The late Colin Powell, retired General who served as the 12th Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993 and Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005 said, "Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them." It's a great quote that emphasizes that leaders need to build psychological safety within their teams so that they will feel as though they can speak up with ideas, questions, concerns, or even acknowledge their mistakes. The Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson has written extensively about psychological safety, including The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth and most recently, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well (both are superb).
I recently came across a LinkedIn post by Robert Shumate who made a slight correction to Colin Powell's quote. He said, "Leadership is mentoring others to solve problems. The day those you lead come to you to solve their problems is the day you've failed leading them." After thinking about this some more, I realized just how profound this slight change in the original quote is for leaders today. Leaders have to create "fearless organizations", but they also have to both train and empower their teams to solve problems on their own! After all, this is exactly what High Reliability Organizations do with the fundamental principle of "Deference to Expertise".
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