Help Employees Grow Without Doing Their Work

A senior manager recently brought me a problem. He wanted his employees to become more independent, but whenever he made himself too available, they came to him with problems they could have solved themselves. Yet he couldn’t simply leave them alone, because mistakes and delays could have critical consequences. Doing the work for them was often faster, but it reinforced their dependence on him and left him less time for his other responsibilities.

In his situation, I would focus on two principles, which work best when applied together:

1. Help employees solve their problems, but don’t do the work for them.
2. Teach employees how you arrived at a solution, not just what the solution is.

Let me explain each.

1. Help them solve the problem, but don’t do the work for them

Imagine an employee comes to you with a problem they genuinely don’t yet have the competence to solve on their own. Instead of giving them the solution, identify what knowledge or skills they’re missing and provide those.

The goal is to provide the kind of help that makes employees more capable of solving problems independently, without doing the work for them or leaving them entirely on their own.

Of course, there are exceptions. Urgency, safety, or the consequences of a mistake may justify solving the problem yourself. But these should remain exceptions reserved for the most severe cases; otherwise, you risk teaching employees to depend on you, while leaving yourself with progressively less time for the other parts of your job. And even during these exceptions, you should at least apply the second principle, which is…

2. Teach how you arrived at the solution, not just the solution itself

When an employee asks for your help, don’t limit yourself to explaining what you would do or consider; also explain how and why you reached that conclusion.

You want to teach them how you think, not because your way of thinking is necessarily the best or the only one possible, but because it gives them another approach to problems they don’t yet know how to solve. After all, there’s probably a reason they came to you for help.

So, rather than simply explaining what you would do, explain how you arrived at that decision: what information you looked for, which possibilities you considered, and why you favored one over the others.

The goal isn’t for employees to imitate your decisions, but to learn from your reasoning and adapt it to other situations. Over time, this should make them less dependent on you.

3. Putting the two together

Ideally, you would apply both principles in the same interaction.

Imagine an employee comes to you because they don’t know how to complete a particular task. Rather than doing it for them, find out what they’re missing. Perhaps they don’t know how to use a particular tool or where to find the information they need.

Show them what they need to know, but let them complete the task themselves. As you do, explain how you would approach it: where you would start, what you would check, and how you would recognize whether the result is bad, good, or great.

This way, you’ve helped them complete the task without doing it for them. And rather than merely solving today’s problem, you’ve given them knowledge and a way of thinking they can reuse tomorrow.

Conclusion

The goal is to make each interaction leave employees a little more capable than before.

This is particularly valuable when teams rotate frequently: you may not have enough time to teach employees every skill they’ll need, but you can teach them how you think, giving them an approach they can apply even to problems you haven’t taught them to solve.