Be a problem solver, not a problem creator

For a long while now I have been touting this saying of “Be a problem solver, not a problem creator”. I don’t know if it’s truly something I came up with or if I stole it from somewhere else. I’m sure it’s a little cliched at this point, but I’m not on much social media, so if it’s making the rounds it is passing me by.

My approach to this I tend to keep isolated to my work life. Problems often come up at work, I do tend to be the one that identifies them. I’ve found that simply alerting people to a problem tends to be more of an annoyance when reporting it.

Yes there are support staff to handle issues in the larger scheme of things, but within my role, and within my project if something looks off or isn’t going the way we expected, that’s not something the help desk team is going to solve for me.

Instead, what I started doing, even before my obnoxious quote, was to try to also come up with some kind of solution before presenting the findings. My solution wasn’t always right and smarter people than myself were able to pop in and help with a real solution, but what I noticed was that even though my solution may have been wrong, it got the conversation started a little easier. Instead of being someone that comes to the table with the problem and asking everyone else to solve it, I came with the problem, but also a way around it.

It can be tricky to do this without coming off as pretentious or over achieving, especially if I were going outside of my lane. Sometimes people already knew about the issue and were working to solve it. Sometimes they just didn’t want to hear it. Or my idea was SO incredibly bad that it actually was very unhelpful.

I’ve been with the same company for around twenty years now though, and I do owe part of that to this mindset.

-TFMD