How to become more coach-like as a leader

Executive overview

Most leaders default to giving advice when someone brings them a problem. Being more coach-like means staying curious a little longer and rushing to advice a little more slowly — and it's a learnable behaviour, not a professional identity.

Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit, draws the line between coaching as a profession and coaching as a leadership style. The goal is not to become a coach; it's to shift your default from answer-giving to question-asking in everyday interactions.

The advice monster is the core obstacle: taming it unlocks better conversations, stronger thinking, and real development.

What being coach-like actually means

• Coaching as a profession comes with baggage; coaching as a behaviour is just sustained curiosity
• Daniel Goleman identified coaching as one of six leadership styles — and the least used
• The working definition: stay curious a little bit longer, rush to action and advice giving a little bit more slowly
• It applies beyond management — parents, sports coaches, and pastors use the same approach
• The shift is not about learning more models; it's about how you show up

The being of coaching: fierce love

• Two qualities matter most: caring deeply about the person, and holding outcomes lightly
• "Care and don't care" — be fully on their side while accepting that choices belong to them
• Peter Block's framing: give people responsibility for their own freedom
• The coaching posture MBS calls fierce love: championing the person's best while refusing to let them off the hook
• Be fierce, not nice — fierceness means saying what needs to be said, not being an obstacle
• A coach who won't be conned and won't be swayed by charm is rare and worth keeping

Knowing when it's working

• The lazy (and effective) method: ask the learning question — "What was useful or valuable here for you?"
• The internal check: ask yourself before each conversation —
  1. How active and engaged do I plan to be?
  2. How much risk am I willing to take?
  3. How much do I care about the other person's experience?
• When you hold back a challenging question, it's rarely because they can't handle it — it's because you can't
• Infantilizing people by protecting them from hard truths damages more than a direct question would

Delivering hard truths

• Frame before you deliver: "Is it okay if I share a hard truth? It might shock you a little."
• Almost no one says no to that framing
• Treat the feedback as a third point — something you and the other person look at together, not something you hand them
• Follow up with: "What rings true about this for you?" — not "Here is the truth"
• This preserves the relationship and keeps future tough conversations possible

Questions that help vs. questions that don't

• Advice disguised as a question: "Have you thought of…?", "What about…?", "Did you consider…?" — these are statements with question marks attached
• Why questions almost always land as accusatory and push people into justification and defensiveness
• How questions assume you've already identified the real problem — often you haven't
• What questions are the most useful: they stay open, they don't presuppose
• The focus question — "What's the real challenge here for you?" — slows the rush to solve the wrong problem
• Being known as the person who finds the real problem is more valuable than being known for having ideas

The power of silence

• When a question truly lands, people need time to find the answer — their eyes go up, they pause
• That pause is new thinking happening; your job is to hold the space and not fill it
• Silence after a good question is a measure of success, not a sign of failure
• The discomfort of silence is mutual — but the other person will crack first
• Sitting with silence signals presence, calm, and confidence in the other person's ability to figure it out

Checking who the conversation is actually for

• A subtle skill: noticing whether you're asking a question to help them find something out, or to find something out yourself
• Some questions are in service of your own curiosity or your own next suggestion — not theirs
• Fierce love means every question is in service of the person in front of you
• If you're in second gear in a conversation, you'll feel it — and so will they