Coaching Your Team Instead of Solving Everything For Them

If people arrive at your desk with problems rather than proposals, that is not a comment on them. It is a pattern you created, usually by being helpful. Every time someone brought a problem and left with your solution, they learned that bringing problems works.

Coaching is the alternative, and it is not a soft skill or a formal programme. It is a different default response to being asked a question.

The reflex to interrupt

Someone describes a problem. Within about twenty seconds you know roughly what you would do. Saying it is faster, feels useful, and confirms you were right to be promoted.

It also costs three things: they do not develop the judgement, they return next time, and you never discover whether their answer was better than yours. Over a year that compounds into a team that cannot operate without you — which is usually the thing stopping you from doing your own job.

The discipline is simply to wait, and to ask before telling.

Four questions that do most of the work

"What have you tried?" Often they have already done more than you assumed, and you were about to suggest something that failed last week. It also signals that arriving with nothing is not the norm.

"What do you think we should do?" The single highest-value question available to a manager. Most people have a view and have not been asked for it. Frequently it is as good as yours, and when it is not, the gap tells you exactly what to teach.

"What would you do if I were away?" Removes you from the equation. People who claim to have no view often produce a clear one when the option of deferring disappears.

"What is the risk in that?" Moves from having an idea to having a judgement, which is the actual skill. It also surfaces whether they have thought past the first step.

Four questions, maybe three minutes. Slower than answering, considerably faster than answering the same question for two years.

When not to coach

Coaching everything is as unhelpful as coaching nothing, and it is infuriating to be asked what you think when the person clearly knows.

Just answer when: it is genuinely urgent; it is information rather than judgement; the person is new and lacks the context to reason it through; or the stakes make experimentation unwise. Nobody wants Socratic questioning during an incident.

The useful habit is to notice which one you are in, rather than defaulting to either.

Separating coaching from feedback

These get conflated and are different activities. Feedback is about something that already happened and needs to change — see our guide to giving feedback that changes behaviour. Coaching is about something they are working out now.

Trying to do both in one conversation usually means the feedback gets softened into a question, which is confusing. "What do you think went wrong there?" when you mean "that was not acceptable" is unfair to the person.

Where it pays off

The return is not in the conversation, it is in the delegation that becomes possible afterwards. A team that reasons independently can be given decisions, not just tasks — which is the difference between allocating work and genuinely delegating it. Our guide to delegating effectively covers how to hand over decision rights once the judgement is there.

It is also the most reliable retention tool most managers have. People rarely leave jobs where they are visibly getting better.

Doing it in one-to-ones

The easiest place to start. Most one-to-ones are status updates, which you could get from a message. Give fifteen minutes to a problem they are actually wrestling with, ask the four questions, and resist filling silences. The pause before someone answers a hard question is usually them thinking, not them stuck.

Frequently asked questions

Does this not take longer?

Per conversation, yes. Across a year, no — the same questions stop coming back.

What if their answer is wrong?

Say so, and explain the reasoning rather than just the conclusion. The reasoning is what transfers.

Do I need a coaching qualification?

Not for this. Formal coaching is a distinct discipline; asking before telling is a management habit.

What if they find it annoying?

They will if you do it to everything. Match it to the situation and say why occasionally — people respond well to being told you are deliberately not answering because you want their view.

Our CPD courses include management development mapped to professional body requirements, and our guide to building a high-performing team covers the wider conditions this depends on.