Stop solving problems! Discernment is a much more important leadership skill.

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at a session of the Leadership Fellows program run by the Denver Metro Chamber Leadership Foundation.

I told participants—executive-level leaders from all sectors—that my primary goal in the session was to get them to stop solving problems. My reasoning for this was as follows:

1. Since the participants have reached leadership positions in their organizations, it is no longer their job to solve problems. Solving problems is the job of the people they lead. When a leader solves a problem, they actually deprive more junior staff of the opportunity to learn and grow by trying to solve that problem themselves.
2. If they've reached middle age, participants may be past their prime for solving problems. A person's "fluid intelligence," which helps navigate new situations and solve new problems, peaks early in one's career and declines through one's late 30s and 40s. ("Crystallized intelligence," which helps people recall and connect the things they've learned in life, peaks later and declines slowly if at all.)
3. Most importantly, they should stop solving problems because they have a much more important job to do: discernment.

My primary goal in the session was to get participants to stop solving problems.

"Discernment" comes from the Latin roots dis (apart) and cernere (separation). A related term is "diagnosis," which comes from the Greek roots dia (apart) and gignōskein (come to know). Both words carry the sense of being able to tell what's what—to make the fine distinctions that other people might overlook.

Here's an example: I recently coached the new executive director of a statewide nonprofit who had taken over from a founder who had led the organization for 30 years. In her initial listening sessions with staff, the new leader heard stories of retribution by middle managers when junior staff raised concerns or suggested different ways of doing things. The new director was shocked. Her initial impulse was to find out who these middle managers were and then move them out of the organization.

Maybe that was the right idea. Maybe there are a few "bad apples" that have gotten into the barrel, and they need to be removed. OR... maybe the culture that existed under the founding executive director tolerated or even encouraged such behavior, and these middle managers were just doing what worked. Maybe they can adapt to the new culture. Maybe they can't.

Ultimately, this new leader decided on a few talking points that she now plans to use to establish the cultural norms she believes will help staff make their greatest contributions to the organization's success. It will be abundantly clear that under the new regime, retaliatory actions by managers will not be tolerated. Then she can see if the past offenders, whoever they are, can adapt to the new expectations.

In the Leadership Fellows workshop last week, I presented a few different frameworks for discerning different types of problems, such as the distinction between "technical" and "adaptive" challenges, the distinction between "problems" and "polarities," and the Cynefin framework that differentiates between the obvious, the complicated, the complex, and the chaotic. Then we used the framework from my book, Reframing Poverty: New Thinking and Feeling About Humanity's Greatest Challenge, to stretch participants' discernment muscles by forcing them to explore four different explanations for poverty that have been around for centuries: behavioral, structural, contextual, and cultural.

In a small group exercise, participants were tasked with explaining a particular social problem (topics they had discussed previously) through these four different lenses—even the ones they typically dismiss or despise. The emotional charge of these discussions highlighted an important aspect of discernment as a leadership skill: to discern accurately, a leader cannot be pulled into their default way of understanding and approaching problems.

Using the metaphor of a 2x2 matrix (like the poverty framework from my book), one participant noted that it's the leader's job to stand in the middle of the framework, at the intersection of the two axes, and to review the content and insights in each quadrant. Then, using their crystallized intelligence and staying about the fray, the leader can gather up all the relevant insights, discern what the various problems are, and prioritize the ones that need to be addressed first.

Then they can direct their staff to go solve those problems, since that's not the leader's job anymore.