Good Leaders Should Ask Themselves: Am I Creating Problems or Solving Them?

The most important questions are often the simplest ones. One question has become central to how I think about leadership: Are we creating problems or solving them?

This question is based on real need. Hope is the primary attribute that people worldwide demand from their leaders—even more than trust and far more than compassion or stability. And hope isn’t abstract optimism, but rather the belief that the future can be better and that leaders have a credible plan to get there. In other words, hope comes from leaders who solve problems rather than create them.

Today’s leaders make long-term commitments and investments—even when the world demands short-term results. 

This applies across disciplines, sectors, and hierarchies, even if creating or solving problems looks different to everyone. Here is what solving problems—and thus true leadership—means for me personally and for Bayer’s leadership more broadly. 

Doubling Down on Sustainability Even as Others Are Retreating

Climate change, the water crisis, the growing global population—these are long-term challenges that demand long-term solutions and resolute adherence to sustainability commitments. Despite gloomy media commentary, the evidence suggests that many businesses are showing exactly this kind of leadership. Sure, some are retreating from climate pledges, but 10,000 companies have committed to the Science Based Targets’ rigorous 2050 reduction targets, suggesting momentum is building rather than stalling.

Sustainability leadership also requires transparency. Committing to sustainability measures is easy; actually implementing those measures is hard. It requires investing in research and development and making ambitious changes at a time when investors are questioning spending and resources are squeezed. Leaders need to be honest about this complexity so as to build trust—the second most important attribute we want from those at the top.

Turning Existential Threats into Opportunities

True leadership also means facing threats, quantifying their impact, and tackling them head-on, such as global food security, which is at risk from the colliding forces of population growth, increasingly harsh climate conditions, and conflicts blocking trade routes and sending fertilizer prices skyrocketing. Another example is antibiotic resistance, which if unaddressed could send us back to a world in which routine operations are impossible, and minor injuries can become deadly.

These are huge challenges—and solving them is not just necessary but also presents opportunities. For Bayer, ensuring global food security means developing tools and input that help farmers cope better with a hotter planet and more extreme weather event. And fighting antibiotic resistance means investing in the innovation and stewardship that make us part of the solution, rather than contributors to the problem.

Traditionally, we have believed that leadership means seeking out and capitalizing on the new. Increasingly, it seems to me that today’s leaders must instead use innovation to protect the status quo of sufficient productivity and functional modern medicine.

Building Systems That Work for the Most Vulnerable

A final crucial facet of leadership today: contributing to infrastructure, technology, and financing models that will ensure resilience for all. Profiting from vulnerabilities—like Africa’s current productivity deficit, which sees African countries spending $65 billion annually on food imports—reinforces unsustainable dependencies and is thus both ethically wrong and commercially unviable. Really solving problems means solving them for the long term. True leaders invest in resilience-focused, community-centered technologies and tools, join and drive coalitions aiming to address shared vulnerability, and support sustainable, long-term financing models—like the Belém model under which 44 countries endorsed climate-resilient social protection and smallholder agriculture finance—that help end the vicious cycles often perpetuated by short-term, untargeted aid. Such programs are not charity measures—they are investments in global food and economic security, to the benefit of all.

Good Leadership Is Good for Us All

Today’s leaders make long-term commitments and investments—even when the world demands short-term results. They name uncomfortable truths and face reality while developing the remedy. They measure success by whether systems serve the most vulnerable rather than just the most powerful. By constantly asking if we are creating problems or solving them—and course-correcting when needed—we build hope, become better leaders, and create a healthier planet.