Stop trying to fix it

Why being helpful isn’t helping

Do you ever find yourself talking with a colleague, or a friend (or both!) who’s explaining a problem, and before they’ve finished the first couple of sentences, you’ve already thought of the solution? You do what you’ve always done: you see the problem, you jump in, you roll your sleeves up, and you get on with sorting it all out.

How generous everyone must feel you are! How capable! Surely that must be why you’re so respected and destined for great things.

Except, over time, that instinct to solve all the problems yourself isn’t doing you, or your colleagues, any favours. Firstly, there’s a very fundamental human response at work: unless they’re specifically asking for advice, people don’t like being told what to do, especially when it comes to handling their own challenges. If you’re the sort of person who, with undoubtedly positive intention, doesn’t even wait to understand someone’s problem before rushing off to overcome it, you’re almost certainly doing more harm than good to your relationship.

There are two ways in which this tendency is damaging.

1.    There are those who’ll find your helpfulness infuriating. After a while, they’ll stop sharing stuff with you, be reluctant to involve you in projects, and maybe even start to avoid you altogether.

2.    And there are those who’ll just defer decisions to you because you’ll always handle it anyway, and it’s easier to let you get on with it on your own than to work together.

The fixer instinct is one of the hardest habits for very capable people to break because it feels like competence rather than a flaw. But every time you solve something for someone, you’re also telling them, however kindly, that you don’t quite trust them to solve it themselves.

How to change it

You can shift this by very intentionally taking a moment to pause when someone tells you of an issue they’re having. Deliberately change your mindset from solution provider to active listener. Ask questions, not to buy time to come up with an answer or to say something clever, but to deepen your and their understanding. Sit with your colleague’s problem long enough, and the most positive solution for resolving the issue and building your relationship will often present itself without your intervention.

The objective here isn’t to be less useful but to be useful in a way that delivers the most positive outcome to a problem, strengthens those around you, and deepens trust and cooperation.

Next time someone tells you about a problem, try resisting the urge to solve it for them. You might find the most influential thing you can do is not fix it at all.