Do people in leadership positions actually say this in the real world? I personally have not seen it in the workplace in 10 years, but maybe I have been lucky. I am curious to hear if others have heard this saying in the workplace before and what your reaction was.

As a software developer and individual contributor, I firmly believe in the saying applied to my own work (with a small modification): I avoid bringing open-ended problems to my leadership. I'll bring problems with solutions, I'll bring problems with sets of options, but it's only a last result that I bring an option with no proposed solutions.

I came to this conclusion after two events. The first was a few years ago when I joined a company and was given a task to fix a bug in some Perl code on my first or second week. In my first 1:1 with my manager, I complained about the task. Why did they use Perl, I don't know Perl, the code isn't documented, it's ten years old etc. I wasn't trying to get out of the task. My manager had simply asked me how it was going, and I was just going through the things I was thinking about at the time. He listened patiently, and after the meeting, he assigned the ticket to someone else. Whoops. I realized at that time that I had brought a problem to my manager, and he had chosen to solve it in his own way. As a result, I did not achieve the outcome I was hoping for (which was to fix the bug and make a good impression).

The second event was a couple years ago when I stumbled into one of HBR's classic articles from 1974, Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? [1] This article is about the need for managers to manage their time effectively. If a manager's reports are bringing too many problems ("monkeys"), then the manager can get bogged down solving problems on behalf of their reports. Reading this article about the manager's point of view really helped it click for me: to be a more effective engineer, I needed to bring results to my manager. Overall, I think the approach is working well for me.

When I read the 1974 and 2017 articles, I believe both are implying is that excellent managers should empower their reports to bring solutions rather than demanding solutions. Rather than demanding solutions, a good manager will build trust with their reports, encourage critical thinking, and build up the confidence of their reports.

[1] https://hbr.org/1999/11/management-time-whos-got-the-monkey