Last week I was in a coaching for performance session — part of our work building High Performing Teams — and the facilitator asked a simple question of the managers in the room:
What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing with your people right now?
A theme emerged almost immediately. Employees coming to their managers with every problem, expecting them to have every answer. Managers stretched thin, caught in a loop of solving, deciding, directing — and wondering why their teams still didn’t feel fully engaged.
Here’s what I believe: that loop isn’t a people problem. It’s a mindset problem.
When we operate from a command-and-control framework — even a well-meaning one — we quietly send a message to the people we lead: I am the expert. You are the recipient. Over time, that message becomes a belief. And once someone believes they don’t have the answers, they stop looking for them.
A coaching mindset flips that entirely.
The research backs this up. Studies on psychological safety — particularly Amy Edmondson’s work at Harvard — show that people perform better, innovate more, and recover from mistakes faster in environments where they feel safe to speak up. You cannot have psychological safety without trust. You cannot have trust in an environment where people feel like their thinking doesn’t matter. You cannot have authentic contribution if people are conditioned to wait for permission.
When managers coach, people discover their own resourcefulness. They bring ideas they would have kept quiet. They take ownership of problems they would have passed upward. They show up as whole people — not just the part of themselves that follows instructions.
That’s not soft. That’s the performance multiplier most organizations are still leaving on the table.
To the managers reading this: you don’t have to have all the answers. In fact, the most powerful thing you can do is ask a better question.
What’s one question you could ask tomorrow that would help someone on your team discover what they’re already capable of?