The Most Expensive Business Decision You'll Make Is Solving It Yourself

*"It's just easier to do it myself than to try to explain it to them right now."* It sounds like efficiency. It sounds like a leader with high standards who knows how to keep things moving. It sounds like someone who cares enough to make sure the work gets done right. It's also the reason your plate keeps growing and your team keeps waiting. In this episode, I share two stories. The first is Monica, a client who ran a small manufacturing company from an office on the plant floor, who was so far behind on her own core work she couldn't get to it because she was too busy solving every problem her team brought through her door. The second is from my own experience, managing a provincial election campaign and watching a rookie volunteer coordinator walk out of a thirty-minute conversation owning a solution he built entirely himself. The tool that made the difference is something I call the PAR Principle. It's a process for walking someone through their own thinking: from naming the problem precisely, to surfacing every possible course of action, to landing on a recommendation they can own and execute. Once you use it, you'll use it every time. This episode also names what it costs you when you don't. The late nights. The resentment you feel and then feel guilty about. The team that never develops because the leader keeps doing the developing for them. In this episode: - Why solving every problem your team brings you teaches them to bring you every problem - The three reasons it keeps happening, and why every one of them sounds like responsibility - The PAR Principle: how to walk someone through their own thinking in thirty minutes or less - What changes when they own the recommendation instead of executing yours - The question that has never once failed to crack a conversation open **This week's permission:** Stop solving. Start asking. The next time someone walks in with a problem, pause before you answer. Ask them what they think. Then wait. You might be surprised how much thinking was already there, waiting for permission to show up.