How to stop people coming back with the same problems

Executive overview

Leaders who jump in with answers feel helpful but create dependency — people return with the same problems because they never develop their own solutions. The fix is not a coaching overhaul but two go-to questions that interrupt the habit.

Asking questions instead of telling engages more of the brain: memory, emotion, and the ability to generalise solutions across situations. Telling only activates rational processing — nothing sticks.

The dopamine hit from giving answers is an addiction that undermines your people's growth and makes you a single point of failure.

Why leaders keep giving answers

• Answering feels good — it triggers a dopamine reward identical to the brain's response to chocolate
• Leaders are often promoted because they were good at the role they now oversee — they have the answers
• Habit, time pressure, and a genuine desire to help reinforce the pattern
• Intellectually knowing you shouldn't jump in does not stop you during the daily grind

The cost of helping too hard

• Team members don't retain answers they didn't generate — they return with the same question
• People can't generalise a solution they were handed to similar situations
• Constant answering disempowers people and signals a lack of trust
• The leader becomes a bottleneck; succession and resilience suffer
• Strategic work gets crowded out by reactive operational requests

Breaking the habit: awareness first

• Awareness of current behaviour is the prerequisite — you cannot change what you don't see
• Map the impact: on your people, on the organisation, on you personally
• For Brendan (case study): he was stalling a promotion by staying in the weeds — naming that impact created motivation to change
• Decode the cause before trying to fix the behaviour

Circuit-breaker questions

• Replace the answer habit with two simple go-to questions kept top of mind
• Useful starters: "What do you think I'm going to tell you?" or "What have you tried so far?"
• "What have you tried so far?" prevents repeating advice people have already attempted
• Prompts people to engage their own thinking before receiving guidance
• Keep questions visible: screensaver, sticky note, inside a notebook cover

Expanding the repertoire over time

• Once the pause-and-ask habit is established, broaden the range of questions
• Apply a coaching approach across contexts: corridor conversations, team meetings, client interactions
• Curiosity is the antidote to judgment — questions loaded with judgment shut down the space
• Not every situation calls for coaching; directive leadership is sometimes right — match the approach to the moment

Communicating the shift to your team

• Name the change explicitly before and during the transition; don't let people guess what's happening
• Frame it with intention: "I'm shifting how I lead because people are more empowered when they find their own solutions"
• Reassure people you're still available and backing them
• Use a coaching question to review the shift: "Over the past couple of months I've been changing how I lead — how's that working for you?"
• The more entrenched the old pattern, the more explicit the framing needs to be

Holding on to pain, burying the learning

• Corrinne's own failure: walked into a troubled project without adequate due diligence, felt isolated, and carried the pain for years
• Key insight: leaders tend to hold onto pain but bury the lessons
• Recovery required consciously releasing the pain and deliberately surfacing the learnings
• Giving yourself explicit permission to move on — rather than waiting for it to feel natural — accelerates recovery
• Career "sliding doors" moments shape leaders more than easy successes do