It’s always good to be able to solve a problem, but it’s often far better to help make the problem crystal clear before you try to solve it.

I was recently watching the excellent movie “Moneyball”, and this scene shows exactly what I’m talking about:

The scouts are all trying to solve the problem and “we all understand what the problem is”, but they’re all on very different pages. As Dan Roam said (via “The Personal MBA“):

“Whoever best describes the problem is the one most likely to solve it.”

Albert Einstein said it like this (via “Inspired Every Day“):

“If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend fifty-nine minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.”

Problem solving is a fantastic skill, but it only works if you have a clearly-defined problem to start from.

Jim Sinegal was one of the cofounders of Costco and had some amazing quotes captured over the years. My favorite, while not related to this post, was what he told his successor as he was stepping down: “If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.”

For today’s quote, though, he was talking about the intersection of leadership and education. In a recent episode of Founders (which was focused on Steve Jobs), they shared this quote from Jim:

“If you’re not spending 90% of your time teaching, you’re not doing your job.”

As you develop as a leader, it can be tricky to figure out where best to spend your time. As GreenMellen has grown, both Ali and I have had to work to determine how best to serve our team as our roles became less about doing the tactical work of marketing. As this quote shares, teaching has been a big part of it.

• Teaching our team through high-level items (goals, mission, etc) and tactical issues.
• Teaching our clients through various interactions.
• Teaching the community through things like our Meetup and podcast.
• Teaching others through activities such as this blog.

We see this through great leaders in every kind of organization. You have business leaders like Sinegal, but even leaders in sports are great teachers; Michael Jordan was famous for the amount of time he spent teaching and mentoring the younger players on his team.

I’m not sure that Jim’s 90% number is accurate, but it’s likely very close. Finding ways to teach, at any level, is a great thing for both sides of the conversation.

One thing that I love about having a relatively small team (it’s myself and Ali, and then seven others) that are full-time employees instead of contractors is the trust that can be built. You certainly can build trust with larger teams and with part-time or contract employees, but it gets more difficult. Having people by your side 40 hours a week, year after year, is a fantastic way to generate that trust.

In Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team“, he shares it this way:

“Trust is the foundation of real teamwork. And so the first dysfunction is a failure on the part of team members to understand and open up to one another.“

Getting team members to “understand and open up to one another” doesn’t happen overnight, but the benefits are unbelievable. Not only will they work together far better when they trust one another, but it makes my job much easier as well, for two reasons:

1. I don’t have to follow up to make sure things are done. I’m confident in emailing anyone on my team to take care of something, and I know it’ll get taken care of in a timely manner.
2. The “timely manner” is important too, because it doesn’t always mean “right away”. I trust them to prioritize my request with the rest of their workload, and it tends to work out very well. I try to infuse my requests with a smidge of Commander’s Intent (“here’s what I need done, and here is why I need it”), and the more I can include the “why”, the better they’re able to prioritize it.

This also reminds of something that Shane Parrish shared in “Clear Thinking“, when he said:

There is only one most important thing in every project, goal, and company. If you have two or more most important things, you’re not thinking clearly. This is an important aspect of leadership and problem-solving in general: you have to pick one criterion above all the others and communicate it in a way that your people can understand so they can make decisions on their own. This is true leadership. You need to be clear about what values people are to use when making decisions. If I tell you the most important thing is serving the customer, you know how to make decisions without me. If you make a bad judgment call, but it puts the customer first, I can’t fault you. You did what I wanted.

Trust doesn’t come automatically, but building a place of trust makes for a much better situation for literally everyone involved.

When you’re a solopreneur, working on your own, you need to control every decision. It can be brutal, but necessary. As your company grows, though, getting out of making every decision is the best thing you can do. It can also be very tough, but also very necessary.

In his book “The Dichotomy of Leadership“, author Jocko Willink shares his “Four Laws of Combat”, with the fourth being “Decentralized Command”, explained by Willink here:

No one leader can manage it all or make every decision. Instead, leadership must be decentralized, with leaders at every level empowered to make decisions, right down to the frontline troopers in charge of no one but themselves and their small piece of the mission. With Decentralized Command, everyone leads. To empower everyone on the team to lead, team members must understand not just what to do but why they are doing it.

His situation is military-focused, but the application of that law reaches all of us. In any scenario, trust is the key; if you can’t trust others to make decisions on your behalf, then you can’t hope for any degree of decentralized command.

This also pulls in a good degree of Commander’s Intent (explained here), when Willink advises that “team members must understand not just what to do but why they are doing it“. If they understand the why behind the need, they can adjust to make the right choice.

If you have a team that understands the “why” and are people you can rely on, you’ve got something rare and amazing. If not, Willink’s book might be a great place to start to learn how to work toward that change.

As my team will tell you, I’ve been bad over the years about forwarding information to them with just one line from me: “Thoughts?”. That’s not helpful.

When I sent those items, such as a review of a new software tool, I legitimately just wanted to hear their overall feedback. However, it could also be taken two different ways:

1. Does he want me to implement this now?
2. Is there something else in here I’m missing?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy recently wrote about this issue and how it’s affected her as a leader. She referenced an amazing clip from the show “Silicon Valley” where the CEO of the company quips “the bear is sticky with honey” and the team scrambles to figure out what he really means. Check it out here:

As Josepha points out so well in her post, clarity matters a lot, and spending a few extra moments to offer context can be huge. In her words:

Context-free sharing of anything assumes that everything between you and the recipient is identical: the same frame of reference, values, and requisite information. I have found that, especially when I want team members to come to their own conclusions, I owe it to them to give them some concept of what made this worth their time in the first place.

Sharing fresh content and ideas with our team is something we’re constantly working on, but finding the right way to do it is always a bit of a work in progress.