Most leaders I know got promoted because they were good at solving problems. They were the ones with answers. The ones who could see what was broken and fix it fast. And then they moved into leadership, where the job changed completely, but the instinct remained the same.
I’ve been thinking about this tension a lot lately, and a recent conversation with Lacey Partipilo, VP of Client Success at Xenium HR, helped me put sharper language around it. Lacey has spent years coaching leaders and managing HR professionals, and she’s developed a clear-eyed perspective on what separates the leaders who genuinely develop their people from those who just feel busy doing it.
The distinction matters more than most leaders realize. Because in many cases, the very thing that made you successful as an individual contributor can quietly undermine your effectiveness as a leader.
The First Question to Ask Yourself
Before you can help someone who’s struggling, you need to understand what kind of struggle you’re looking at. There’s a meaningful difference between someone who is stuck and someone who is struggling. One might be facing an external barrier, a resource gap, an unclear process, or a bottleneck in another department. The other might be dealing with something internal: a confidence issue, a skills gap, or emotional weight from outside of work.
You can’t coach your way through a resource problem. And you can’t resource your way through a confidence problem. The intervention has to match the cause.
Lacey made this point plainly: “If you are not meeting regularly with your employees and you don’t have a good pulse on their workload, the challenges that come up inside of their job, the peaks and valleys that happen, I would say you’re not connected enough with your people.”
That sounds obvious. But the number of leaders who skip regular one-on-ones or treat them as status updates rather than real conversations is staggering. You can’t diagnose what you don’t observe. And you can’t observe what you don’t make time for.
Take the Backpack Off
One of the most useful frames Lacey offered was about what leaders bring into conversations with their people. She described it as a backpack.
“We as leaders sometimes think we have all the answers. Maybe we’ve done that job before. And so we’re bringing our own backpack full of feelings and thoughts to the conversation. You have to take the backpack off and really try to understand from the perspective of that individual what’s going on.”
This is where many well-intentioned leaders go wrong. They walk into a coaching conversation already knowing what they think the problem is and how they’d solve it. That preloaded perspective closes the door on the very thing they should be doing: listening for what they don’t already know.
When you go in with your backpack on, you miss the process failure hiding behind what appears to be a performance issue. You miss the peer conflict that’s draining someone’s energy. You miss the fact that your employee already tried the thing you were about to suggest and hit a wall.
Asking open-ended questions like “What have you tried?” and “When you’ve been stuck like this before, what helped you get out of it?” does two things. It surfaces information you wouldn’t otherwise get. And it signals that you see the person in front of you as capable, not as a problem to be fixed.
Three Conversations, One Meeting
Early in Lacey’s management career, one of her direct reports, an HR Business Partner named Kelli Woodworth, set a boundary in their very first one-on-one that changed the way Lacey leads. Kelli told her, essentially, that not every problem brought to the table requires the same response. Sometimes she wanted Lacey to help solve the problem. Sometimes she wanted Lacey to go solve it for her, because she had exhausted every resource she had. And sometimes she just wanted to vent.
“Sometimes I want to come to you, and we’re going to talk about an issue. And sometimes I want you to help me solve that problem. Sometimes I need you to actually go solve it for me because I have exhausted all my effort. And sometimes I just want to vent. And that is a very different type of conversation that requires a different type of listening.”
Lacey has carried that framework into every management relationship since. It sounds simple, but it requires real discipline, especially for leaders whose instinct is to jump in and fix. She was honest about that pull: “I want to fix things. I want us to move through work quickly and take care of our clients. So I think if I have a tendency, I fall towards not just sitting in the venting space, but really trying to figure out what we can do to get through that.”
The leaders who learn to pause before defaulting to fix-it mode tend to uncover more. They find the process breakdowns that surface only when an employee walks you through their thinking. They find the gaps in organizational support that no one has flagged because everyone assumed it was their own shortcoming.
“When you can have yourself filled by the success of the people that report to you and from your teams versus your own individual wins, that’s real leadership.” — Lacey Partipilo
The Ego Trap
There’s a reason leaders default to solving. It feels good.
Lacey named it directly: “It fuels our ego. It feels good to solve people’s problems. It does. I could check that box. I could get that thing done for them. I could save the day.”
That dopamine hit is real. And it becomes a trap. Because when you consistently solve for your team instead of developing their ability to solve, you create dependency. You also rob people of the experience that builds confidence and competence.
Lacey shared a pivotal moment from her own career. When she transitioned from being an HR Business Partner to leading a team of HR Business Partners, her manager, Angela Perkins, raised a concern. Angela worried that Lacey might not feel as fulfilled in the new role because the wins would be different. Instead of client accolades and personal shout-outs, she’d need to find fulfillment in her team’s success, their NPS scores, and their growth.
“When you can have yourself filled by the success of the people that report to you and from your teams versus your own individual wins, that’s real leadership,” Lacey said. “And that took time.”
This is a transition many leaders never fully make. They stay attached to being the smartest person in the room, the one with the answer, the one who saved the project. And their teams stay smaller as a result.
Accountability Is Not a Last Resort
One of the most common misconceptions in leadership is that accountability only comes into play when things go badly. Lacey pushed back on that idea. In her view, accountability should be present from the start of any coaching relationship.
“Maybe accountability in the beginning isn’t to successfully work through that issue. Maybe accountability is being a willing participant in these conversations. I need there to be a two-way street.”
She also shared something I think every leader needs to hear: “I can’t want you to be great at your job more than you want to be great at your job.”
That line draws a clear boundary. Leaders are responsible for creating the conditions for success, removing barriers, providing resources, and offering coaching. But the employee has to meet them halfway. When that effort is one-sided, the relationship breaks down. And before leaders jump to performance management, Lacey believes they owe themselves an honest internal audit.
“Have I been clear about my expectations? Do they have the tools and resources they need? Are there points of friction in our processes or with their peers or technology that make them being successful more difficult?”
If the answer to any of those questions is no, the problem may not be the employee at all.
What Leaders Can Do Now
If any of this strikes a chord, here is what Lacey recommends.
Meet regularly with your people. You cannot uncover friction if you don’t make space to discuss. Let employees drive the agenda of those meetings. When people own the conversation, they bring better problems to the table. Go in with an open mind. If you already have the answer before the meeting starts, you’re not coaching. You’re directing. Ask what they’ve tried. Ask what’s getting in the way. Ask what they need from you. And resist the urge to be the hero. The goal is not to save the day. The goal is to build people who can handle the day on their own.
Leadership Is Hard. Find Your People.
Lacey closed our conversation with something I think gets overlooked in leadership development circles. She made the point that the leaders around you are probably facing the same struggles and feeling the same doubts. Finding a peer group, people you can talk to honestly about what’s working and what isn’t, makes a real difference.
Leadership can be isolating. But it doesn’t have to be. And if you’re a leader who genuinely wants to grow, the first step might not be reading another book or attending another workshop. It might be sitting across from one of your people, taking the backpack off, and asking a better question.