Problems, Solutions, and the Space Between
The last two posts in this series have been about curiosity - what it looks like when people have it and what happens when the environment kills it. A friend responded to the second one with something I've been thinking about since: the framing issue.
His take was that people who find problems can end up being seen as the problem, but that's at least partially a framing issue that can be addressed from either side. Issues need to come with possible solutions. Sometimes the first solution is "we need to investigate to find out more information." Sometimes there's enough on the surface to propose something concrete right away. But if you consistently show up with just the problem, people start associating you with bad news.
I think he's right, and I think it works on a few levels.
From the IC side, there's a difference between "this is broken" and "this is broken, and here's what I think we could do about it." The first one puts the burden on whoever's listening. The second one shows you've thought about it. Even when the proposed solution is just "I'd like to spend a couple days digging into this," that's still a proposal. It gives whoever you're talking to something to react to instead of just a problem to absorb.
Mixing in problems that have clear solutions alongside ones that don't helps too. If every conversation you bring is an unsolvable mess, people start tuning out. But if you're also the person who regularly identifies things and fixes them, you build up trust. That trust is how you get the room to bring up the harder stuff - the problems where you don't have a clean answer yet.
That trust-building isn't guaranteed to give you a voice that gets listened to, but it's a better starting position than not having one at all.
From the management side, the job is similar but pointing in different directions. Department leads need to take the big top-line business goals and translate them downward - making sure execs understand that the programs running in their area align with those goals, require real staffing and resources, and are worth the investment. They also need to translate upward from their teams, advocating for the work their people are finding important.
Sometimes as a manager you get forced to de-prioritize things that seem critical in your space. Managing up matters here - making sure the people above you understand the benefits of action and the risks of inaction, clearly, and then figuring out how to move forward when priorities don't go your way. Managing down matters just as much. Sometimes that's as simple as telling your team "yeah, I hear you, I'm trying to get movement on this, I'm supporting you." Sometimes it isn't simple at all, but the acknowledgment still matters.
It's worth remembering that managers - especially first-line managers in more hierarchical orgs - are not always empowered to change the systems they're operating in. They're functions of those systems too. Everyone has some degree of agency to push for change, but the amount of that agency varies a lot depending on where you sit. That's a bigger topic for another post, but it's important context for understanding why "just fix the management" isn't always a useful answer.
None of this is a guarantee. You can frame things well, build trust, manage up effectively, and still work somewhere that doesn't reward it. But framing and trust-building are the parts you can control, and in my experience they're the difference between being heard and being tuned out more often than not.