Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

Colin Powell repeatedly framed leadership in practical, soldier-centered terms drawn from his U.S. Army career (Vietnam, senior command posts, and later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). This maxim circulates widely in leadership training and military professional education as a distillation of his command philosophy: leaders exist to remove obstacles, make decisions, and take responsibility for the hard issues subordinates cannot solve alone. The “soldiers stop bringing you their problems” line reflects a command climate diagnostic—whether troops trust the chain of command and believe their concerns will be heard and acted on. While strongly associated with Powell, the exact occasion and first publication are often not cited in popular reproductions.

Powell defines leadership less as charisma or authority than as the ongoing work of confronting and resolving problems on behalf of a group. The quote implies that open upward communication is a key indicator of healthy leadership: when people still bring problems, they assume the leader is competent and cares. Silence, by contrast, signals organizational breakdown—either fear, cynicism, or learned helplessness. The final sentence makes the standard explicit: a leader is accountable not only for outcomes but for maintaining trust and approachability. In this view, leadership failure is often visible first in the disappearance of candor, not in a single dramatic mistake.