Stop solving, start leading.

By Sandra Oliver, Impact Founder

When a team is underperforming, the default move for many leaders is to step in, tighten standards, increase oversight, and make more of the decisions themselves. While this feels responsible, it also teaches the team to wait, defer, expect the leader to step in, and under-own. The more the leader controls, the less they lead – and the less they lead, the more the leader feels forced to control.

That’s the trap that Michael Bungay Stanier’s book, The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever outlines – and helps break.

Stanier encourages us as leaders to stop trying to be the person with all the answers. Instead, he suggests we become the person who creates better thinking in others, using coaching to build accountability:

1. Stay curious longer than feels natural

As leaders, we’re often too quick to advise, rescue, and solve, especially when we’re frustrated. We see a problem, jump to diagnosis, and then take over because our irritation diminishes our curiosity in the moment. But while, this approach can create short-term movement, it weakens judgment and initiative across the team.

Instead, before telling our team, we need to learn to ask them. Before fixing for our direct reports, we need to understand what they’re going through. Before deciding for our people, we must require them to think.

2. Replace advice-giving with questions that create ownership

When a team is struggling, giving them advice can make them dependent on us. We think we’re being helpful, but when we repeatedly provide solutions, our teams learn to escalate too early, think too shallowly, and avoid true ownership because they know we’ll refine it anyway.

Coaching helps interrupt that cycle. Asking good questions, like “what do you think?”, “what options have you considered?” or “what’s your recommendation?” pushes responsibility back to the team in a constructive way.

It doesn’t mean we should stop being decisive as leaders – we just shouldn’t be the first source of every answer.

3. Make coaching a daily leadership habit, not an occasional event

Coaching should happen in 10-minute moments, not just in formal one-on-ones or offsites. Coaching is a leadership behaviour that happens in real time during meetings, check-ins, when someone brings up an issue, or even just when we feel the urge to jump in. 

The key is repetition. Team culture changes when our response pattern as leaders changes consistently. If we meet every problem our people bring forward with a coaching question instead of an immediate fix, the team starts showing up differently.

4. Focus on the real issue, not the first issue

When we’re frustrated, we tend to react to the visible problem: the missed deadline, poor communication, or weak execution. But the visible issue may just be masking the actual problem: unclear ownership, fear of making decisions, lack of capability, misaligned incentives, conflict avoidance, or a leader who unintentionally crowds out initiative.

As leaders, we can use coaching to slow down long enough to find the challenge beneath the complaint. If we keep solving surface-level issues, we stay busy and remain disappointed. But, if we start surfacing root issues, we can actually change the system.

5. Don’t let coaching become endless discussion

The point is not to ask open questions forever, but to generate better clarity, ownership, and action. As leaders, we can use coaching to move the team toward clearer thinking, explicit commitments, stronger ownership, and better follow-through.

6. Stop rescuing

Many leaders are chronic rescuers, especially when they’re competent, driven, and impatient. Rescuing feels efficient, like: “I’ll just handle this”, “let me rewrite it”, “I’ll join the call”, or “here’s exactly what to do.”

Each rescue can deliver immediate relief, while at the same time fostering long-term regression and trained helplessness. As leaders, we need to build tolerance for the discomfort of watching others struggle appropriately. That doesn’t mean allowing failure without intervention – it  means intervening in a way that builds capability in our people, rather than replacing it.

7. The way we lead is part of what we get

If our team is ineffective, there may absolutely be talent, structure, and accountability issues to address. But if we micromanage, we also participate in the problem. Our behavior may create the very passivity, caution, and underperformance that frustrates us.

This is why the shift has to begin with us. Instead of asking ourselves, “why won’t they step up?”, we can ask “how am I leading in a way that makes stepping up less likely?”

Changing our leadership pattern

Often, we don’t only have a team ownership problem. We also have a leadership pattern problem. Our frustration drives us toward control, and our control produces less ownership. If we keep solving faster than our people can think, we remain the engine of the business and the ceiling on the business.

Instead, we need to keep our expectations high, stay curious, raise the quality of our questions, keep holding our people accountable for their work, and stop rescuing.

Dig deeper

Five high-value coaching questions for our teams

1. What’s the real challenge here for you?
This gets beneath the surface issue and forces clarity. It often reveals whether the problem is capability, confidence, prioritization, or avoidance.

2. What are you seeing as your options?
This interrupts dependency and requires independent thinking before we weigh in.

3. What do you recommend, and why?
A strong CEO question. It builds judgment, not just discussion.

4. What ownership do you need to take here?
This sharpens accountability and prevents abstract conversations about “the situation.”

5. What support do you need from me that doesn’t take this back out of your hands?
This is especially powerful for a micromanaging leader. It lets us help without rescuing.

Our tone matters as much as the words

These questions shouldn’t sound like a trap, test, or passive-aggressive frustration. They should sound calm, firm, and developmental.

We also need to wait through the silence. If we asks a coaching question and then answer it ourselves two seconds later, we haven’t coached anything.

And when the team gives weak answers, we shouldn’t immediately take over. Instead, we need to recognize we have the opportunity to coach one layer deeper.

To build capacity, we can encourage our people to “say more”, or ask “what leads you to that view?”, “what’s missing in your thinking?” or “which option are you ruling out too quickly?”