This Is Why You Need To Teach Your Team How To Solve Problems

And 4 questions to ask them that will develop their critical thinking skills.

I often talk with leaders who lament over their team’s inability to think critically and independently solve complex problems. Instead, their teams run across problems, drop those problems in their laps, and ask them to provide a directive solution.

Once you get in the habit of solving every problem your team brings to you, you are effectively ensuring two things. First, your team will never learn to think for themselves. And, second, you will become the bottleneck in every decision your team faces.

The result is a degree of micro-management that is crippling to your team, taxing on you as the leader, and — at the same time — entirely self-imposed.

The reality is that if we never teach our teams how to solve problems, they’ll never learn to do it well. ‘I’m too busy to teach them how to do something they should already be able to do on their own,’ you might be thinking.

Welcome to the club; we’re all busy. But the best leaders find time to do this anyway because they realize two key truths about leadership:

1. Frankly, it’s quite literally in their job description to train and develop their people.
2. While it might take up a lot of their time in the short-run, the efficiency they generate in the long-run pays off in spades.

Anyone can teach their team how to solve problems and make decisions more effectively. The trick to teaching problem-solving — like all coaching — is to do less telling and more asking.

Here are 4 questions to ask your team members that will teach them to think critically and problem-solve effectively even in your absence.

“What problem are we solving?”

A few years ago, I was studying for my PHR certification when I realized every single process referenced on the exam started with the same first step — analyze the problem at hand. Why were they driving this point home so hard?

Well, because most of us don’t spend enough time upfront defining what exact problem we’re aiming to solve. As a result, we end up solving a symptom of the problem rather than the problem itself.

For example, let’s say employee turnover on the marketing team was out of control, and there were ten open positions to fill as a result. If my HR Manager came to me and asked to hire another Recruiter to keep up with the hiring demands, I would probably challenge her to evaluate whether that was the root problem.

The real problem is probably not the open positions, but rather whatever is happening on that team that’s driving the turnover, to begin with. Hiring another Recruiter might alleviate the short-term symptom (open positions), but it would do little to eliminate the actual problem (whatever is causing the turnover).

This process of uncovering the root cause of a problem comes easier to some of us than others. As a leader, you can guide your employees through exercises like the 5-Whys or Fishbone Diagrams to help them begin to think critically.

“What information do you need to gather before making a decision?”

At this point, they’re likely to notice gaps between the information they have and the information they’d like to use to inform their decision-making process.

I always coach team members to ‘seek first to gather information.’ Sometimes we put so much pressure on ourselves to arrive at the ‘right’ decision as quickly as possible that we fail to tap into our natural curiosity and ask the right questions to gather the information that will help get us there.

Ask your employees, ‘If you were the VP of this area, what questions would you need to ask, and what information would you need to gather to be able to justify your decision to the CEO confidently?’

“What decisions could you make?”

The keyword in this question is could. Because there are hundreds of decisions they could make, and none of them are necessarily right or wrong. But your employees may not have an appreciation of this.

If they’re used to bringing you a problem and you conferring a solution upon them, then they haven’t had the benefit of seeing the pro/con exercise happening inside your brain at the speed of light. They may not realize that you’re continually evaluating large quantities of information and experience, weighing your options, and choosing the option that best fits this present-day scenario all in a matter of seconds.

They don’t have the benefit of seeing the processes happening just behind your forehead, only the outcome of those processes.

So, once they’ve appropriately identified the problem and gathered the information necessary to make a decision, ask them to brainstorm 3–5 decisions they could make and circle back with you to discuss.

“What are the implications of each of those options?”

This final question is the pièce de résistance of the problem-solving process. They have identified the problem, collected the necessary details surrounding that problem, and brainstormed multiple options for solving it.

Ask them to share those options with you while evaluating the implications of each. You can ask them to consider the implications each decision would have on the people involved, the product or service the company delivers, the customer experience, and so on. Ask about whatever factors matter most to your business, but people should always be a consideration.

The point is to ask them to inspect each option from 20 different angles, fully explore and weigh the pros and cons associated with each, and make the best decision from there.

As you can see, asking these questions helps guide your team members through developing their critical-thinking process, but it also does something else equally as valuable.

It slows them down.

Too often, we rush to make decisions without fully considering their implications or evaluating the other options we may have at our disposal. And we do that because indecision is uncomfortable.

The stagnant period of time between learning about an impending decision and actually making that decision is a time of stress and anxiety.

We feel pressured to take action because doing something feels better than doing nothing. But when we give in to that anxiety and decide before we’ve taken the time to slow down and think critically, we make sub-optimal decisions.

Give your team permission to slow down by asking them the right questions, and soon, they’ll be asking these same questions of themselves.

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