Are We Growing People, or Just Growing Their Need for Us?

Are We Growing People, or Just Growing Their Need for Us?

Same team, same fortnight, two leaders doing what felt like the same thing: giving feedback.

One of the leaders on that team has a habit of just telling her people what she thinks of their practice: quicker, cleaner, and nobody ever seemed to mind. Not long ago, one of her staff messaged her about something completely within their own judgement, and asked what she'd do. Not because they couldn't see it. Because some part of the pattern between them had quietly taught that staff member to check first.

Another leader on the same team holds more silences than most people find comfortable; some long enough to feel a bit awkward for everyone in the room. Not long ago, I observed one of their team handle something genuinely hard, well, with nobody in the room to check with. They didn't need him. That was the whole point, and I noticed it happening side by side, in the same team, within the same fortnight.

Neither of their teams turned out that way because of one decision either leader made in the moment. They turned out that way because of a pattern nobody was watching closely enough.

That's the bit that sat with me. Every time a leader chooses telling or coaching, they're not just responding to what's in front of them; they're quietly building a habit in the person across the table, one conversation at a time, whether they mean to or not. And the habit being built isn't always the one they think they're building.

It's worth naming, too, that the pull toward the first leader's habit is a genuine trend at the moment, not a personal quirk. Most of us have sat through years of feedback so softened it barely landed, and the correction (direct, explicit feedback, say the actual thing) is understandable. But a correction can overshoot. Somewhere between "stop hedging" and "make direct, explicit feedback the whole toolkit," we can end up building the very dependency we were trying to fix: clearer conversations, but fewer people who can think without us in the room.

Telling, done often enough, unintentionally creates dependency, and sets you up as the expert, the one who knows. Even when each individual answer was right, even when it was genuinely the kind thing to do in the moment (Brené Brown's clear is kind, unclear is unkind holds up conversation by conversation), the pattern across dozens of conversations can quietly teach someone that the knowing lives with me, not with them. Not because I set out to be the expert. Because every time I answered instead of asking, I cast myself in that role again, a little more permanently each time. That's not a failure of any single moment of telling. It's what telling becomes, unwatched, over time.

But telling also creates something worth keeping: trust that I'll actually say the thing. Nobody grows from a coach who's gone so precious about never telling that they've become impossible to get a straight answer out of. That's its own kind of unintended creation: confusion wearing curiosity's clothes.

Coaching, done well and often enough, unintentionally creates exactly what I saw this week: someone who doesn't need me in the room. Marcel Proust had the line for it: We don't receive wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves, and nobody can take that journey for us. Every question I hold instead of answering is a small deposit into someone else's capability, and John Whitmore was right that the whole point of coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximise their own performance, but you don't see the return on that deposit in the room. You see it weeks or months later, somewhere you're not. Asking, done properly, creates agency. Not because a question was asked, but because the person on the other end of it was genuinely free to land somewhere I hadn't already decided on.

And that's the catch: it only works if the coaching is real. A question with my answer hiding inside it isn't coaching. It's a guessing game with better manners, and most people can feel the difference within a sentence or two: the slight narrowing, the sense that there's a "right" response I'm fishing for. That version doesn't create agency at all. It creates something worse than dependency: someone quietly trying to work out what's in my head instead of what's actually true for them. Genuine coaching has to be willing to be surprised by the answer. If I already know where I want the question to land, I'm not coaching; I'm just telling, slowly, and making them do the work of finding my answer for me.

Its unintended cost, done badly, is real too: held without care, coaching creates exhaustion instead of capability. Too many questions, too much silence, not enough of the plain, clear thing they actually needed, and what you've built isn't independence. It's someone who's learned that asking me for help doesn't get them anywhere, so they've quietly stopped asking.

Underneath both of those failure modes sits the same missing thing: knowing what great actually looks like, and that can't just live in my head. A telling answer is only worth giving if I've genuinely got a clear, well-formed picture of what good looks like here; otherwise I'm not being direct, I'm just being confident. And a coaching question is only genuine if I'm holding that same picture lightly enough to let someone else's version of great turn out different from mine, without me quietly steering them back toward my answer. But it can't stop with me holding the standard privately either. If the coachee doesn't have their own clear sense of what effective practice looks like, every question I ask lands as a guessing game from their side too; they're not searching for their own answer, they're searching for mine. Both of us need to be looking at the same picture of great before a question can do honest work. Without that shared reference point, telling becomes guessing dressed up as expertise, and coaching becomes guessing dressed up as curiosity, on both sides of the table at once.

So the two things I'm actually trying to build, on purpose, are narrower than "always tell" or "always coach": clarity, freely given, on what's actually true, and space, genuinely held, for someone to decide what it means. The observation gets handed over. The verdict gets left for them to reach. Do that consistently enough, and what you're unintentionally creating starts to look a lot more like what you meant to create in the first place.

Check out my High Impact Coaching programme here.

Go with wisdom this week
Mary-Anne 😊