Handing your team a finished solution and telling them to execute it fails for three reasons, Joe argues: they may not agree (so they won’t really do it), their way of doing it may be better for them, and you can’t see all the details about the work that they can. Trying to dictate the solution is effectively trying to “replicate 30 of me throughout a company” instead of leveraging 30 different people with different strengths.
The alternative isn’t to abdicate. The leader defines the solution criteria — the non-negotiable requirements a good answer must meet — and then lets the team solve the problem within them. “We need replicable revenue. The sales cycle has to be under 10 months. We have to identify an ICP. The story has to be differentiated.” The team can debate and improve the criteria, but the leader ultimately owns them.
“The team’s job is to solve a problem within your solution criteria and to augment, improve or debate the solution criteria, but it’s not the team’s job to be the end-all-be-all of what the solution criteria is.”
This avoids the most common delegation failure: leader and team each silently prioritize different things, work past each other, and only discover the mismatch when the leader says “this isn’t what I wanted” — by which point no one could have known.
Related Concepts
- Objections create buy-in and better solutions
- Find the one thing that makes everything else easier or irrelevant
- The leader’s job is not to take care of everyone
- Principles make decisions for you