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Erin, welcome to unlearning work, where we empower you to redesign your job by rethinking work habits, behaviors and strategies. I'm your host. Erin Merideth, a work behavior enthusiast and leadership strategist, join me as I explore various work related topics and provide practical insights and real life examples. We'll examine the nature of work from the ground up and deliver bite size episodes with actionable advice twice a month.
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Welcome to unlearning work. Today, we're getting into something small that changes everything, how you show up in conversations and why not every problem needs you to solve it. There's a moment in almost every conversation where something subtle happens, someone is talking and your brain moves ahead of them. You're no longer listening, you're building the answer, and it feels productive, like you're being efficient, like you're helping, but in that moment, something else happens, quietly. You take over the thinking, and once you do that, often enough people stop doing it themselves. Let's simplify this. Every conversation you have at work or at home falls into one of three categories. The first is listening, I need to be heard. The second is advice. I want your perspective, and the third is solving. Help me move this forward. That's it. But here's the friction point, we rarely match our response to the actual need. We respond based on our habits, our role, our discomfort with silence or our desire to be helpful, not based on what the other person actually needs. Let's look how this shows up in real life. My first example is the fast solver, the one at work. So a team member says, I'm struggling with the timeline on this project. Before they finish, you say, just push the vendor and cut scope on phase two. Problem solved, right? Not quite. What you missed is they hadn't fully defined the problem yet. They didn't explore trade offs and they didn't build ownership. So what happens next? They follow your direction and then come back when something else breaks, you didn't solve the problem. You interrupted the thinking process. The other exam. Another example is the advice overload. A manager comes to you and says, I'm having a hard time getting buy in from my team, and you respond with, here's what I would do. You give a thoughtful, well, structured answer, but what you didn't do is understand their specific context, explore what they've already tried. Help them build their own approach. So now they rely on your thinking, or they try your approach without full conviction, and neither one of those options sticks. And finally, the mismatch at home. So someone says, at home, today was just exhausting, and you respond with Well, maybe you should set better boundaries, which is technically helpful, but completely emotionally off. They didn't need a fix. They needed acknowledgement, and now, instead of feeling supported, they feel misunderstood. Here's the shift. Listening is not passive. It's diagnostic. Your job is not to react quickly. Your job is to understand accurately. Instead of asking, what's the answer? Ask, what kind of moment is this? Because when you misdiagnose the moment, advice feels like interruption, solving feels like control, listening feels like avoidance. So the real skill is not listening. It's matching your response to the need, and that requires slowing down just enough to see, is this person thinking out loud? Are they looking for direction, or are they ready to move forward? Let's make this practical and identify your default pattern. Everyone leans somewhere. Are you a solver who jumps in too early? Are you an advisor who gives perspectives too quickly? Or are you a listener who stays too neutral, avoids direction? And none of these are wrong. They're just incomplete if overused, a simple design shift is to use the three mode question, which is, do you want me to listen give advice or help solve? Use it when the conversation feels unclear, you notice yourself jumping ahead or the stakes are higher. Over time, your team will start to self identify their need before you even ask. Another approach is to build thinking space instead of filling filling it. So when someone is talking and pauses, most people jump in. So instead, try this, wait three to five seconds and let the silence work. That pause is where thinking happens. We could also guide without taking over. So if someone is in listen mode but drifting, guide gently and ask what feels most unclear right now, or what part of this is actually stuck, or what are you leaning toward? You're not solving. You're helping them structure their thinking. A good approach is to separate processing from decision making. A lot of leaders blend these, but they are different. So processing is talking it through, and decision making is choosing a direction. If you solve during processing, you skip capability building. Another approach would be to reduce accidental dependency. If people consistently come to you just to think out loud, then you're signaling them not of weakness, but of a system you've unintentionally designed. So instead, try this, ask them to come up with one to two options, or ask, what would you do if I wasn't available? You're not pushing them away, you're moving them forward. And finally, you could contextualize empowerment. For instance, not everyone should operate the same way, so new employees need more guidance, where high risk employees need more precision, and an experienced performer may need more autonomy. So the empowerment is not a blanket strategy, it's calibrated, and your listening approach can match it. There are three different ways you could practice these skills. Number one is the 10 second rule, so in your next conversation, notice when you want to interrupt and then wait 10 seconds before responding, you'll hear more than you expect. The second way to do it is the category shift. After a conversation, ask yourself, what did they actually need? Did I match it? This can build your awareness really fast. And finally, you could do the come with options habit. So for recurring conversations, say, next time, bring me what you think we should do and watch what changes we're looking for better thinking, faster decisions, and less back and forth. In closing, most people think leadership is about having answers, but at scale, leadership is about where thinking happens. If all thinking flows through you, you become the bottleneck. If thinking stays with your team, you become the accelerator. The reflection for this week is, where am I stepping in too early, and what would happen if I let the thinking finish? If this resonated, try one small shift this week and ask just one person, do you want me to listen give advice or help solve and notice what changes. And if you're interested in building this into how you lead and work, you can explore more Tools, frameworks and practical ways at unlearning work you you you.
