Who Should Own the Problem - The Staffer or the Leader?

In a previous post with a subtitle of "lighting a fire under them," Jim Stroup may be assuming away what may be the underlying problem. His posts are always very astute and always worth reading. So this is more of a question than a criticism.

One of the key elements in my work with CEOs in helping them make high-performance organizations is the core strategem: Who should OWN what problems? If you get this wrong, you have perennial problems you can't solve.

Problem ownership. Who should own the problem of be "motivated" - the staffer or the leader? Who should own the problem of being "competent" - the worker or the leader? Who should own the problem of the employee's "happiness" at work - the employee or the boss? And so on through the whole litany.

We may live in a culture where we have come to believe that learning in a classrom is the teacher's problem. That makes the real problem insolvable. Where the problem is not owned by the person who should own it, the system is dysfunctional and cannot be fixed except by fixing the underlying dysfunction. Where what's at stake is the performance of the organization, the cultural bias that makes everything the leader's problem is simply wrong.

If we don't get problems owned by the person who could actually fix them, we will have them forever. The whole notion that you have to motivate people to perform the roles they volunteered to fulfill is ludicrous on the face of it. It's just folklore on a cultural level.

In his review of Abrashoff's book, It's Your Ship, I thought Jim was decrying the practice of attributing all of the success to the leader. But here he seems to be nurturing that view without realizing it. As most folks do these days.

So...whose problem should seeing the problem be? My anwer: the person who created it or who is in the best position to resolve it. That's the Toyota Way. But our automotive engineers don't get it. Their cultural lenses are out of focus. Maybe here too.