When homeowners prepare to sell, they often begin with a familiar checklist: paint the walls, make repairs, improve the landscaping, or update the kitchen.
Those actions may be useful—but they may not address the homeowner’s actual goal.
Leaders often make the same mistake.
A problem appears, and we immediately begin prescribing solutions:
Action feels productive. It creates movement and gives us something tangible to point toward. But movement is not always progress.
When leaders act before understanding the full situation, they can create more expense, confusion, frustration, and distrust. The solution may temporarily quiet the symptom while leaving the real problem untouched.
The better question is not simply:
“What should we do?”
It is:
“What are we actually trying to accomplish—and what is preventing that from happening?”
Imagine a five-person marketing team that repeatedly misses campaign deadlines.
From the leader’s perspective, the problem seems obvious: the team is not moving quickly enough.
The immediate solutions might include adding stricter deadlines, scheduling daily progress meetings, purchasing project-management software, or placing one employee on a performance-improvement plan.
But when the leader slows down and speaks with the team, a different picture emerges.
The team is receiving requests from three different department heads. Each person labels their request as urgent, but no one has been given authority to establish priorities. Team members are quietly working from different assumptions about what should be completed first.
One employee has been staying late trying to satisfy everyone. Another has stopped offering suggestions because previous concerns were dismissed as negativity. The team is not missing deadlines because its members are lazy or incapable.
They are missing deadlines because the decision-making process is unclear.
The visible symptom is poor performance. The deeper problem is a lack of structure, prioritization, and psychological safety.
If the leader responds only by increasing pressure, the team may work harder for a short time—but the underlying confusion remains. Eventually, exhaustion, resentment, or turnover may follow.
The better leadership response would be to clarify:
The team may not need another employee or another piece of software. It may simply need clearer leadership.
Google’s Project Aristotle studied 180 teams to understand what made some more effective than others. Researchers found that team effectiveness was influenced less by who was on the team and more by how the team worked together.
Five dynamics consistently mattered:
Psychological safety ranked first. In healthy teams, people feel able to ask questions, admit mistakes, raise concerns, and offer different ideas without fear of embarrassment or punishment.
Structure and clarity also mattered. Team members need to understand their responsibilities, how decisions are made, what success looks like, and how their work contributes to the larger goal. Google re:Work: Understanding Team Effectiveness
This matters because leaders frequently interpret silence as agreement.
But silence may mean:
Before correcting the person, we must be willing to examine the environment in which that person is working.
Google uses an anonymized team scenario in its psychological-safety training.
In the scenario, an experienced manager had high standards but became increasingly intolerant of mistakes, ideas he considered inferior, and challenges to his thinking. He publicly criticized one team member’s idea and later spoke negatively about that person to others.
The rest of the team believed the idea had merit—but they learned something from the manager’s response: offering a different perspective was risky.
New ideas quickly disappeared.
The manager’s own proposal was eventually rejected by executives because it lacked creativity and innovation.
The problem was not that the team had no ideas. The problem was that the environment taught people not to share them.
A leader looking only at the final result might conclude that the team needed more creative people. A leader willing to examine the full system would recognize that the team needed a safer culture. Google’s psychological-safety team scenario
One simple way to avoid solving the wrong problem is to keep asking why.
The “Five Whys” approach, associated with the Toyota Production System, encourages teams to ask why a problem occurred repeatedly until they move beyond the visible symptom and identify a deeper process or system issue.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement explains that leaders often move toward solutions before fully understanding the root cause. What initially appears to be the cause may actually be another symptom. The process may require more or fewer than five questions, and complex problems can have multiple contributing causes. Institute for Healthcare Improvement: Five Whys
For the marketing team, the conversation might sound like this:
Why are campaigns late?
Because the team is not completing tasks according to the original schedule.
Why are they working outside the schedule?
Because new urgent requests are being added.
Why do new requests displace existing work?
Because each department believes its request should take priority.
Why is the team accepting conflicting priorities?
Because no one has been given clear authority to make the final decision.
Why hasn’t that authority been established?
Because leadership assumed the team would work it out independently.
Now the problem looks very different.
The answer is not “work faster.” The answer is to establish a clear process for prioritization and decision-making.
Before recommending a solution, ask:
Leadership is not measured solely by how quickly we act.
Sometimes it is measured by our willingness to pause long enough to understand.
That pause is not indecision. It is discernment.
It is also stewardship—the careful use of people, resources, authority, and trust.
Before spending money, restructuring a team, adding another system, or correcting an employee, make sure you understand the complete situation.
The right strategy begins with the right question.
Leadership reflection: Where might you be prescribing a solution before fully understanding the problem?
If your organization needs greater clarity around communication, operations, team alignment, decision-making, or authentic leadership, let’s talk about what is happening beneath the surface.
Schedule a Coffee Meeting with Pamela
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