How to GROW your team one question at a time

Why coaching beats advice — and how to start

Give a person a fish, and you feed them for a day. Teach them to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime.

Many managers prefer to give a fish.

I write High-Impact Engineering — a weekly newsletter for engineering managers, directors, and CTOs. This issue is about coaching and how to use this powerful tool in your team development.

What is coaching?

What do you do when someone asks you to help them solve a technical or organizational problem? Most senior engineers and managers default to giving advice. It’s the most natural approach — and sharing hard-earned wisdom feels good.

Another approach that works better in many situations is coaching. Coaching is not about you providing answers. It is about you helping another person to find and articulate the answers themselves. A coach doesn’t need to know the answer. Instead of telling someone what to do, you ask questions that help them explore the problem, consider options, and come to their own conclusion.

Imagine someone from your team comes to you and says, “I’m not sure how to handle the deadline for Project X, we’re behind, and I don’t know what to cut.” Instead of telling them what to prioritize, you ask: “What are the options as you see them?” They start thinking out loud, weigh the tradeoffs, and arrive at a plan. That’s coaching.

By coaching, you facilitate another person’s ability to find solutions to their own problems. They learn to drive sitting in the driver’s seat, instead of looking at you driving. As a manager or a senior engineer, you cannot scale indefinitely, think, and make decisions for everyone. To scale yourself, you need to invest in another person’s growth.

As the other person grows, your relations transform from dependency to partnership. You can delegate more confidently. You can now shift your focus from details to the bigger picture.

To be successful at coaching, you need empathy and discipline.

Empathy

Empathy and emotional intelligence are essential. Without understanding another person’s emotions and motivations, coaching becomes difficult if not impossible. You need to step into another person’s shoes to be able to prod for and surface the solutions. You cannot just go through a checklist of coaching questions. You must walk the path together.

Imagine two senior engineers from different teams are stuck in a disagreement over an API design. On the surface, it looks like a technical dispute — one wants REST, the other wants GraphQL. Their managers have tried to mediate, but nothing moves.

You sit down with one of them, Anna, in a one-on-one. Instead of jumping in with your own opinion on the API, you get curious.

“What’s making this decision so difficult?”

She talks about the technical tradeoffs for a while. You listen, but something feels off — the energy behind her words doesn’t match a calm architectural discussion. So you reflect that back. “It sounds like there’s something beyond the technical side that’s frustrating you.”

A pause. Then she says, “Honestly, I feel like Tom doesn’t take my input seriously. Last quarter, he dismissed my proposal in front of the whole group without even reading it. Now he wants me to just go along with his approach?”

Now you’re somewhere real. This isn’t about REST vs. GraphQL — it’s about respect and trust.

No amount of technical comparison docs will fix this. You continue: “What would need to change for you to feel comfortable moving forward together?”

She thinks about it. “I think I need to know he actually considers my perspective. If we could sit down and he genuinely engaged with my reasoning, even if we end up going with his approach, I’d feel differently.”

Now she has a path forward that she arrived at herself. You didn’t tell her what to do. You didn’t side with her or against her. You helped her surface what was actually going on and what she needed — something she might not have articulated without the conversation.

This insight — that trust was the real blocker — would have been nearly impossible to reach by asking only technical questions. To get there, the coach needs to empathize.

Empathy, however, does not mean that we run a therapy session. Coaching at the workplace is about reaching a goal or solving a problem. One problem at a time. It is not about childhood trauma or fixing someone’s relations at home. The difference is important.

Discipline

As with everything in life, you only benefit from coaching if you are consistent. Dieting on Monday and binging on Tuesday is not a diet.

Same with the coaching. It is not going to make a difference in your team if you only use it once a month when you have a special “coaching conversation”. Coaching needs to be woven into one-on-ones, brainstorming, and casual chats about work. That is when it starts to count.

The problem is that it is very easy to forget about it and start “helping”.

Your colleague starts telling you about the problem, you get the gist of it, and stop listening. And you’re already thinking about what you want to say, preparing the answer in your head.

Stop. Listen. Get curious. Empathize. Ask a question.

Instead of focusing on yourself and your knowledge, you focus on another person. Suppress your impulse to jump forward with a solution and save the day. Really listen, not in order to answer, but in order to understand. And then reflect this understanding back by asking powerful questions.

How to start?

Starting with coaching can be difficult. It is hard to remember to downshift from giving direct advice to actively listening and guiding through questions.

If you’re not sure where to start, these are the clearest signals to reach for it:

• You don’t have the full context. Maybe it’s a project with details you don’t know, or an interpersonal issue in another team.

• The situation is ambiguous, and there is no clear right answer; your past experience may not apply.

• You deliberately want to invest in the growth of another person rather than solve the problem immediately.

In all these cases, instead of trying to get all the details and give advice, ask questions.

First, about the current state, then what options another person has, and then finally what they are going to do about the problem based on the discussion.

When not to coach

If the question is direct and you know the answer, there is no need to start coaching. Just answer the question.

If, for example, your team member asks you why a certain part of the database is structured a certain way, and you know the answer, just tell them.

That leads to a simple rule of thumb. If resolving the problem requires you to dive deep into the details and do the work yourself, default to coaching. Help the other person find the answer instead of taking their seat.

What is next?

The goal of this article wasn’t to give you a complete overview of coaching practice and techniques — it is too big a subject to cover in depth here.

If you want to know more, I recommend looking at the GROW framework: https://www.britishschoolofcoaching.com/the-grow-coaching-model/.

It is a simple model that you can practice using immediately.

For those who want to go even further, I recommend picking up the latest edition of “Coaching for Performance” by Sir John Whitmore.

I created a free coaching guide for engineering leaders — my adapted version of the GROW framework with questions for each stage and example conversations from real engineering situations. You'll get it when you subscribe to High-Impact Engineering

Coaching Habit

Develop a habit of coaching. When asked a difficult question, don’t start solving it — guide the other person to find their own answers instead.

Remember.

Stop. Listen. Get curious. Empathize. Ask a question.

GROW your team one powerful question at a time.

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This article was originally published as a guest post on Colette Molteni 's Empathy Elevated — a newsletter about emotional intelligence, stoicism, and human-AI partnership in modern work. Colette writes practical frameworks for clearer communication, better judgment, and less friction. If these topics resonate with you, this article would be a good place to start.