Minute With Mallon: Stop Solving Your Team’s Problems!
Welcome to Minute with Mallon!
Something I Taught:
I was coaching a client recently who told me something many leaders struggle with.
“I feel like I’m always the one solving problems for my team. They come to me, I give them the answer, and then I move on to the next thing.”
I told him that while it feels helpful in the moment, over time it creates two problems:
His people stop thinking for themselves, and
He becomes the bottleneck for every decision.
So I recommended a simple shift in how he responds when his direct reports come to him for help.
Instead of giving answers, I suggested he ask them to do three things before bringing him a problem:
First, clearly define one specific problem they are trying to solve—not five issues, not a story, just the core problem.
Second, come prepared with three realistic options for how that problem could be solved.
Third, tell him which option they recommend and why.
The goal isn’t perfection—it’s thinking.
A week later, he tried this with one of his managers who came in frustrated about a job that was behind schedule. Normally, my client would have jumped straight into fixing it. Instead, he slowed the conversation down and asked, “What’s the one problem we’re actually solving here?”
After thinking it through, the manager realized the real issue wasn’t labor—it was poor sequencing between trades. He laid out three possible solutions and recommended adjusting the schedule and moving one crew earlier in the week.
My client didn’t solve the problem.
He simply asked clarifying questions, affirmed the thinking, and let the manager move forward.
Later, he told me, “That conversation took less time than usual—and I walked away realizing my guy can think. I just haven’t been letting him.”
That’s leadership development in real time.
The real lesson here…
If you always provide the answers, you train dependence; if you require thinking, you build leaders.
Here’s a simple way to put this into practice:
This week, resist the urge to solve the problem. Instead, ask your people to define the issue, bring options, and make a recommendation—and watch how quickly their confidence and capability grow.
Something to Ponder:
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.”
Winston Churchill
Something I Learned:
I was at a dinner party last Saturday evening, and one of my friends mentioned that he’d read a book called Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. It turns out there’s a special right now—you can get it on Audible for $0.99.
I reminded him that I had suggested the book to him about a year ago and had rated it a 10 myself.
One of the many things that really stuck out to me was this:
On the whole, people are very slow to spend down (“decumulate”) their assets. Across ages—whether looking at retirees in their sixties or those in their nineties—the median ratio of household spending to household income hovers around 1:1. This means that people’s spending continues to closely track their income—so as people’s incomes decline, their spending does, too.
At the high end, retirees who had $500,000 or more right before retirement had spent down a median of only 11.8 percent of that money 20 years later or by the time they died. That’s more than 88 percent left over—which means that a person retiring at 65 with half a million dollars still has more than $440,000 left at age 85.
What Perkins suggests is that we start identifying the experiences we want to enjoy—and intentionally do more of them earlier in life. He doesn’t just make the case; he explains how to do it.
One line that really stayed with me was this:
Experiences actually gain value over time because they “pay what I call a memory dividend.”
Invest in yourself—buy the book.
Something I Saw:
Our dear friend Elizabeth Umberson made this incredible Osso Buco for the dinner party! No knife needed — just a fork! 🤤
Want to pass this issue along? Just share this link: RobertMallon.com/Newsletter
Hope you have an incredible week my friend!
Robert
