Problem-Solving: Teaching Your Team To Fish

Coaching to be most effective in addressing three areas:
1. solving problems
2. developing and achieving long-term goals
3. improving performance
This takes patience and empathy: Always remember that your
teammates are people, not computers whose software you’re
upgrading. But it’s worth it. Not only will your team be more
capable and better retained, but you’ll grow too, as teaching is one
of the most effective ways to learn.
1. Problem-solving: Teaching your team to fish
When a teammate comes to their manager with a problem that

needs solving, many leaders’ first instinct is to give them advice on
what to do. If you’re good at something that someone else is
struggling with, it’s only natural to say, “Here’s what I would do.”
But that’s at best a short-term solution. When you simply give
advice, your teammates never learn how to solve similar problems
for themselves in the future.
Instead, you want to “teach them how to fish.” To adapt the famous
saying, “Give your team a solution, and you empower them for
today; teach your team how to solve problems, and you empower
them for a lifetime.”
Start with active listening: when your teammate brings up the

problem they need to solve, reflect back on what they’re saying
(“What I hear you saying is…”). Sometimes just hearing a problem
relayed back inspires someone to realize they already know the
answer.
Think of an organization like a tree, with the

CEO on the bottom. The individual contributors
are the fruit—the people doing the work—and
managers are their supportive branches.
Coaching is a key tool for ensuring your
teammates fully ripen.
Next, ask probing open-ended questions that can help them come to
the answer themselves. Walk them through the thought process you
would use. Tell them about your own experiences, and how you’ve
seen similar situations go down. Give a specific solution to the
problem only as a last resort.
2. Goal-setting: Big hairy audacious goals

Anyone on a career track should have concrete long-term goals.
As a coach, it’s your job to help them identify those goals and then
set them on a realistic path toward achieving them, with a
timeline of concrete milestones along the way.
ifferent people have different goals, so you need to listen and
probe to understand each person deeply. One person might want
more responsibility, another may want to master their craft, or be
a better communicator, or become a leader, or increase their
productivity, or feel more confident. What obstacles will they need
to overcome? What habits do they need to outgrow? You can ask
them to introspect on these questions, and you can add your own
answers based on your experience.
When you simply give advice, your teammates never learn how
to solve similar problems for themselves in the future.
4.Performance improvement: Tough

conversations
An inevitable part of any leader’s role is to

give constructive feedback to a teammate
when something isn’t going the way it
should be.
Ready to implement a few of these practices? Here are a set of questions
to guide your coaching sessions:
Assessing how things are going:
 How are you feeling?
 What went well this week?
 What’s exciting to you right now?
 What’s bugging you?
 What are your priorities?
 What are your goals? Specific action plans for working toward
each one?
 What are the biggest challenges you currently face?
 How can I and the organization can assist you?
 Is there anything preventing you from an unqualified “yes” to the
question, “Is this organization the place where I can do my best
work?” What obstacles can we remove?
 How challenged do you feel at work? Do you wish you were
more, less, or differently challenged?
Role reflection:
 How do you view yourself in your role?
 Is there an area we should give you more space, sheltered from
the day to day, to shine?
 Are there new approaches you’re interested in experimenting
with in how you do any part of your role?
 How would you appraise your current skills and abilities?
 What’s your pie chart of what you working on? What do you
want it to be?
 Where are you being under-leveraged?
 Where would you like to develop?
Career reflection:
 If you were having the best workday ever in your ideal role,
what would your schedule look like?
 Where do you get your job satisfaction from? What do you find
most fulfilling and rewarding? What matters to you most?
 What’s most unique in your skill sets?
 Where have you been most successful in the past? What do those
experiences have in common?

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Coaching to be most effective in addressing three areas:

1. Problem-solving: Teaching your team to fish

When a teammate comes to their manager with a problem that

Start with active listening: when your teammate brings up the

Think of an organization like a tree, with the

2. Goal-setting: Big hairy audacious goals

4.Performance improvement: Tough

An inevitable part of any leader’s role is to

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