It can be tempting for an experienced leader to solve problems for their team. But effective coaching is less about providing the answers and more about asking the questions that help people develop their own.

Maria Stavrinides, Practice Lead – High Performance Culture, CXO2, says high-performing teams are built partly through the quality of the relationships leaders develop with their people. Feedback and coaching conversations are central to those relationships.

One practical approach is the GROW model. A leader starts by establishing the goal of the coaching conversation, then explores the current reality before helping the team member identify possible options and commit to an action.

The aim is not for the manager to prescribe the solution.

“The idea is to really draw this out of the person through open curious questions,” Stavrinides says.

Good feedback also needs to be specific. Stavrinides recommends the Situation-Behaviour-Impact (SBI) model: identify the situation, describe observable behaviour rather than assumptions and explain its impact.

The impact could be on the customer, team or business. From there, the leader can open a coaching conversation about what happened and what could be done differently.

For Steven Mason, Insurance Sales and Service Manager at Beyond Bank Australia, learning to step back was transformative.

Despite having led his team for 19 years, Mason realised during a leadership development program that he was doing “way too much talking” in coaching sessions.

His team had become reliant on him to make decisions and tell them what they were doing wrong. Instead, he began asking questions such as: “What do you think a better outcome could look like?” and “What have you tried to do differently?”

Previously, Mason says, “It was all me, me, me talking … ‘This is what you did. Well, this is what you do differently. This is what I want you to do,’ without getting them to open up.”

The change produced measurable results. After an employee engagement survey placed his team 17% below the bank benchmark, Mason used the techniques to create a safer environment for feedback and involve his team in developing solutions. A subsequent result put the team 9% above benchmark, with later results maintaining the improvement.

For Mason, the lesson is deceptively simple: sometimes better leadership means saying less.

Having structured questions, he says, helps “get them to open up; and you see the difference straight away.”