There is a crucial yet hard-to-understand concept here. Most people grasp the need to set priorities; they put the biggest problems at the top, with smaller problems beneath them. There are simply too many small problems to consider them all. So they draw a horizontal line beneath which they will not tread, directing all their energies to those above the line. I believe there is another approach: If we allow more people to solve problems without permission, and if we tolerate (and don’t vilify) their mistakes, then we enable a much larger set of problems to be addressed. When a random problem pops up in this scenario, it causes no panic, because the threat of failure has been defanged. The individual or the organization responds with its best thinking, because the organization is not frozen, fearful, waiting for approval. Mistakes will still be made, but in my experience, they are fewer and farther between and are caught at an earlier stage.

There are two major errors with that line of thinking. The first is overestimating what you, the manager, are capable of. Yes, it may be within your power to solve a wide variety of issues, but as a single individual, you can’t solve that many of them. The best work comes from those who have the time to live and breathe a problem fully, who can dedicate themselves to finding the best solution.

The second error is assuming that nobody wants to take on hard problems. In fact, the most talented employees aren’t looking for special treatment or “easy” projects. They want to be challenged. There is no greater sign of trust than handing your report an intricately tangled knot that you believe she can pull apart, even if you’re not sure how.

Companies can get by with sloppy execution if they have a killer strategy or highly dedicated people willing to work 18-hour days, eight days per week to cover up all the slop. Just recognize you’re wasting a lot of profitability and time (i.e., you’ll burn both cash and people in the process!)

We can easily understand why busy nurses rarely engaged in second-order problem-solving. But this left them vulnerable to continued frustration because the work-arounds didn’t reduce the frequency of future process failures. The average time a nurse spent on work-arounds (a few minutes here, a few minutes there) added up to about half an hour per shift—a substantial waste of skilled professionals’ time. Like all quick fixes, the nurses’ work-arounds created an illusion of effectiveness. Confront a problem, implement a work-around, get on with your day. End of story.

If you're preparing for significant growth, we recommend paying loving attention to even the small problems. Most organizations have an implicit 80-20 rule, a belief that 20 percent of the problems are causing 80 percent of the harm. The built-in assumption is that if you can resolve the big ones, you'll be OK. But an HBS colleague, AnitaTucker, has found that it's the small problems that often cripple companies. Small problems often don't get addressed, because they don't seem significant enough to warrant focus. But because they don't get addressed, they always require a work-around, and that work-around can consume 20 percent of an employee's day. People can spend 20 percent of their time on the job working around problems that will never make it onto the priority list to be fixed. Tucker conducted a study of a nursing unit and found that on average, each employee wasted one hour per day working around problems that could be fixed, but that no one deemed important enough to address. An hour every day. What could your company achieve if it gave an extra five hours a week to every employee?