How to coach your team instead of carrying them

"If your team can't function without you in the room, you don't have a team, you have a dependency. Too many business owners confuse supporting their team with carrying them. Instead of learning how to coach team members, they do the work for them. They jump into every problem, solve every issue, and answer every question themselves. It feels like good leadership, but it's actually just bottlenecking in disguise."

"When a team member asks you, "What should I do about X?" don't give them the answer right away. Instead, ask: What options have you considered? What would you do if I weren't here? What's the next step you could take? This isn't about being evasive. It's about developing their decision-making muscles. Every time you solve it for them, you train them to keep coming back. When you coach them through it, you grow their confidence and capability."

"Good managers put out fires. Great leaders build fire prevention systems. Start capturing how you think through challenges: What is your decision-making process? What questions do you ask before committing to a course of action? What patterns do you see in recurring issues? Turn those into frameworks your team can use. That could be a decision tree, a checklist, or a step-by-step doc. If it's in your head, it's a habit. If it's on paper, it's a tool."

Teams that rely on a single person create dependency rather than autonomy. Owners often carry work instead of coaching, solving problems for others and creating bottlenecks. Effective leadership focuses on building people who can think, solve, and act independently. Leaders should stop immediately answering every question and instead ask what options have been considered, what the team member would do without them, and the next step to take. Capture decision processes and recurring patterns and convert them into tangible frameworks—decision trees, checklists, or step-by-step docs. Coaching should prioritize outcomes over style, celebrating near-complete results and refining where necessary to build capability and scale sustainably.

Read at Fast Company