Les BaileyHave you ever finished the week exhausted, then realised you spent most of it solving other people’s problems? Do the people you lead bring you their thinking, or just their questions?
If that second question stings a little, you are in good company. Most leaders I meet are carrying their team’s thinking around like a second job, and they are tired.
In this article I want to share the one habit that separates leaders who build capable, confident teams from leaders who quietly become the bottleneck. By the end, you will know why the habit is so counterintuitive, what it sounds like in practice, and three small ways to start this week.
The answer trap
Most of us get promoted for being good at the work. You were the one who knew what to do, so you became the one in charge. It seems logical, and it is exactly how the trap gets set. The skill that earned you the promotion becomes the thing that limits your team.
Here is how it plays out. Someone arrives at your desk, or in your inbox, with a problem. You know the answer. Giving it takes 30 seconds, feels generous, feels efficient and, if we are honest, feels quite nice. Being needed is a lovely feeling.
Now run that moment forward a year. The same person has brought you 200 more problems, because why would they wrestle with a decision when you hand out answers for free? You have become the team’s search engine. They stop thinking, not because they cannot think, but because you keep doing the thinking for them.
The cost is bigger than a crowded diary. People who are never trusted with the thinking never grow. Your best people get bored, your quieter people stay hidden, and everything routes through you. What feels like service is actually dependence, wearing a helpful face.
Telling and coaching are different jobs
Telling transfers an answer from your head to theirs. Coaching builds the person, so the next answer comes from them.
I have spent more than three decades around sales teams, and the pattern is identical whether the team sells software, runs a clinic or edits a magazine. The leaders whose teams perform, year after year, are rarely the ones with the best answers. They are the ones whose people learned to find their own, because someone kept asking instead of telling.
I watched a leader I worked with break her own answer habit with a single question. When one of her team brought her a stalled decision, instead of solving it she asked, “What have you already considered?” There was an awkward pause. Then something interesting happened. He talked his way through three options, spotted the flaw in his favourite, and left with a plan she had barely touched. He did the work. He also walked out taller.
What coaching actually sounds like
You do not need a qualification or a formal session. Most everyday coaching is a handful of honest questions, asked with genuine curiosity:
- What outcome are you actually trying to reach?
- What have you already considered?
- What is really getting in the way here?
- What would you do if I were away for two weeks?
- What will you do next, and by when?
Notice the last one. The commitment stays with them. That is the point.
Why we resist it
If asking is so powerful, why do so few leaders do it? Three fears, mostly.
The first is looking like you do not know. It feels safer to demonstrate expertise than to ask a question. In reality, the leaders secure enough to ask are the ones people trust most. A question signals confidence, not ignorance.
The second is losing control. If they decide, what if they decide badly? You still own the outcome, and you can still step in when the stakes demand it. Coaching does not mean abandoning judgement. It means sharing the ownership of thinking, while keeping your responsibility for results.
The third is time. “I do not have time to coach” might be the most common sentence in management. Yet answering the same questions for the same people for years takes far longer. Coaching requires consistent effort up front and pays it back every month afterwards.
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Three ways to start this week
You do not need to announce anything. Just change three small moments.
First, pause before answering. When the next problem lands, ask one question before you offer anything. “What have you considered so far?” works almost everywhere.
Second, hold the silence. Count to five in your head. The first answer people give is rarely their best one, and the good stuff usually arrives just after the pause you wanted to fill.
Third, end every one-to-one with their commitments, not yours. If you keep leaving meetings with all the actions, you have been coaching yourself.
The quiet payoff
A few weeks in, something small but lovely happens. Someone brings you a decision they have already made, and it is better than the one you would have handed them. That moment is the whole job. Leadership was never really about having the answers. It is about growing people who can find them, long after you have left the room.
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