Are you the chief problem-solver in your business?
I was.
Before CultureWise, I was an executive at a 150-person AV services company, Adtech, running the Technology & People side of the business.
My days looked a lot like this:
It would be 9:30PM on a Thursday night. The house was finally quiet, the kids were asleep, the laptop was open, and it was the first hour all week I had to think about where the business is going. I knew the next morning would start at 7:30 with a client escalation. I’d also need to approve a different client proposal before noon.
I was constantly playing defense, and it never slowed down. If something came up, I would bring people together, talk to their managers, and try to make sure everything worked out. And honestly, I loved it. There's a real hit you get from swooping in and fixing something.
What I didn't see was what it was teaching everyone around me. Every time I solved a problem that wasn't mine, I was telling the team they couldn't. I wasn't the chief problem-solver. I was the chief enabler.
I’d warn every leader we work with about the same thing. Your business can’t grow if you never get out of the way. You are the bottleneck. Your people need you to lead and work on the business, instead of inside it.
How? You have to elevate your team with the clarity and context to operate without you. Every person must be empowered to lead and problem solve.
At Adtech, as soon as we accepted that fact as a leadership team – and changed it in the business – everything changed. We started hearing from customers about how proactive we were. Gross margin went up, recurring revenue grew, and retention and employee satisfaction climbed with them. Adtech went from a summer packed with local projector replacements to multi-million-dollar national rollouts for Fortune 500 companies.
Employees would regularly come to me with an issue involving somebody else. Something from the field, a job site, or a sales meeting. I would talk to the person, talk to their manager, and pull people together to try to solve it.
A mentor of mine helped me see another way. He taught me to give the employee ownership to solve the problem themselves.
He told me: If a person came to me and said “Hey, John’s doing XYZ,” the first thing I’d ask them was, “Have you talked to John about it?” It felt stupidly obvious once I heard him say that, but after coaching that over and over, I saw how I started to give employees the ownership and language to solve it themselves.
We rolled out that same approach across the business. We actually had a leadership scale to measure how people were showing up. Level 1 was complaining, at worst, and Level 4 was the best case: proactivity, taking initiative, bringing out the best in others. (See below.)
In meetings, people would throw ideas around like, “Hey, someone ought to X,” or “We should really Y,” but they wouldn’t take action toward X or Y themselves.
Jack, one of our teammates on the engineering side, for example, would come into meetings and toss around “Level 2” feedback. He’d complain about the solutions architects or vaguely suggest how another team should better use our ERP software.
It wasn’t his fault. It was ours. That kind of thing happened a lot at the time. Because although we had the language, we largely left it ‘on the walls’ at first.
We hadn’t yet ritualized it in our daily work, so it wasn’t ingrained in the way our team operated.
At Adtech, we had a scale to measure how people were showing up as leaders. In meetings, we often found that people would throw around “Level 2” feedback, like, “Hey, someone ought to X,” or “We should really Y,” but they wouldn’t take action toward X or Y themselves. We changed that by building reminders into the places where people’s work was already happening.
Gradually, we built reminders into the places where people’s work was already happening.
Everyone had regular 1-on-1s. We used management Lunch & Learns, town halls, and management business reviews. Whenever possible, we’d name a behavior when we saw it, reinforce it when someone got it right, and point back to the chart when they didn’t.
The repetition worked.
One day after a meeting, Jack’s manager walked him over to the chart and started walking him through the four levels.
I couldn’t believe it. I quickly snapped the picture below.
One of our teammates on the engineering side would often complain about the solutions architects or vaguely suggest how another team should better use our ERP software. Then one day, after a meeting, his manager walked him over to the chart and showed him our four levels of leadership.
That coaching changed how Jack brought issues forward. Soon, more people were working things out with each other instead of immediately escalating them.
We started getting compliments from customers about how we worked. How proactive we were. We signed bigger clients and repeat projects. We went from spending summers upgrading classrooms for local universities to coordinating multi-state buildouts for a Fortune 100 company.
Our culture drove our business.
Because most employees have not developed the psychological ownership to solve things themselves. From a very young age, we’re used to escalating things – to our parents, our teachers, our boss.
At the same time, us leaders like to solve things. We love to say, “Oh yeah, let me fix this.”
That dynamic trains everyone to look upward. Employees pass problems up the chain, while leaders start to see accountability as something they personally enforce top-down.
Instead, leaders should set the standard — but then that standard must become something that everyone in the organization shares and upholds, even when the leader’s not in the room.
Positive accountability is the thing that changes that. Positive accountability is the shared practice of upholding standards within a team or a business. It’s not limited to one tier of leadership or the leader themselves. It’s collective and it’s proactive.
When every person on your team collectively and positively holds each other accountable, your business gets better. Your people have so much more in them than your current way of operating lets them show. When you get out of the way, they fix the problems themselves, and eventually they start bringing you opportunities too. That's when things transform.
Set the standard clearly → give people the language to use → enlist everyone to hold everyone (including you!) accountable to it.
Jack’s manager didn’t need me or any other leader in the business to step in. He knew the standard, had the language to explain it and felt comfortable coaching Jack himself.
Once I understood this, that work that happened Thursday at 9:30PM was the first thing I tackled on Monday morning. My calendar reflected my priorities. I was choosing how I spent my time. I was playing offense.
The next time a problem lands on your desk, before you solve it, ask yourself one thing: what would it look like if I got out of the way?
Thanks for reading.
– Alex