Why Is Your Best Advice Making Your Team Weaker?
The instinct to give advice — to solve the problem the moment someone brings it to you — is exactly what keeps a team dependent. Coaching versus giving advice is the difference between answering for people and growing them. Michael Bungay Stanier names the culprit the “Advice Monster,” which shows up as Tell-It, Save-It, and Control-It, and offers a simple corrective: tell less, ask more, because your advice is not as good as you think it is. Two questions do most of the work — “And what else?” and “What's the real challenge here for you?” — because the answer a person reaches themselves is the one they understand, commit to, and can repeat. This is the Grow movement of The Hanlon Potential Model™ — See, Grow, Back. The weekly discipline: once a day, replace one piece of advice with one question.
You're good at your job. That's part of the problem. When someone brings you a problem, you can usually see the answer before they've finished the sentence — so you give it. It's efficient, it's generous, and being the person with the answer feels good. Everyone walks away satisfied.
But something quiet happens every time you hand over the solution. The person doesn't build the muscle to find it themselves. Do it enough, and you've trained a team that brings you every problem and solves none — and you've mistaken that dependence for being needed. Last week we talked about seeing potential. This week is about the next move: growing it. And the surprising truth is that you grow people faster by talking less.
Key Takeaways
• Giving advice is a reflex; coaching is a skill — and the reflex quietly keeps your people small.
• Michael Bungay Stanier's “Advice Monster” hijacks well-meaning leaders in three predictable ways.
• “Tell less, ask more” — because your advice is rarely as good, or as useful, as you think it is.
• Two or three good questions develop a person more than a dozen answers ever will.
• Coaching is staying curious; feedback is sharing your view. Great leaders know which one the moment calls for.
• This is the Grow movement of The Hanlon Potential Model™ — after you See potential, you develop it by asking.
The Trap Hidden Inside Being Helpful
Michael Bungay Stanier — who wrote The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap — makes an uncomfortable case: “Most of the advice we give is less useful than we assume, and giving it carries real costs. It demotivates the receiver, because being told what to do quietly signals you don't trust them to think.” It overwhelms the giver, because now you're carrying everyone's problems on top of your own. And over time it makes the whole team less capable, not more.
There's a mechanical reason the advice usually misses, too. The first problem a person names is almost never the real one. So you deliver a confident answer to the wrong question, feel helpful, and move on — while the actual challenge sits untouched. Being fast with an answer and being genuinely useful are not the same thing, and leaders confuse them constantly.
Meet Your Advice Monster
Stanier gives the impulse a name — “the Advice Monster” — because naming it is how you catch it in the act. It shows up wearing three faces. “Tell-It” is the loud one, certain it has the best answer and eager to share it. “Save-It” is quieter and more self-flattering, convinced everything will fall apart unless you swoop in and rescue the situation. And “Control-It” is the one that can't bear to hand over the reins, sure that letting go means letting things go wrong.
You have all three. Most leaders have a favorite. The point of naming them is not guilt — it's awareness. Once you can feel your particular monster reaching for the wheel, you get a half-second of choice you didn't have before: the choice to ask instead of tell.
Tell Less, Ask More
Stanier compresses the whole philosophy into a line worth memorizing: “Tell less and ask more. Your advice is not as good as you think it is.” It stings because it's true. The value you add as a leader is not the answer in your head — it's your ability to draw the answer out of the person who actually has to own it.
This is not soft. When a person reaches their own conclusion, three things happen that never happen when you hand it to them: they understand it more deeply, they commit to it more fully because it's theirs, and they get slightly better at solving the next one alone. Advice creates dependence. Questions build capability. If your goal is a team that can operate without you in the room, you cannot advise your way there.
The Handful of Questions That Do the Work
You don't need a coaching certification to start. Stanier's most useful questions are almost embarrassingly simple. The first is the “And what else?” question — you ask it after the person's first answer, because their first answer is rarely their best or their whole one. Asked with genuine curiosity, it surfaces more insight than any advice you'd have offered.
The second is the “What's the real challenge here for you?” question, which cuts past the first, easy version of the problem to the one that actually matters — and the words “for you” put the ownership squarely where it belongs. Master just those two, resist filling every silence, and you will develop people faster than you ever did by supplying answers. Curiosity, not cleverness, is the coach's real tool.
Coaching Is Not the Same as Feedback
One clarification saves leaders a lot of confusion. Stanier draws a clean line: “Coaching is the act of staying curious. Feedback is when you need to share your point of view.” Both belong in your leadership, but they are different moves for different moments, and collapsing them is where coaching goes wrong.
When someone needs to build judgment, stay curious and ask — that's coaching, and it grows them. When someone needs to know where they stand or that something must change, be direct and say it — that's feedback, and withholding it in the name of “coaching” is just avoidance dressed up as method. This is where last month's work connects: the Hanlon Conversation Compass™ paired Care with Candor. Coaching is Care in action. It never replaces the honesty people also deserve.
The Hanlon Potential Model™: This Is the Grow Movement
This month we're working through The Hanlon Potential Model™ — See, Grow, Back. Last week lived in See: recognizing potential before people see it themselves. This week we move into Grow, and coaching is its engine. You do not develop the potential you spotted by lecturing it into shape. You develop it by asking better questions and getting out of the way.
The discipline for this week is small enough to actually do. Once a day, catch your Advice Monster reaching for the wheel — and replace one piece of advice with one question. Just one. Ask “what's the real challenge here for you?” instead of delivering the fix, and then stay quiet long enough for a real answer to arrive. Do that daily, and you'll feel the shift within a week: your people start thinking out loud instead of waiting for instructions. That's Grow, in motion.
Final Thoughts
The best leaders are rarely the ones with the best answers. They're the ones who make everyone around them better at finding their own — and they do it, paradoxically, by resisting the urge to be brilliant on demand. Your advice, however good, has a ceiling: it can only make people as capable as you are. Your questions have no such limit.
So this week, when someone brings you a problem, and you feel the answer rising, pause. Ask one question instead. You'll be trading the small satisfaction of being right for the larger one of watching someone grow. That trade, made daily, is how you bring out the best in your people.
Sources & Further Reading
The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever — Michael Bungay Stanier
The Advice Trap: Be Humble, Stay Curious & Change the Way You Lead Forever — Michael Bungay Stanier
The Digital Coaching Revolution — Anna Tavis and Woody Woodward
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:
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In the moment, yes. Over a quarter, no. Advice is fast today and expensive forever, because it keeps the problem coming back to you. Coaching costs a few extra minutes now and buys you a person who handles it themselves next time.
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Sometimes you should just tell them — coaching isn't a vow of silence. The test is whether this is a moment to transfer information or to build capability. For anything the person will face again, ask first; you can always add your view afterward, prefaced honestly as your best guess.
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It feels like a gimmick when the curiosity is fake. If you're asking questions you already know the answer to, people sense the manipulation instantly. Real coaching starts with genuinely not knowing what they'll say — and being interested to find out.
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Coaching is high-engagement, not low. You're fully present, asking hard questions, holding people to their own conclusions. Hands-off is absence; coaching is a very active kind of attention that happens to talk less.