The most underrated leadership skill is not solving the problem. It is believing the person who brings it to you.

When someone tells you something is wrong, the instinct is to jump straight to the fix, roll up the sleeves, and get to work. It feels like competence and care.

Or, worse, the instinct is to explain to them why they are wrong to feel the way they feel. Well, actually. Have you considered. I think if you look at it from this angle. All of it, however gently delivered, lands as the same message. I don't believe you.

Here is what I have learned watching teams up close for thirty-five years. People can usually live with a problem that does not get solved right away. Budgets are real. Timing is real. Not everything can be fixed this week, and adults know that. What people cannot live with is being disbelieved.

Feeling unheard is its own injury. It is separate from, and often larger than, the original complaint. I have watched teams fracture, and not over the thing that was actually broken. They fractured over the moment a leader made it clear, with a look or a sigh or a fast counterargument, that they did not buy that it was broken at all.

That moment is expensive. It teaches people to stop bringing you things. And a leader who stops hearing about problems does not have fewer problems. They have the same problems, later, bigger, and now with a layer of resentment on top.

So slow down by one beat. Before you debate the facts, validate the experience. That sounds hard. Tell me more. I believe you that it felt that way. None of that requires you to agree on what happened or to commit to a particular fix. It just requires you to treat the person in front of you as a credible narrator of their own life.

Half the time, the fix matters less than the being-believed. People come in braced for a fight about whether their problem is even real. When you skip that fight and go straight to I hear you, the heat drains out of the room and you can both actually think.

Believe people first. It is not soft. It is the foundation everything else gets built on. You cannot solve a problem with someone who does not trust that you can see it.

-Moe

P.S. My latest piece in Fast Company is out this week. Deloitte and Zoom just cut parental leave and called it alignment. From the spreadsheet a benefit cut looks clean. It rarely is. The piece gives you three questions to ask before you make the cut.

P.P.S. And if you want the longer version of what happens when those needs go unmet, I sat down with the awesome Adam Contos on Start With a Win. We talked about the real reason your best people leave. It is not the money.

Have a read or listen and tell me what you think. I want to know!