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My team expects me to solve all their problems—help!

My team expects me to solve all their problems—help!

How can you break the cycle of people coming to you for everything—even things they can handle on their own? That’s the question we answer in this week’s episode of Per My Last Email—the podcast about what to do when work gets weird.

Jen Dionisio
August 21, 2025

Managers: I’ve spotted a pattern. Some of you are doing way too much for your teams because you’re afraid you’re not doing enough.

That’s the predicament this week’s letter-writer on Per My Last Email is in. Here’s the dilemma they shared with us:

I manage a team and I’m finding that people are coming to me a lot with questions—often ones they could probably work through themselves, or with others in the team. I want to be supportive and approachable, but I’m also struggling to get my own work done because I’m constantly in problem-solving mode for others.

How can I gently shift this dynamic? I’m looking for ways to encourage more autonomy and confidence without making people feel like I’m shutting them down. When suitable and I get the opportunity to (in 1:1s, etc.), I am adopting more of a coaching approach. I know this will help longer term. But in the short term I’m needing a magic wand. What should I do?

This is such a familiar cycle. It starts with insecurity: you wonder if you’re any use to your team, maybe because you’re new to the role, or you’re in the midst of big org shifts, or you’re just too busy to be present the way you want. And so you, like our listener, turn yourself into a human “answer machine,” trying to be helpful, getting little pings of validation every time you can fix something—anything.

This can go a long way towards establishing trust from your team, but it can also reinforce a sense of dependence—and expectation (or sense of obligation?) to check in with you before making any decisions. You may have grown your confidence, but your overwhelm has grown too. It’s the cost of being everyone’s ear, sounding board, wiki-page, and lifeline.

Sometimes this kicks off the insecurity cycle again: after all, shouldn’t you have prevented this? But sometimes it breeds resentment instead. You flood with dread every time your DMs ding or 1:1 time arrives.

And that feels awful when you’re a manager who cares about your team, even if they sometimes make you want to pull your hair out.

But trust me, you’re not a jerk. You’re a human. And every manager in the world has been caught in the tug of war between wanting to be helpful and wanting to be left alone.

Instead of beating yourself up, I want you to think about turning points like this as opportunities not to fix your errors, but to step up. You’ve shown your people you support them—now you get to show that you also trust them, by stepping back from your caretaker role.

Everyone wins. Your team members build their confidence, seeing they can tackle plenty of challenges on their own—and you get back the energy you’ll need to be the best manager you can be when things actually hit the fan.

If you’re in a situation like this, I hope you’ll check out the episode. Listen and subscribe here.

And if you’ve got a different issue you want our help making sense of, submit a dilemma. We’ve got room to answer another question or two this season!

EPISODE 32