> “bring me solutions, not problems"

If someone says this unprompted, I’d suspect they aren’t a manager, they aren’t even an employee. They provide roughly the same input one provides while ordering food at a restaurant. Basically they are a customer, but also on the payroll.

That being said, there are some cases where this might be said out of frustration. I’ve seen in my life a few people whose output is mostly finding and bringing issues to the table for someone else (who?) to magically solve them. That still brings some value, and maybe they’d make excellent auditors, but it wears the team and maybe their managers down.

When I say something like this it usually means “I don’t want to dictate your job to you. You’re here because you’re smart, ambitious, and capable. We’ve talked at length in team settings and 1:1 about our goals. What do you think are the problems that need attention, and what solutions do you propose?”

The anti-pattern I’ve seen from some folks is that they never want to propose solutions because then it’s someone else’s fault if those fail. These folks often demonstrate minimal ownership of any decisions, so they don’t feel bad complaining about all the problems they see. Not only is that unhelpful, it can actually be very toxic for the team. (As you mentioned.)

So when I’m saying “bring solutions” what I’m really asking for is some shared ownership of the choices and consequences—I’m asking folks to act like the main character in the story. And don’t worry, I own the consequences of the mistakes in my team to my leadership—this isn’t about throwing them under the bus. (Getting this to work well requires a lot of trust both ways.)