The Words That Build Your Team

The fastest way to weaken your team is to solve every problem they bring you.

I know — that's counterintuitive. Solving problems is supposed to be the job. You're the most experienced person in the room, you can see the answer faster than anyone, and the calendar is screaming at you. So you solve it. You move on. You feel productive. And without realizing it, you've just trained your team that thinking is your job, not theirs.

Two choices, every time. When someone walks into your office stuck on a problem, you have two choices. You can solve it for them — which feels efficient and is actually a slow poison. Each time you do it, you make yourself slightly more central and your team slightly less capable. Multiply that by a hundred interactions, and you've built a company that can't function without you in the room.

Or you can affirm their capability to solve it themselves. This feels slower in the moment. It's the highest-leverage thing you do all week.

The language that builds people. Try these phrases. They sound simple. They're load-bearing. "I trust you to figure this out." "You've solved harder than this." "I hired you because of how you think — show me how you'd handle it."

Every time you say one of these, you're doing two things at once. You're returning the problem to its rightful owner. And you're rewiring how that person sees themselves at work. People rise to the version of themselves their leader reflects back at them. If you treat your team as capable, they become more capable. If you treat them as needing rescue, they'll start to need it.

The all-hands reframe. The same principle applies at scale. Most all-hands meetings open with what's broken. The miss, the gap, the thing that needs to be fixed. There's a place for that — but it can't be the opening note, because the opening note sets the entire emotional register of the meeting.

Open with what's working. Who shipped. Who showed up. Who made the customer's week. Then move into the harder stuff. People will run through walls for a leader who notices them. They will quietly disengage from a leader who only sees gaps.

This isn't denial. To be clear: positive leadership is not pretending the hard quarter isn't hard. It's not avoiding accountability or skipping the difficult conversations. It's being the person in the building who still believes — out loud — that your team can handle the truth and rise to it. Because they can. And the moment you stop believing it, so will they.

Next in the series: how to actually build a daily practice around this — and what to do when you don't feel any of it.