Stop Solving Your Team's Problems: Five Questions That Work

Executive overview

Elizabeth Lotardo, consultant and Harvard Business Review contributor, joins Dave Stachowiak to examine why compassionate leaders chronically over-rescue their teams — and how to stop. The short-term win of jumping in to solve problems masks a long-term cost: burned-out managers, disempowered employees, and cultures that can't scale.

The core insight is that genuine compassion means redirecting employees toward independent problem solving, not shielding them from difficulty.

Lotardo offers five concrete questions leaders can use to transfer intellectual ownership back to the team while preserving trust and psychological safety. The shift is uncomfortable at first — blank stares and awkward silences are signals that the habit has been entrenched, not that the approach is wrong.

Why leaders fall into the problem-solving trap

• Servant-leadership culture rewards being the one who removes roadblocks.
• Both parties feel good in the moment: employee is relieved, leader feels heroic.
• The cost is delayed — it can take years before burnout and resentment surface.
• Gallup data shows middle managers declining fastest in engagement and most at risk of burnout.
• The opposite extreme ("come to me with solutions, not problems") fails by stripping out compassion entirely.
• The goal is a both-and: keep the compassion, remove the reflexive rescuing.

Question 1 — What have you tried?

• Baked-in assumption: the employee has authority and ability to act independently.
• Leaves space for "nothing yet" — this is not a trap, it opens a joint conversation.
• Expect blank stares; they confirm the question is needed, not that it should be dropped.
• Follow with "what can we try together?" to ease the transition from leader-solves to employee-solves.
• Awkwardness decreases as the new dynamic becomes the norm.

Question 2 — What or who is getting in the way?

• Shifts leader focus from solving one-off problems to removing systemic blockers.
• Frontline employees often see the recurring theme before the manager does.
• Identifying a pattern ("it's always this vendor") lets the leader fix the root cause once.
• Leaders are better positioned by role and seniority to address cross-functional friction.
• Solving the underlying obstacle eliminates dozens of future individual requests.

Question 3 — What support do you need?

• Dropping "from me" is the critical change: support can come from colleagues, adjacent teams, or external resources.
• "From me" causes the leader to unconsciously assume ownership before being asked.
• Putting the problem "in the centre of the table" makes it a shared object, not a hot potato.
• The question still allows the employee to ask for the leader's help — it just doesn't default to that.
• Removes the conversational trap where the employee requests leader action and the leader complies out of habit.

Question 4 — What would you do if you were in my seat?

• Forces the employee to carry some of the intellectual load of problem solving.
• Naturally surfaces the politics, cross-departmental dynamics, and time costs invisible from the ground.
• Builds succession-awareness without a formal "let's talk strategy" conversation.
• Illustrates to employees how much effort problem solving actually requires — reducing resentment when resolution takes time.
• Conveys belief in the employee's judgement and capacity for higher-level thinking.
• Originally developed while coaching a burned-out customer-success leader whose team had no visibility into what solving escalations actually took.

Question 5 — Is there anything else I should know?

• Validates the employee's decision to surface the issue without automatically absorbing ownership of it.
• Decouples awareness from action: informing the leader and solving the problem are separate events.
• Creates space for employees who just need to be heard rather than solved for.
• Must follow the earlier four questions — asked in isolation it can reinforce the assumption that the problem stays with the leader.
• Mirrors the experience most people have had personally: venting to a partner or friend who immediately solution-modes when you just wanted to be listened to.

Changing your mind along the way

• Lotardo admits she is herself a reflexive problem solver — the article title is a confession as much as advice.
• Early in her career she believed removing discomfort for others was the highest form of support.
• Observing the pattern play out across coaching clients, family, and community convinced her otherwise.
• The most caring thing is often to stay present while letting the other person do the work.
• None of these questions require abandoning compassion — they are how compassion scales.

Putting it into practice

• Start with question one as the entry point; it is the gentlest on-ramp.
• Progress is not linear — treat early awkwardness as diagnostic data, not failure.
• Cultural change at team or organisational level requires consistency over time, not a single conversation.
• Related listening: episode 284 (Michael Bungay Stanier on the drama triangle), episode 650 (middle managers at McKinsey), episode 753 (belonging as a team norm).