Support Is Not the Same as Fixing

When someone on your team brings you a problem, what's the first thing you do?

If you're like most founders I work with, you solve it. You're a builder. You got here by taking hard, tangled problems and working them until they came apart in your hands. So when a team member shows up at your door with something heavy, the reflex is immediate and generous. You want to help, so you reach for the answer.

And often, it doesn't land the way you meant it to.

This came up in a conversation I had on Suits & Sneakers: Leadership Unfiltered with Mike Cameron, who led his own company as CEO for sixteen years before founding Connect'd Men. Mike was honest about something a lot of leaders feel and rarely say out loud. For years he believed that supporting his people meant fixing things for them. What he found was that his fixes often made things worse, because what he assumed someone needed wasn't what they actually wanted. He'd solve the problem and feel frustrated that they weren't grateful, while they walked away frustrated that he hadn't simply listened. As he put it, supporting people often has "nothing to do with fixing the problem."

The practice he uses now is simple. When someone comes to him with a problem, he asks one question first. Do you want strategy, or do you want empathy? Sometimes people need help thinking it through. Sometimes they just need to be heard so they can find their own way forward. The question does two things at once. It tells him what's actually wanted, and it asks the other person to pause and notice what they need, which they often haven't worked out for themselves yet.

Here's what I keep noticing with the founders I coach. The instinct to fix isn't a flaw. It's competence and care showing up in the only way they've practiced. But it has a cost, and Marshall Goldsmith named it well in What Got You Here Won't Get You There. He calls it "the fallacy of added value." When you improve someone's idea a little, you can reduce their commitment to carrying it out a lot, because it stops being their idea and becomes yours.

I'd take that one step further. Ownership and engagement are much higher when someone has had to struggle a bit to think things through and work out their own solution. That struggle is where a lot of the real learning lives. So when we step in and bail our people out of their own problem, we feel helpful in the moment, but we're taking away the very thing that builds their confidence and their commitment. Over time, a team learns to bring problems to you instead of solving them, and the dependency you're trying to escape gets reinforced every time you reach for the answer.

There's a second point I want to make here, because holding space often gets misread as going soft. It isn't. Choosing empathy in a moment doesn't mean lowering the standard or excusing the result. The financials are still due. The deadline still stands. Support and accountability aren't opposites, and the leaders I respect most can sit with someone's frustration and hold a clear line at the same time. The skill is doing both, not trading one for the other.

So here's the question I'd offer you. The next time someone brings you a problem, what might change if you asked what they actually need before you reached for the solution?

I'd love to hear if this resonates with you. If you've felt yourself struggle between solving and supporting, Mike's full conversation is worth a listen.

Listen to the full episode of Suits & Sneakers: Leadership Unfiltered with Mike Cameron here: episode link