The Questions Advantage (Part 3): Coaching to Build Capacity

Part Three of a Three-Part Series on Leadership on the Edge

TL;DR

• The Advice Monster: Great leaders build capacity by asking, not telling.

• The Responsibility Shift: Coaching moves the “answer” from the leader to the team member.

• The “What” Framework: Effective coaching follows a simple three-step loop: What? So What? Now What?

• The Capacity Multiplier: When teams solve their own problems, the leader is freed to focus on the future.

I Get Sh!t Done!

I thought my true value was my ability to “get sh!t done”. I was the to-do list ninja, if you needed something done, give it to Phil.

That served me well, until it didn’t.

Have you ever had that sinking feeling that there is no way to be successful with what’s on your plate, there is no one coming to rescue you, and the light at the end of the tunnel is probably a train?

As Marshall Goldsmith says, “What got you here won’t get you there.”

If I wanted to keep advancing my career, I had to reframe my approach to productivity. It was no longer about what I could produce, it was the capacity of the system I was responsible for.

The problem? I had trained everyone around me that I had the answers, and I loved doing the work.

The pivot? 

Learning to coach my team to develop the answers so I could focus on increasing the capacity of the system I was responsible for. I also had to rewire my dopamine addiction from crossing things off a to-do list to watching my team grow in their own capabilities.

The Case for Coaching

There are two primary reasons coaching has become a non-negotiable leadership skill.

First, business today moves so fast and is so heavily integrated that command-and-control structures are no longer appropriate. Leaders must not be the providers of answers; instead, they should focus on being experts at asking questions to push decision-making closer to where the problems actually happen.

Second, the relationship between employees and employers is evolving. Boomers and Gen X’ers, I am an X’er, were generally loyal to companies and respected authority. (I know my Mom and Dad read these, and I could hear them chuckle as they read that line.) 

The Millennials, Gen Z’s, and Alphas, just entering the workforce, have a fundamentally different view. They are focused on personal growth and their relationship with their direct leader. They want autonomy and guidance, not instructions.

Coaching as a leadership tool is no longer optional. But there is an important distinction between using coaching as one tool in your leadership toolkit and being an executive coach as a profession. 

Let me explain.

The Secret to Great Coaching: Who Has the Answer?

Early in my leadership career, I thought 1-on-1s were for problem-solving. A team member would walk in with an issue; I’d listen for about 90 seconds, then tell them exactly what to do. It felt efficient. It felt like leadership.

What I didn’t realize was that I was running a very expensive advice desk.

There is a fundamental distinction that changed how I lead:

Managing and mentoring are appropriate when you have the answer and the situation requires you to provide it, a new hire who lacks experience, a genuine emergency, or a policy breach. Here, your knowledge is the asset.

Coaching is appropriate when they have the answer, and your job is simply to help them find it. This is true more often than most leaders admit.

The shift matters because every time you hand someone an answer they were capable of finding themselves, you’re making a quiet withdrawal from their confidence account. Over time, you don’t just create dependency, you create a team that stops thinking and brings only their problems.

The simplest filter: if you believe the person has the skill to solve this, coach them. If they genuinely don’t, manage or mentor them.

The goal is to spend more and more of your time in the first category.

This is also an important distinction from the work of a professional executive coach. A trained executive coach operates in pure inquiry mode, holding open-ended space for exploration without agenda or outcome. That is a genuinely valuable discipline. But it is not the same as leadership coaching. 

As a leader, you are responsible for results, culture, and the development of your people simultaneously. That means you need a full toolkit, knowing when to coach, when to mentor, when to manage, and when to simply get out of the way. 

Staying in pure inquiry mode when your team needs a clear decision or direct guidance isn't coaching excellence; it's abdication.

The Simple Coaching Model: What? So What? Now What?

This series is focused on the power of questions, so it’s not surprising that they are the foundation of great coaching. But questions only work when paired with equally disciplined listening.

Questions

High-stakes coaching doesn’t have to be complicated. It follows a predictable, three-stage diagnostic loop built entirely on “What” questions.

What is the observation. Before you can coach anything, you need to get curious about what is actually happening—not the presenting problem, the real one. Ask: “What is going on right now?” and then stay there longer than feels comfortable. Most leaders rush past this stage because they think they already know the answer. They rarely do.

So What is where meaning gets made. Once the real issue is on the table, the question shifts: “So what does this mean for you, your team, the outcome?” This is where your coachee moves from describing a situation to understanding it. Your job is to keep asking, not interpreting.

Now What is the commitment stage. “Now what will you do?” and “What will progress look like before we meet next?” Own nothing here. The plan, the action, and the accountability all belong to them.

Two things I’ve learned after teaching this to hundreds of leaders: don’t rush the What stage, clarity on the real problem is the whole game. And new information can surface at any point in the conversation, so stay loose enough to loop back.

Listening

One of the hardest skills for leaders who want to improve their coaching is listening without an agenda.

Remember: you are not responsible for solving the problem. Your job is to clarify the problem to be solved and, through questions, help your coachee solve it themselves.

Much more on listening in a future newsletter.

What Gets in the Way?

Shifting to a coaching mindset is hard, especially if your early career success was defined by what you got done. A few things to watch for:

• The Advice Monster—you may have the answers, but that’s not the point of the exercise.

• Leading Questions—these usually mean you’re listening with your own agenda. Try to focus on where they want to go.

• Focusing only on the Problem—sometimes the unlock is the person, not the problem.

  
  

Leadership Takeaways

• Coach the person, not the problem: Focus on their development, not just the immediate fire.

• Shift the responsibility: The person doing the talking is the person doing the thinking.

• Curiosity > Control: Your best “fix” is often a better question that surfaces a new perspective.

• Practice restraint: The more senior you are, the more your voice shapes the room. Open with questions to keep the thinking alive.

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If this framework resonates and you want to build coaching into your leadership operating system for you and your team, I run a program for senior leaders who want to shift from advice-giver to capacity builder. You can learn more here. https://www.philipedgell.com/coaching-the-leadership-superpower

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➡️ The Practical Step: The “What Else?” Rule

In your next 1-on-1, after your team member presents a challenge and a potential solution, resist the urge to validate or correct them.

Instead, ask: “What else?”

Stay in the “What” stage for five minutes longer than feels comfortable. You’ll be surprised how often the first issue presented isn’t the real issue. By staying curious, you give them the space to become the leaders the organization needs them to be.

Closing the Loop: The Questions Advantage

When I started this series, I made a confession: I spent years believing my value was in having the fastest answer in the room.

That belief shaped how I ran meetings, engaged clients, and led my team.

What I’ve learned, often the hard way, is that the leaders who create the most lasting impact aren’t the ones with the best answers. They’re the ones who ask the best questions.

Across these three issues, found here, we’ve explored what that looks like in practice:

In Part 1, we saw how questions expand strategic thinking—how curiosity at the executive table unlocks collective intelligence that no single leader can access alone.

In Part 2, we brought that same lens to high-stakes sales conversations—how the shift from pitching to diagnosing through the Influence Funnel creates the executive access and trust that close complex deals.

And in Part 3, we’ve brought it home to the 1-on-1—the place where leadership capacity is either built or quietly destroyed, one advice-filled conversation at a time.

The thread running through all three is the same: curiosity is not a soft skill. It is the highest-leverage tool available to a senior leader. And like any tool, it requires discipline, practice, and the willingness to sit in the discomfort of not having the answer, so that the people around you can find theirs.

That’s the Questions Advantage.