Leadership is framing

I have seen many clients struggling with the following dilemma:

I am the only person in the business (or one of the very few, generally senior, people) who are able to really understand certain big strategic issues. There are these big problems that are on my plate, that are existential concerns for the organisations - and still all the time people are asking for my help or input. It's overwhelming.

If this rings true to your experience, then this is a great moment to remind you that interruption is the very nature of being a manager. Those constant interruptions are not you doing it wrong. They are simply what the job is like. You're never going to make the interruptions go away.

So given that, what do you do about those big problems, the ones only you can work on?

The answer is you stop trying to solve them all yourself, and you get other people involved.

There's a saying at Toyota which goes something like:

Do you want to be a business of 10 heads and 90 pairs of hands, or a business of a hundred heads?

In practice, this means that if you are one of the few people who see these big problems, your job is not to solve them all yourself. Your job is to use that special, valuable insight that you have to frame those problems in a way that gets other people involved in them as much as possible.

One of the things that high performing organisations do is that they teach problem solving. That is, they are aiming, over time, for their employees to become better able to deal with a wider range of issues on their own, without having to ask for help.

So one of the goals of being a manager or leader is to have fewer and fewer problems on your plate that you are the only one able to solve. So rather than thinking "I need to solve this" you need to shift to thinking "I need to make this the kind of problem that other people can solve".