your l and d or HR person? That would be a great way for me to come in and support you and your colleagues as well. The other thing is I run open programs. So I run my women leading community, which has just started, and you've heard about in this episode.

I also have the influence and impact, 3 month leadership development program. The next one is running in May, and then there's one in September. May is nearly full. I think there's a couple of spots left as I'm recording this at the end of March. And then finally, there's be bolder, which is my confidence course for women at any level. And the next one's coming in the autumn. So few different ways to work with me. I would love to take our relationship beyond the podcast and get to know you.