As managers, we can help our people to become autonomous.
It is undeniable that the best answers are the ones we can come up with ourselves: obviously it is not easy but it is the less time consuming process but if you look at it carefully, most probably is not he most efficient tactic.
Delegating to others and empowering them to solve problems can be a time consuming activity at the very beginning but pays out in the medium term. Sometimes as managers we just need help other figuring out how to handle the situations rather than sorting out the mess for them.
When we remember this fact and act on it as a leader, we shift the paradigm for how we help others solve problems, we also help them grow and build their self-esteem. It is the purest form of helping others develop.
So here’s the change we need to make: our job as leaders is to help THEM find the answer by asking the right questions; questions that invite them to think how to sort it out for themselves.
These questions are part of a “construction” path where we managers are only facilitators: these are the answer to helping others understand things for themselves, but only questions when we take the time to fully listen to the answer that our resource will give.
It is important to let them speak, listen and think, allowing to fully answer the question and avoid offering our easy solution that will work but is not theirs.
It is often difficult to step back: for reasons of time it is easy to enter the discussion and address the answer. In this case it cannot be so since any induced and non-internalized response is a foreign object that will not be part of the path of our resource and therefore will not represent a tool that will be available in the following times.
Just remember: if you do it for them, will maybe be painful at the beginning but for sure will be a building block and a new tool for the future.
