Michael Bungay Stanier

coaching others helps you. It lets you work less hard and have more impact. When you build a coaching habit, you can more easily break out of three vicious circles that plague our workplaces: creating overdependence, getting overwhelmed and becoming disconnected

The essence of coaching lies in helping others and unlocking their potential.

giving a little less advice and asking a few more questions is surprisingly difficult

On the other hand, when you’re asking questions, you might feel less certain about whether you’re being useful, the conversation can feel slower and you might feel like you’ve somewhat lost control of the conversation (and indeed you have. That’s called “empowering”). Put like that, it doesn’t sound like that good an offer

Harvard Business Review article “Leadership That Gets Results.”

you’ve trained your people to become excessively reliant on you, a situation that turns out to be disempowering for them and frustrating for you.

You’ve spent years delivering advice and getting promoted and praised for it. You’re seen to be “adding value” and you’ve the added bonus of staying in control of the situation.

then as an unwelcome bonus, because you’ve been so successful in creating this dependency that you now have too much work to do, you may also have become a bottleneck in the system. Everyone loses momentum and motivation. The more you help your people, the more they seem to need your help. The more they need your help, the more time you spend helping them

globalization was just warming up, and we hadn’t yet sold our souls to our smartphones.

Building a coaching habit will help your team be more self-sufficient by increasing their autonomy and sense of mastery and by reducing your need to jump in, take over and become the bottleneck