This philosophy is applicable to much more than just sales.
I generally try to avoid highlighting problems unless I can suggest a solution. People don't want to hear whats wrong, they want to know how things can get better.
I generally try to avoid highlighting problems unless I can suggest a solution. People don't want to hear whats wrong, they want to know how things can get better.
1. This kind of thing leads to bigger problems. If they're small but your employee is having trouble coming up with a solution, and they don't come to you, odds are the problem will get worse and you might not find out about it before it takes the proverbial "pound of cure" to deal with it.
2. If your employee already has a solution in mind, why do they need to come to you at all? Just let them implement it. If you need your employees to run their "solutions" by you, you might be a micromanager. As a manager, I want my employees coming to me with their unsolvable problems, not the stuff they think they can handle. Sure, there's some risk of a mistake from time to time, but I treat those as experiences to learn from and there are other ways of keeping those "lessons" from getting too expensive.
3. It's often hypocritical. Does the average middle manager waste their senior exec's time with stuff they already know the answer to? Most likely not.
All that said, a policy of "Don't come to me with a problem until after you've thought about it a little bit" (i.e. a form of "Don't come to me with data, come to me with analysis") is perfectly reasonable to me.
As for points 2 & 3, I think there is a big difference between solving something you've been told to do vs. solving something you've ran into. The latter will oftentimes highlight an underlying issue in the process/project which needs to be addressed and solving it without letting others know may create unwanted assumptions.
The reason I said "generally try to avoid" instead of always avoid is because sometimes there are real problems worth mentioning or, as you said, times where one simply can't find an acceptable answer. In either case its important to raise the issue even though no solution is at hand. This is exactly why not wanting to hear problems is so catastrophic from a managerial perspective, you end up not hearing about your largest problems.
Being constructive is important, but being realistic is even more important.