Ep230: From Problem Solver to Leader: How to Stop Doing and Start Developing Your Team

In this short episode, Humanergy’s David Wheatley shares a powerful story about an engineering leader who learned to shift from solving problems himself to building a team that could solve them.

Discover how one simple visual tool helped transform his leadership, empower his team’s critical thinking, and free him to focus on what truly matters—leading.

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Transcript

David Wheatley – Humanergy (00:10)
Welcome to this episode. I'm your host, David Wheatley, and I just want to talk through something that’s happened a couple of times recently—and honestly, many times throughout my career.

I was working with an engineering leader in an organization. This person had reached their position because they were great at solving engineering problems. But now, as an engineering leader, their job was no longer to solve problems themselves—it was to create an engineering team that could solve problems.

However, their skill set and experience were all built around being the problem solver. So people would come to the engineering leader and say, “Hey, I’ve got this problem.” And, of course, the engineering leader would solve it. This habit was restricting the team’s ability to grow and also limiting his ability to move to the next level as a leader.

So we sat down and had a chat about it. One of the things I asked him was what his internal problem-solving process looked like. When someone came to him with an issue and he zipped through a solution, what was actually going on in his head?

We broke it down—six to eight steps that he went through almost automatically every time someone brought him a problem. Sometimes it happened in nanoseconds, sometimes in a few minutes. We wrote it all down, and then I encouraged him to blow it up as big as possible and stick it on the wall.

The next time someone came in with a problem, I suggested he stand up, walk them over to that big chart on the wall, and ask them the questions he would normally ask himself: “What’s the problem? What’s causing it?” and so on.

By doing that, he helped people start developing their own answers. Over time, he began to wean people off relying on his brain and into using the problem-solving process themselves.

He knew it had worked one day when someone burst into his office, ran straight to the board, looked at the big sheet of steps, took a few notes, and ran right back out—without even acknowledging he was there. That’s when he realized he had taken the next step: he had truly become a leader, not just a problem solver.

And I think this happens outside of engineering, too. We often get promoted because we’re good at solving problems—but the next job is about building others’ capacity to think critically and solve problems themselves.

Have a think about that. Let me know what your thoughts are.