Are you a task-solver or a problem-solver

“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.” – Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, writing in Creativity Inc.

Do you, in your day-to-day, spend more time doing tasks or solving problems? If you manage people, does your team have a to-do list that you assign, or are they tackling thorny challenges (that you may or may not have assigned) because they are important for the business? 

This is a simple idea. The execution is not so simple. When I talk to great managers and say “you have to give your team problems, not tasks,” they nod. When I talk to new managers, they tell me the way they manage their reports is by building a to-do list together. 

I’m writing this late at night after a few days in a cabin in the woods, so I’m feeling hyperbolic. But I’ve also been meaning to write something about this for months, so I’ll go ahead and make a bold claim — doing tasks vs solving problems is the number one reason some people get promoted and others don’t. 

For both individual contributors and people managers. 

The problem with tasks is that you probably have the wrong tasks 

If you are a people manager and you are in the position of assigning things to your reports, it’s tempting (and much easier in the short term) to give them a list of things to do. 

Except…oops! When you manage your team by giving people a list of things to do, you encourage them to turn off their brains and do those things. And you’re quickly going to find a few issues cropping up:

• The tasks you have assigned have been completed as you directed. Literally as you directed. So literally that, because your directions were not 100% perfectly spelled out — to quote George Saunders, “language is a meaning approximator” — the end product of the work is off the mark (based on a different interpretation of the task) and you can’t use it at all.

• You wind up giving a lot of feedback on a high number of small, relatively disconnected tasks

• People finish the tasks faster than you expected, so you’re in a constant state of digging up new things for them to work on and there’s a lot of person-hours wasted not doing much of anything

• The tasks you assigned aren’t really the most important things facing the business, which means you start to either take those on yourself — and it’s too much for one person — or they don’t get done at all.

• Your team has ideas that they don’t mention because they think their job is to do the tasks you assigned. Or worse, they stop coming up with ideas at all.

• Your team notices problems and doesn’t mention them. They’ve got their tasks to do, after all. But because they’re closest to the front lines of the work, they see things that suggest you’re focusing in the wrong areas (or they see improvement opportunities) and then just don’t mention them.  

If you ever have a team of more than four reports you will feel these things acutely. It’s probably not sustainable. You’ll be spending time and mental energy saying things that you feel people should already know, and you’ll feel like the most important work you have to do is never getting done. 

What if, instead, you did this:

• Shared as much information as you could about the context of the business, then put the overarching problem (e.g. “better week 1 user activation,” “starting XYZ problem,” “better conversions from content,” “churn reduction”) in front of them and ask them to come up with the fix. 

Obviously, management is not this simple. Sometimes you’re the manager of a production workflow, sometimes it’s unfair to give people a massively-scoped problem without the tools/experience to solve it, and many times you are going to have to choose between having an adequate answer to the problem immediately and spending a lot of time untangling inadequate answers before arriving at a great one. 

But at the same time, management is this simple. When you can have a team of people tracking down problems and tackling them as they come up, you can move faster as an organization and focus more of your brainpower on problems that have existential stakes and genuinely difficult solutions. 

I was once given the advice “you should try to push everything you do to your team, and have them do it instead.” It’s extreme, but that’s what makes it helpful — there are all kinds of things I would never have dreamt of giving to my team, except that when I did they came up with an answer I would never even have considered pursuing.

Even if you have more expertise in an area than your team, your team can spend more time on the problem. They can do more background research, talk to more users, do more outreach, and spend more time in the shower thinking about this problem, because for them it’s a greater percentage of their total work. They can give it their full attention when you aren’t able to.

And yes, some problems aren’t appropriate to give to your team. Yes, sometimes you will have to give tasks. Yes, sometimes you will have to scale the type of problem you give to your scope of influence in a company or the experience level of your team. 

But as much as possible, when there’s a problem you’re trying to solve — bring your team inside your thought process and have them try to solve it instead. 

How do you know if you’re slipping into task-solving instead of problem-solving? The “this is stupid” test.

If you’re an individual contributor, how do you know if you’re a task-solver or a problem-solver? If you’re a manager, how do you know if your team is solving tasks or solving problems? 

I call it (for now, until I have a better name) the “this is stupid” test. 

1. How often do you/your team throw out your entire to-do list because you realize that it doesn’t solve the core problem and you need to start over from something better? 

2. If the answer is “never,” you’re doing tasks. 

If you give a list of tasks to a bona-fide problem-solver, they should come back and tell you that they don’t think the list you gave them gets the job done, and what if they did XYZ things instead (possibly including something you never would have considered). 

Even a great task-solver will never do this. You can have people who produce amazing, high-quality work without ever questioning the premise of that work. 

When it feels like my team is reaching a consensus, I will often throw out a “someone explain to me why this idea is stupid.” And it’s a joke (everyone knows this is a no-hard-feelings thing), so it usually gets a smile, but I really do want to prompt people to start thinking about why the work we’re doing might be the wrong work, because working on the right things is most of the battle. 

Problem solvers question the underlying assumptions of the work. They look for ways to address the intent behind projects, even if that means completely changing the tasks. This almost always means they have an impact on their team and their company that far outstrips what they could accomplish with a to-do list.

In job descriptions for the marketing team I run, we include this line:

“As a company, we value running towards the most important problems over solving the problem that happens to match the tool we have in our hands right now.”

It’s a standard that’s hard to uphold, and one that I’m always working to attain.