Are You Coaching Your Team, or Just Solving for Them?
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”
There was a person I worked with for a long stretch who brought me the same kind of problem over and over. Not the identical problem, but the same shape of it, every few weeks, for the better part of a year. And every time, I gave good advice.
I want to be clear about that, because it matters to what I'm about to say. The advice was good. It was specific, it was right, and it worked. I was proud of how useful I was being.
What I did not notice until much later was that the interval between visits never got longer. A year in, they were still coming to me at the same rate, with the same category of problem, and I had never once asked myself why. I had been so busy being helpful that I missed the obvious thing, which is that if your advice is working, people should need less of it over time. Mine wasn't producing that. It was producing a very reliable customer.
The Myth of Better Advice
Most leaders know, in the abstract, that they shouldn't just hand people answers. That lesson is everywhere. So the sophisticated version of the instinct doesn't look like handing over an answer at all. It looks like giving genuinely good advice.
This is the version that's hardest to see, because it holds up under every test you'd think to run on it. The advice is accurate. It's tailored to the situation. The person leaves the conversation better off than they came in, and they're grateful, and the problem gets solved. By every measure available in the moment, you did the job well.
Here is what the measure in the moment can't see. Your thinking stood in for theirs. They now have the answer to that problem, which is worth something, and they have no more capacity to work through the next one than they had walking in. So the next time a problem of that shape appears, they're back at your door, because nothing in the exchange built the thing that would have let them handle it without you.
Good advice is not the opposite of that trap. It's the most comfortable place inside it.
Why It Feels Like the Right Move
There's a reason this is so hard to interrupt, and it isn't that leaders are lazy or controlling.
Giving someone useful advice is genuinely rewarding. It's fast, it resolves the discomfort of watching someone struggle, and it's one of the few moments in a leader's week that produces immediate, visible proof of value. Everything about it feels like competence, because in a narrow sense it is competence.
It's also the path of least resistance under pressure. When you're behind, the twenty seconds it takes to say what you'd do is cheaper than the six minutes it takes to help someone find what they'd do. That math is real, and on any given Tuesday, it's correct. The cost only shows up in aggregate, months later, in the form of a team whose every hard decision routes through one person.
What the Alternative Actually Looks Like
The useful framework here comes from outside of leadership entirely.
Motivational interviewing was developed by William Miller and Stephen Rollnick for clinical work, originally in addiction and health behavior change, where telling someone what to do has a famously poor track record. Its core communication skills go by the acronym OARS, which stands for open questions, affirming, reflective listening, and summarizing (Miller & Rollnick, 2023). The premise underneath it is that people are far more moved by reasons they articulate themselves than by reasons handed to them, however sound.
That premise transfers. The evidence for its transfer is partial, and I'd rather say so than overstate it. A meta-analysis of psychologically informed workplace coaching across twenty studies found substantial effects on goal attainment and self-efficacy, with the strongest gains showing up in goal attainment (Wang, Lai, Xu, & McDowall, 2022). Those studies looked at external, one-on-one coaching, not at managers coaching their own teams, which is a meaningfully different relationship with real power dynamics in it. So treat this as a well-grounded adaptation rather than a tested finding.
To Be Sure
None of this means advice is bad, and I want to head off the version of this that turns every conversation into a therapy session.
Sometimes people need the answer. When someone lacks information you have, give them the information. When the building is on fire, be direct. When someone is new and doesn't yet know what good looks like, show them. Withholding an answer that someone genuinely needs isn't coaching, it's just a slower way of being unhelpful, and people can feel the difference immediately.
The question isn't whether to ever advise. It's whether advising is your default, running automatically, before you've checked whether this is one of those moments.
The Groops Take
Every leader has a version of this moment. Someone comes in with a problem, and the fastest, most caring, most confident response is to just answer it. That instinct is not wrong. It's efficient, and efficient is exactly what makes it so hard to unlearn.
OARS is a way to slow that moment down enough to ask one real question before you answer it, and then to actually listen to where the other person takes it. Open, affirming, reflective, summarizing. The gap between the two approaches is much smaller than it sounds. It's the difference between telling someone what you would do and asking them one open question first. That single swap is most of what separates a leader who absorbs every problem from one whose team solves its own.
Something to Try This Week
The next time someone brings you a problem, run all four pieces of OARS in order before you decide whether to answer.
1. Open question. Before you say anything else, ask one of these: "What's the part of this that feels hardest?" or "What have you already tried?" Then stop talking.
2. Affirm. Name something real and specific about how they're handling it. "I've noticed how much care you bring to this, even when it's hard." Specific is the operative word, because generic affirmation reads as a stalling tactic and everyone can tell.
3. Reflect. Feed back what you heard, in your own words. "So the part that's really getting to you is the timing, not the decision itself." You will sometimes get this wrong, and that's useful too, because correcting you forces them to say it more precisely.
4. Summarize. Pull it together before you respond. "So what I'm hearing is you're clear on what needs to change, and you're still working through how to raise it."
Only then decide whether they still need your answer, or whether they found their own somewhere in the middle. My experience is that it's roughly half and half, and that the half who find their own don't come back with that problem again.
Want to Build This Skill Set?
Knowing when to coach and when to answer is one of the least-taught skills in leadership, and it's almost never learned from a book. It's learned by practicing it with real stakes and getting feedback on how it landed.
The Groops Emerging Leaders program is built for exactly that kind of development. It focuses on the interpersonal, psychological, and communication skills that determine how people lead when the pressure is on and the default is loudest.
Learn more and apply below.
P.S. Enrollment for the Emerging Leaders Groop closes Friday, October 2, ten days from today.
References
Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2023). Motivational interviewing: Helping people change and grow (4th ed.). Guilford Press.
Wang, Q., Lai, Y., Xu, X., & McDowall, A. (2022). The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta-analysis of contemporary psychologically informed coaching approaches. Journal of Work-Applied Management, 14(1), 77–101.