I’ve used the “don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions” phrase quite a bit as a manager to empower employees to solve problems themselves when I know full well they have the brains and resources to do so.
I’ve had my share of lazy employees who any time they ran up against a roadblock would immediately come to dump the problem in my lap thinking “I’m not paid to think or figure things out when there’s a problem, that’s the managers job.”
But then I had a lot who knew what to do in a situation but just needed to run it by me. “Hey boss, I ran up against problem A, I’m thinking the best way to handle it is solution X, what do you think?”