Are Your Managers Solving the Wrong Problem?

Originally published September 2, 2025 · Edited February 19, 2026

In many organizations, the managers who get promoted are the ones who execute well. They hit deadlines, close loops, and solve problems quickly. That is the behavior senior leaders often reward, and it sends a clear signal: keep executing.

But when execution becomes the only signal, managers start to equate leadership with fast problem-solving. They see an issue, make a change, and move on. The intention is sound. The impact is often not.

Why Execution Alone Is Not Enough in Leadership

Execution-driven managers act on what they observe, not on what employees actually experience. When changes land without conversation, staff end up feeling like they are being moved rather than heard, bounced from one fix to another without voice or ownership.

There is a name for what breaks down in those conditions. When people cannot predict whether their input matters, whether raising a problem will help or hurt them, they stop contributing to things they cannot control. They disengage not because they stopped caring about the work, but because the environment stopped being safe enough to care out loud. The protection they extend to themselves is rational. The cost to the organization is real.

The Hidden Cost of Quick Fixes

What looks efficient at the top can feel chaotic at the bottom. Employees lose confidence in their managers and begin to disengage. The fix may solve a visible problem while creating new ones: mistrust, frustration, and wasted energy. The organization keeps moving but stops getting stronger.

The managers doing this are not failing. They are succeeding at exactly what they were taught to succeed at. That is the more important observation.

When Managers Miss the Real Problem

The surface issue is often not the real problem. What looks like a performance gap may actually be a listening gap. Employees who do not feel heard tend to stop surfacing the problems they see, which means the problems that get addressed are the ones visible from the top, not the ones that matter most at ground level.

Process improvements that skip this step tend to produce short-term results and long-term drift. The system gets optimized. The people working inside it get quieter.

How Promotion Criteria Shape the Culture

The managers in an organization reflect the promotion decisions that built it. When the criteria that get people promoted emphasize execution speed over connection depth, the culture that results is not a mystery. It is a consequence.

Senior leaders who want different behavior from their managers often need to examine what their own decisions have been protecting. Not the values on the wall. The values in the choices: who got promoted, what got tolerated, what got rewarded when pressure was high. Those are the signals the organization actually learned from. The gap between what is stated and what is demonstrated is often where the real work lives.

Execution and Listening Together

Strong execution is essential. Execution without listening is motion without progress. Organizations that sustain both tend to build it into structure rather than leaving it to individual character. Regular check-ins, skip-level conversations, and feedback mechanisms that do not require courage to use are design choices, not personality traits.

The question worth asking is not whether managers are solving problems. It is whether the problems they are solving are the right ones, and whether the people closest to those problems had any say in naming them.

Continue Your Exploration

Framework Context:

The core diagnostic this article points toward is the gap between what organizations say they value and what their promotion patterns actually demonstrate. That work belongs to Define What Matters, the practice of testing whether stated values show up in actual decisions, especially under pressure. The conditions that allow employees to surface problems honestly are what Face the Truth builds. And the structural choices that make listening a reliable feature rather than a personal quality are the work of Make It Real.

Related Reading:

• Workforce Expectations — What the research reveals about the changing relationship between people and their managers
• Political Dynamics — Why public trust depends on consistent demonstration, not stated commitment

Where These Conversations Happen

The question “What are my promotion criteria actually rewarding?” surfaces regularly in our confidential Think Tanks. City managers and county administrators examine the gap between the behaviors they intend to model and the signals their recognition and advancement decisions actually send. It is often the most productive conversation in the room, and the hardest one to have anywhere else.