One of the habits that served me very well as an engineer was solving problems.
If something was wrong, you investigated it, worked out what was happening and found a solution. And if people came to you because you had more experience and you could see the answer, it made perfect sense to tell them.
That works extremely well in many technical situations.
It can become a problem when you start managing people.
Imagine that someone on your team brings you a problem. You can see the solution almost immediately. You’re busy. They’re busy. Why spend ten minutes asking questions when you could tell them what to do in thirty seconds?
Sometimes that is exactly what you should do.
If safety is involved, if there is an urgent risk, or if the other person genuinely lacks knowledge that you have, being clear and direct may be the responsible thing to do.
But not always.
If you continually provide the answer, something else can happen almost unnoticed. The immediate problem gets solved, but the person bringing it to you doesn’t necessarily become any better at solving the next one.
Worse still, you can gradually become the bottleneck.
A different question
Instead of immediately answering, I think it is often worth becoming curious first.
You might simply ask:
“What do you think is happening?”
Or:
“What options have you considered?”
And one of my favourites:
“What do you recommend?”
You may discover that the person already knows far more than you thought. Perhaps what they really needed was confidence to make the decision.
If they genuinely don’t know, then teach them. If the situation requires a decision from you, make it. This isn’t about turning every five-minute conversation into a coaching session.
It’s about resisting the automatic assumption that because you can solve the problem, you necessarily should solve it.
That can be quite a transition for technically capable people.
For years, part of your value may have come from being the person who knew the answer. As a manager, some of your greatest value may eventually come from developing people who no longer need to ask you for it.
And that doesn’t diminish your expertise.
It may be one of the most useful ways of applying it.
If you manage technical people, which do you find harder: delegating the work, or resisting the temptation to take the problem back when you can already see the answer?
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