Not Yet Your Problem

“That's somebody else's problem.” I heard that phrase hundreds of times during my career.

Sometimes it was true. More often, it wasn't.

Some of the best leaders I have known developed a habit of understanding other people's problems—not because they owned them, but because their own success often depended on them.

I learned that lesson while commanding the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk.

Every month, we worked with a new organization preparing for deployment.

We also routinely trained and exchanged ideas with leaders from partner nations. The uniforms, languages, and cultures were often different, but the leadership challenge was remarkably similar.

Leave the organization better than you found it.

That meant resisting one of the easiest mistakes a coach, consultant, or leader can make:

Deciding too quickly what someone else's problem is.

Instead, we spent time understanding how they saw the world. We listened. We observed.

Then we compared what they told us, what we observed, and what dozens of previous organizations had taught us.

Within days, we often understood a unit's challenges differently than they did.

Not because we were smarter.

Because we weren't living inside the problem.

We could see friction between staffs, communication breakdowns, unintended consequences, and gaps between intent and execution that had quietly become accepted as normal.

If we misdiagnosed the problem, we had little value to offer. If we relied only on our previous experience, we had little value to offer. If we failed to communicate our observations with credibility and evidence, we had little value to offer.

The photo below was taken during one of those exchanges with senior leaders from the Colombian Army. Although the uniforms were different, the leadership challenge was remarkably familiar: before you can help another organization improve, you have to understand how it sees the world.

JRTC was an unusual organization because helping other organizations improve was our mission.

But the lesson applies everywhere. Every organization creates work for someone else. Every decision creates friction—or removes it.

The best leaders occasionally step outside their own swim lane long enough to understand how their work affects the rest of the system.

That doesn't mean turning the organization into a five-year-old soccer match where everyone chases the same ball. Clear roles, disciplined processes, and accountability still matter.

But so does curiosity.

Sometimes the fastest way to improve your own organization is to spend time understanding someone else's.

The organizations that improve fastest are often the ones most willing to learn from problems that aren't yet their own.