Coaching: The Leadership Superpower

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Six months ago, I got a new boss.

James’s resume said he was a “certified coach,” which didn’t mean much to me at the time. I figured that meant he was great at giving people advice on what to do — like a consultant.

But I soon realized that James’s gift was asking good questions — not dishing out business advice.

When our team presented problems to James, he’d often ask a few insightful questions, and we’d unearth some new solution together. It got to the point where employees began asking James, “Teach me how to do what you just did. I don’t know what that was, but I want to learn it.”

James’s superpower was coaching: the art of asking questions to help others find their own solutions.

It wasn’t that James didn’t have good advice; he just preferred to ask questions instead. I soon found out why.

3 Different Strategies

Loosely stated, there are three different response strategies when someone comes to you with a problem:

1. Advice — Utilize your expertise to solve the problem. Use your knowledge and pattern recognition (what you’ve seen work in similar situations) to suggest potential solutions to the problem.
2. Ask Leading Questions — Formulate an idea of what the other person should do in their situation. Rather than explicitly telling them what you think, ask questions to lead the person to a conclusion, so it feels like their idea. This is sometimes called “the illusion of empowerment.”
3. Coaching — Set aside your experience and simply ask questions. Be curious. Ask open-ended questions to help the other person determine their solution — one that works for them in this specific situation.

Before learning the power of coaching, I often opted for one of the first two options whenever people came to me with problems.

I assumed the mantle of “Problem Solver” and went to work analyzing the problem and sharing my insights — either explicitly (advice) or subtly (asking leading questions).

Notice how these approaches assume an imbalance of information or knowledge? Sharing advice is predicated on the belief that we know more than the other person. We are…