Coaching Is Not Fixing People

For a long time, I thought my job as a leader was to have the answer.

Someone would come into my office with a problem, and I would listen just long enough to figure out where they were stuck, then offer the way through. Sometimes I framed it as advice. Sometimes I framed it as a question that already had the answer baked inside. Either way, the move was the same. Hear the problem. Solve the problem. Send them on their way.

I told myself this was helpful. I told myself this was what good supervisors did. I told myself I was saving people time.

What I was actually doing was something else.

I was treating people like puzzles to be solved.

When I started learning coaching through the Co-Active Training Institute, the first thing I had to unlearn was that instinct. The instinct that the highest form of leadership is having the answer. The instinct that someone bringing me a struggle was inviting me to fix it. The instinct that my value as a leader was tied to my ability to resolve things.

Coaching asked me to do something much harder.

Coaching asked me to trust that the person in front of me already had wisdom I could not see, and that my job was to help them find it, not to hand them mine.

The fixing instinct comes from somewhere kind

I want to be honest about this part, because I think a lot of leaders carry the same instinct and the same shame about it.

The urge to fix is not malicious. It usually comes from somewhere kind. We want to help. We see someone struggling, and we want to ease the struggle. We have experience, and we want to share it. We care, and that care often expresses itself as a desire to do something.

But fixing has a shadow side.

When I fix, I take the thinking away from the person who needs to do it. When I fix, I send a quiet message that I trust my answer more than I trust their process. When I fix, I get the satisfaction of being needed, but the person I was supposedly helping leaves a little smaller than they came in.

Multiply that over months and years, and you build a team that brings problems to you instead of growing into the kind of people who can sit with their own.

I did not see this for a long time. I thought I was building a responsive culture. I was actually building a dependent one.

What coaching actually is

Coaching, at its best, is not about correcting someone, improving their performance, or getting them to the answer faster.

Coaching is about creating the conditions for a person to think.

It is the practice of asking instead of telling. It is the discipline of staying curious when every part of you wants to jump in. It is the slow, patient belief that the person in front of you is capable, resourceful, and whole, even when they are stuck.

Coaching is not therapy. We are not unpacking childhoods. Coaching is not mentoring. We are not handing down what we learned the hard way. Coaching is not advice in a softer wrapper. We are not pretending to ask while we wait to insert what we already think.

Coaching is a stance. It is a way of being with another person that says, your insight matters more here than mine does.

When I started practicing this, I noticed something. The conversations got slower. The silences got longer. And then, almost every time, the person across from me would say something I never could have given them. They would find a path I would not have seen. They would name a fear I would not have guessed. They would arrive at a clarity that belonged to them, not to me.

That clarity sticks. The clarity I used to hand out did not.

Why this matters in the workplace

I work in higher education and in student affairs. The people I serve are stretched in ways that previous generations of student affairs professionals were not. The problems they bring me are rarely the kind that fit neatly into an advice script. They are messy. They are human. They sit at the intersection of work, identity, meaning, and tiredness.

Those problems do not need a fixer. They need a witness who believes the person can find their way.

I am not saying advice never has a place. There are moments when expertise is exactly what is called for. But those moments are rarer than we think. Most of the time, what people need from us is not our answer. It is our presence, our patience, and our questions.

This is why I believe coaching skills belong in every workplace, not just in formal coaching engagements. A supervisor who can maintain a coaching stance for 10 minutes in a one-on-one can change a team's trajectory. A leader who can ask, what do you think you want to do, instead of, here is what I would do, is quietly developing people every single day.

The most powerful thing I have learned in my coaching practice is also the simplest.

People do not need to be fixed. They need to be heard. They need to be trusted. They need someone across from them who believes they can find their own way.

That is coaching. And it is one of the most human things a leader can offer.

A reflection to sit with

If you lead people, I want to leave you with a question.The next time someone brings you a problem, can you resist the urge to solve it for sixty seconds, and instead ask them what they are noticing about it?

Not as a technique. Not as a script. But as a small act of trust.

You might be surprised what shows up in the space you leave open.