I hear you. Being looked at as the answer-person can be exhausting.
Having been a successful consultant manager, I was promoted to be the district manager in San Francisco for Chase/IDC, a stock market data company. When I first got the job, and came in to my new office, people were lining up to see me. One by one they came in and they wanted me to make a decision about something and then they would leave with the decision and go work on it. I almost felt like I should hang a sign on the door that said “the doctor is in”; I was acting like the doctor in that all I was doing was writing prescriptions, for what medications to take and leave. And what I finally realized was, they were not learning how to solve their own problems.
A popular saying among nonprofit organizations is "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."[1] I needed to apply this medicine at the office.
If it's too easy to drop the problem on my desk, then I was not going to be effective as a manager for this district. If every problem was going to get dropped on my desk. Then it became my problem.[2] Teach a worker how to fish and they don't need a hand-out.
For most day-to-day things, this can be a learning opportunity. Next time one of your team members comes to ask you for a solution, try saying, that's an interesting problem; how would you go about solving it? |