The First Mistake Leaders Make Is Solving Too Early

In hotels, speed matters. But when leaders move too quickly from problem to solution, they often fix the symptom and leave the real issue untouched.

Leadership often rewards speed, but the deeper reward is confidence. When something goes wrong, people look to the leader for an answer. Occupancy drops, so the hotel launches a promotion. Guest complaints rise, so the team schedules training. Sales conversion slows, so the instruction becomes simple. Push harder.

These actions may be needed, but they can also become reflexes. They make the room feel better because something is being done. The problem is that movement is not the same as diagnosis.

Before any strategy can work, the problem it is meant to address must first be understood. Research on strategic problem formulation shows why this matters. In one study of large U.S. companies, 75 percent of problems that entered problem solving had to be sent back to problem formulation. Many teams were either solving the wrong problem or solving before they had properly understood the issue (Baer, Dirks, & Nickerson, 2013).

This matters in hotels because most operating issues arrive as symptoms. A drop in occupancy does not automatically mean the rate is wrong. Weak conversion does not automatically mean the sales team is not pushing hard enough. Lower guest satisfaction does not automatically mean another training session is needed. The number, complaint, or missed target should start the inquiry. It should not end it.

That is the first mistake leaders make. They solve too early. The better discipline is to slow down the diagnosis, test the evidence, question the assumption, and then move with conviction.

Leaders Are Trained to Have Answers

The pressure to answer quickly is real. In a hotel, silence can feel like weakness. A general manager, commercial leader, or department head is expected to know what to do, especially when the numbers are moving in the wrong direction. But the first answer is often shaped by pressure, habit, or bias.

This is why self-regulation matters. Daniel Goleman describes self-regulation as the ability to control disruptive impulses and suspend judgment before acting. For leaders, that pause matters. It creates enough space to separate urgency from understanding, and reaction from judgment.

The pause also gives leaders time to examine their own reasoning. Smart leaders are often good at solving external problems, but less practiced at asking how their own assumptions may be shaping the response. A conclusion can feel obvious because the reasoning behind it has become second nature. That is precisely when the leader needs to ask, “What am I assuming here?” before turning pressure into action (Argyris, 1991).

That pause is not weakness. It is leadership discipline. It keeps the leader from turning pressure into reflex, and gives the team a better chance of solving the real problem.

The First Problem Is Often Not the Real Problem

In hotels, the first problem usually arrives as a complaint, a number, or a symptom. Occupancy is down. Conversion is weak. Guest satisfaction slipped. The danger is that leaders name the problem too quickly.

Once it is called a pricing problem, every solution becomes pricing. Once it is called a sales problem, every solution becomes more pressure on sales. Once it is called a training problem, every solution becomes another training session.

This happens because leaders often move quickly from observation to interpretation. A number drops, and the team immediately gives it meaning. A complaint comes in, and the cause is assumed. A target is missed, and the room decides where the weakness sits. Chris Argyris describes this as moving up the ladder of inference. The conclusion starts to feel obvious before it has been tested (Argyris, 1982).

In hotel terms, the number is only the starting point. It should trigger inquiry, not instant certainty. Strategic problem formulation means translating an initial symptom, or a web of symptoms, into clearer questions and alternative explanations before searching for solutions (Baer, Dirks, & Nickerson, 2013).

The first label is often only the surface. A drop in occupancy may be caused by segment mix, lead time shifts, account production, channel visibility, or competitor movement. Weak conversion may point to proposal quality, response speed, pricing flexibility, or poor follow-up rhythm. Guest complaints may reflect staffing design, broken handovers, preventive maintenance gaps, or departments working around each other instead of with each other.

The issue is not only what happened. The real leadership question is what pattern sits behind what happened. Leaders need to resist the first convenient explanation. It may be true, but it is rarely complete.

Some Problems Need Fixing. Others Need Learning.

Some hotel problems are technical. A broken aircon needs engineering. A wrong rate code needs correction. A missing report needs to be completed. These problems can be fixed with expertise, process, or authority.

Other problems are adaptive. Poor accountability, slow handover, weak follow-through, repeated forecast misses, and commercial misalignment are different. They do not improve simply because a leader gives an instruction. They require people to learn, adjust behavior, and change how they work together.

Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky describe crisis leadership in two phases. First, leaders stabilize the situation and buy time. Then comes the harder adaptive phase, where leaders address the underlying causes and build the organization’s capacity to operate in a new reality. That distinction matters in hotels. Many leaders are good at the emergency response. The harder work is staying with the issue long enough to change the routine that created the problem in the first place (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009).

A weak handover may look like a front office issue. But the real issue may sit across staffing, communication rhythm, system design, ownership, and management follow-through. If leaders treat it as a simple technical failure, the response becomes a reminder, a briefing, or a checklist. Those may help, but they rarely change the routine that keeps producing the problem.

The leadership discipline is to ask: does this problem need a fix, or does it need learning? That question changes the response. It stops leaders from using authority where adaptation is required.

The Danger of Solving Symptoms

Quick solutions calm the room. They show movement. They create the feeling that leadership is in control. Sometimes, they are exactly what the moment requires. But they can also protect the organization from the discomfort it needs to face.

A promotion may cover weak demand diagnosis. A reminder memo may cover unclear accountability. A training session may cover a broken routine.

This is where many teams get trapped. They jump to solutions before the problem has been properly formulated. Once that happens, the search for answers becomes narrow. The team may agree quickly, but only because it has converged too early on the first common explanation (Baer, Dirks, & Nickerson, 2013).

Even root cause analysis can become a ritual when it produces a simple story and weak actions. Teams may settle for administrative fixes such as reminders, training, or documentation instead of addressing deeper system causes. Peerally and colleagues give a striking example from healthcare. After a wrong-lens surgical incident, the response included a new protocol, training, better documentation, and a reminder poster. One year later, the same hospital experienced the same type of incident again (Peerally, Carr, Waring, & Dixon-Woods, 2017).

The lesson is clear for hotels too. A documented response is not the same as a changed system. Another memo, another briefing, or another checklist may show action, but it may not change the condition that allowed the problem to return.

The symptom gets attention. The system stays untouched.

Better Questions Before Better Solutions

Before deciding, leaders need to step back from the action for a moment. Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie call this “getting on the balcony.” It means creating enough distance to see the pattern instead of getting trapped by the noise of the moment. Who is avoiding the issue? Which department is carrying the burden? Where does the handover break? Which assumption keeps repeating? (Heifetz & Laurie, 1997).

This pause is not delay. It is discipline. A leader who stays only in the action can easily become part of the same system that keeps producing the problem. From the balcony, the question changes. Instead of asking, “What promotion should we launch?” the leader asks, “Which segment changed, when did it change, and what did we do differently?” Instead of asking, “Who failed to follow up?” the leader asks, “What in our process allows follow-up to become inconsistent?”

This is where problem formulation becomes practical. The work is to translate the first symptom, or the web of symptoms, into clearer questions and alternative explanations before searching for solutions. In hotel terms, the leader should not allow the team to move from symptom to solution too quickly. The work is to expand the possible explanations first (Baer, Dirks, & Nickerson, 2013).

Better questions change the quality of the conversation. They move the team away from blame and toward pattern recognition. They stop the meeting from becoming a search for the fastest action point and turn it into a disciplined attempt to understand what is really happening.

That is where better decisions begin. The team starts examining the pattern, not only the incident.

From Single Loop Fixes to Double Loop Learning

Single-loop learning asks, “Did the action work?” Double-loop learning asks, “Why did we believe that action was right?” That second question is where leadership becomes more serious.

In hotel operations, single-loop learning is common because it feels practical. If occupancy drops, the team launches a discount and checks whether room nights improved. That matters, but it is not enough. The deeper question is whether price was ever the real barrier. Maybe the issue was channel visibility. Maybe corporate production weakened. Maybe demand moved to a different lead time. Maybe the hotel responded too late.

Chris Argyris argues that many organizations define learning too narrowly as problem solving. They focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment, while failing to examine how their own reasoning and behavior may have contributed to the problem. That is the limitation of single-loop learning. It can make the team better at reacting without making the team better at understanding (Argyris, 1991).

Double-loop learning shifts the discussion from “Did our solution work?” to “Did we understand the problem correctly?” That shift matters because repeated problems usually survive through repeated assumptions. The hotel may improve the promotion, the report, or the follow-up reminder, while leaving untouched the belief that promotion, reporting, or reminders were the right answers in the first place.

The goal is not endless debate. It is better learning. Once the assumption is questioned, the team still needs evidence to decide which explanation is most credible and which action is worth testing. But the starting point changes. The team no longer asks only whether the discount worked. It asks why discounting became the obvious answer in the first place.

Evidence Should Challenge the First Answer

Evidence is useful only when it challenges the first answer. If leaders use data only to defend what they already believe, the organization learns very little. Data should not become decoration for a decision already made. It should test whether the first explanation can survive scrutiny.

Before acting, the team should look at pickup, lead time, segment mix, account behavior, competitor movement, conversion history, guest feedback, and operational constraints. The goal is not to collect everything. That only slows the team down and creates another meeting. The goal is to gather enough evidence to test whether the first explanation is true.

Evidence-based management is helpful because it does not ask leaders to blindly follow research or drown the team in data. It uses four sources of evidence: practitioner judgment, local evidence, the best available research, and the perspectives of people affected by the decision. That matters in hotels because familiar explanations often sound convincing. But familiar is not the same as true (Briner, Denyer, & Rousseau, 2009).

This is especially important in cross-functional discussion. Revenue may see one pattern, sales may see another, front office may hear something different from guests, and reservations may know where conversion breaks. A group may sound aligned because everyone is repeating the information they already share, while the most useful insight remains with the person closest to the break in the process (Baer, Dirks, & Nickerson, 2013).

The leader is not asking for more reports. The leader is asking for better judgment. What do we know? What are we assuming? What evidence contradicts us? What would change our mind? Those questions help keep data honest.

Evidence should not only fill a gap in the explanation. It should challenge the assumption behind the explanation. Otherwise, the team may collect more data while protecting the same old frame. In practical terms, evidence should help leaders ask two questions at the same time: “Are we missing information?” and “Are we asking the wrong question?”

A Simple Discipline Before Deciding

Peter Drucker gives a useful discipline: ask what needs to be done, then ask what is right for the enterprise. It sounds simple, but it changes the conversation. The question is no longer, “What do I want to do?” or “What will calm everyone down?” The question becomes, “What does the situation actually require?” (Drucker, 1966).

This matters because leaders can easily confuse activity with responsibility. A meeting, a memo, a discount, or a new report may show that action was taken, but it does not always show that the right action was taken. A decision is not complete until people know who owns it, when it must happen, who is affected, and what needs to be communicated.

Follow-through is where many organizations lose the value of diagnosis. Peerally and colleagues note that implementation rates for root cause analysis action plans have been estimated at only 45 percent to 70 percent. In other words, even when organizations diagnose, they do not always convert diagnosis into real action (Peerally, Carr, Waring, & Dixon-Woods, 2017).

The discipline should start before action is assigned. Leaders should first clarify the symptom, identify related symptoms, and explore possible causes. In hotels, this prevents the team from jumping from “occupancy is down” straight to “launch a promotion” without checking what actually changed.

Evidence then gives the team a better basis for action. The leader should not only ask what people think. The leader should ask what evidence supports the view, what evidence contradicts it, what the operating context says, and who will be affected by the proposed action.

Corrective action should also be strong enough to matter. It should not stop at reminders, documentation, or training if the deeper system remains unchanged. Once the team decides what to do, the leader should ask whether the action changes the condition that created the problem, or only records that the problem happened.

So before deciding, I would ask the team:

1. What exactly changed?

2. What related symptoms are we seeing?

3. What evidence supports or contradicts our view?

4. What assumption are we making?

5. What else could explain this?

6. Will this action change the condition behind the problem?

7. What action will we test first?

Slow Down the Diagnosis. Speed Up the Action.

The point is not to make leaders slow. Hotels need speed. But speed is useful only after the problem is properly understood.

Management can fix what is already clear. Leadership is needed when the issue is unclear, uncomfortable, and connected to how people work. John Kotter makes this distinction well. Management brings order and control to complexity. Leadership helps organizations cope with change. In hotel terms, management fixes the broken process. Leadership asks why the process keeps breaking.

This is why problem formulation matters. Before a strategy can be developed, the problem it is meant to address must first be formulated. If that step is rushed, the team may solve with confidence while still solving the wrong problem (Baer, Dirks, & Nickerson, 2013).

Evidence gives leaders a guardrail. Slowing down the diagnosis does not mean delaying action endlessly. It means taking enough time to test whether the explanation is supported by the right mix of evidence: judgment, local facts, research, and the perspectives of people affected by the decision (Briner, Denyer, & Rousseau, 2009).

Even when leaders diagnose well, the action can still be weak. A reminder, a training session, or new documentation may create activity without changing the system. Diagnosis should lead to stronger controls, better feedback loops, and actions that reduce the chance of recurrence (Peerally, Carr, Waring, & Dixon-Woods, 2017).

There is one final discipline: test the reasoning behind the action. Without that, the organization may move quickly while repeating the same assumptions. The team may look busy, aligned, and decisive, while the real problem remains protected by habit (Argyris, 1991).

Better leadership questions challenge assumptions. The discipline is not simply to ask, “What is missing?” It is to ask, “What are we taking for granted?” (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011).

That is why the best leaders do not rush the answer. They slow down the diagnosis so the action can be sharper, faster, and more useful. They do not confuse movement with progress. They do not let pressure decide for them.

The first mistake leaders make is solving too early. The better discipline is simple: formulate the problem before choosing the solution. Test the evidence before trusting the explanation. Question the assumption before choosing the action. Then choose an action strong enough to change the condition behind the problem. Move with conviction.

References

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Argyris, C. (1982). Reasoning, learning, and action: Individual and organizational. Jossey-Bass.

Argyris, C. (1991). Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard Business Review, 69(3), 99–109.

Baer, M., Dirks, K. T., & Nickerson, J. A. (2013). Microfoundations of strategic problem formulation. Strategic Management Journal, 34(2), 197–214. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2004

Briner, R. B., Denyer, D., & Rousseau, D. M. (2009). Evidence-based management: Concept cleanup time? Academy of Management Perspectives, 23(4), 19–32. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.23.4.19

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Heifetz, R. A., & Laurie, D. L. (1997). The work of leadership. Harvard Business Review, 75(1), 124–134.

Kotter, J. P. (1990). What leaders really do. Harvard Business Review, 68(3), 103–111.

Peerally, M. F., Carr, S., Waring, J., & Dixon-Woods, M. (2017). The problem with root cause analysis. BMJ Quality & Safety, 26(5), 417–422. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2016-005511