I work with leaders every day who are frustrated because they keep asking or telling members of their team to do the same things over and over, and they’re not seeing any substantive change. They’re exhausted from being the ones who have to solve everyone’s problems all the time, only to have the same people in their office with the same problems. They wish their employees would take more ownership over the solutions.
Every leader I work with has the best intentions and genuinely wants to see their team members grow. And they have years, if not decades, of their own experiences to draw from to help their employees in situations they’ve seen throughout their careers. That experience is real, and it is worth a great deal. But giving someone the answer is not the same as coaching them, and that is where the trouble starts.
Despite their best intentions, most of what managers think of as coaching these days does not create real change. It often takes the form of quick fixes that look good on paper but do not work in practice. It becomes venting without progress. It becomes advice-giving disguised as mentoring, which pressures the advice-giver to always know the right answer and leaves the other person dependent rather than empowered, frustrated that they can’t seem to make substantive change.
When I ask leaders to walk me through a recent coaching conversation, what they describe almost always turns out to be a plan: a step-by-step set of instructions for what they would do in the same situation.
And it is not only leaders. The same thing shows up as a downloadable marathon plan for a first-time runner, a performance plan for an employee who wants to advance, a sticker chart for a child. But plans rely on willpower and discipline, two cognitive resources that are already strained by the demands of modern life. People try to push through, but they hit walls in motivation, energy, discipline, and confidence. They begin to believe something is wrong with them.
Real growth requires more than a plan. It requires a shift in thinking. Yet most managers think they’re coaching when they’re really defaulting to prescriptive advice and cheerleading. They were never trained how to lead coaching conversations in the way professional, certified coaches were trained.
What the world’s best coaches do
The world’s best coaches have always known that insight precedes action. When we ask better questions and listen with generosity, we help people take ownership of their choices and move toward genuine, lasting change.
Working in both corporate and athletic environments has taught me one truth above all others: The most powerful insights come from within. When you are coaching someone, your job is to guide a creative and thought-provoking conversation that helps someone uncover what is true for them. From there, you lead them from vision to insight to action through questions that expand awareness and reflective listening that strengthens clarity.
Breakthroughs happen when people discover something they did not know they were thinking. Those moments of awareness, whether they feel like an “aha” or an “oh crap,” hold the key to real transformation. No amount of advice can replace the ownership that comes when someone sees their situation in a new way and decides how they want to act based on that new insight.
Your true advantage as a leader is your ability to create a thought-provoking partnership that goes beyond tactics or advice. When you help people think more clearly and more boldly, they develop ownership of their choices and actions. This is what makes you irreplaceable.
Anyone can offer tips or frameworks. Very few leaders help people see something meaningful about themselves and apply that insight to everything that matters. Very few leaders ask the question that changes someone’s direction. Very few leaders create conversations that people remember years later because it was the moment they finally understood what had been holding them back.
What if the most powerful thing you could do as a leader is not to provide answers, but to ask better questions that help people find their own? What could become possible if the people you coach began to think with greater clarity and take action with greater ownership?
That is what Make Them Think is all about: how to help people create a life and career that are better than they believed possible. They will achieve their goals and perform better, yes. More importantly, they will remember you as the person who helped them see something they could not see on their own. You will become the leader who asked the question that shifted everything. You will become the leader who believed they had the answers within them long before they believed it themselves.
That is the kind of leader people never forget.
Try this week
You do not have to overhaul how you lead to move in this direction. Begin with two questions, and sit with them honestly.
- Think back to a time when you and another person had completely different understandings of the same situation. Maybe you offered advice that worked for you but didn’t land for them, or expected them to “get” something that seemed obvious to you. What assumptions were you making about their thinking that, in hindsight, might not have been true for them?
- Look ahead to an upcoming conversation. How does it feel to consider that the person you’re talking with is processing everything through a completely different set of career (and life!) experiences than you are? Does this change how you might approach the conversation?
- Tell me in the comments: when has advice that worked for you completely failed to land for someone else? In hindsight, what do you think was different about how they were seeing the situation that you might have missed at the time?
Jenn
Jenn Farrer is an ICF and NeuroLeadership Institute-certified executive coach, a certified running coach, and the author of Make Them Think: How to Coach for Ownership, Insight and Action.
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