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.
Context
Powell's distillation of a core principle from his decades of military and government leadership, published in his 2012 memoir. He argues that a leader's accessibility to problems is the leading indicator of organizational trust and effectiveness—silence from below is not a sign of success but of failure.