A Story About Questions, Curiosity, and Non-Fiction That Builds What Advice Prevents
Discovering how a management book develops coaching capacity and transforms leadership is rarely what mentors expect — but for many, it becomes the insight that changes everything about what they understand genuine helpfulness to actually require.
Amara had always been known as a responsive leader.
As senior engineering manager at a financial technology company, she was the person who provided clear guidance, shared hard-won expertise, and prided herself on being available when her mentees needed direction.
Her solutions were thoughtful.
Her advice was grounded in fifteen years of experience.
Her mentees consistently praised her ability to help them avoid mistakes she’d already learned from.
But increasingly, Amara noticed something she couldn’t easily solve.
Her mentees were becoming more dependent, not less.
They emailed multiple times weekly with situations they could likely figure out themselves.
They deferred decisions, waiting for her perspective before acting.
They asked what she thought about plans they’d already thought through well.
Amara was mentoring well.
But she was beginning to suspect that being available with solutions and actually developing others’ capability were not the same thing.
The Moment Everything Shifted
The shift began with a mentoring session she couldn’t shake.
Her mentee had presented a straightforward technical architecture decision, walked through perfectly sound reasoning — and then asked Amara what he should do.
She told him his approach was excellent.
He thanked her enthusiastically.
But walking away, she found herself wondering: why did he need her validation for a decision he’d clearly already thought through well?
And more broadly: why were her mentees becoming more reliant on her guidance as their mentoring relationships progressed, rather than less? That evening, a colleague mentioned a book that had transformed her management approach.
The Advice Trap by Michael Bungay Stanier.
The title made Amara defensive.
She didn’t give advice impulsively — she shared hard-won experience thoughtfully.
But her colleague’s description nagged at her: “It’s about how our urge to jump in with solutions, even good solutions, actually prevents the people we’re trying to help from developing their own problem-solving capacity.” Amara ordered the book that night.
The First Experiment
The following week, Jordan requested an urgent meeting about a conflict with a product manager over API design decisions.
Amara’s automatic pattern activated immediately.
Identify the technical merits.
Determine the optimal architecture.
Provide clear guidance on how Jordan should handle the conversation.
Instead, she took a breath and asked a different question. “What do you think is really going on here?”
Jordan looked surprised. “I’m not sure what you mean. The product manager wants REST when GraphQL is clearly better for this use case.”
Amara felt her instinct to jump in with technical assessment and negotiation strategy.
She resisted. “And beyond the technical disagreement, what else might be happening?”
Jordan paused, actually thinking rather than waiting for her answer. “I guess… this might not really be about REST versus GraphQL. The product manager has been frustrated that engineering keeps vetoing their proposals. It might be about feeling like we don’t value their input.”
Amara had been about to provide exactly that insight.
Hearing Jordan arrive at it himself created a completely different dynamic.
By the meeting’s end, Jordan had developed an approach more sophisticated than what Amara would have suggested — because he’d thought more deeply than her quick solution would have allowed.
What Amara Realised Afterwards
The more Amara thought about The Advice Trap, the more clearly she saw what the research had shown her.
Stanier identified three types of Advice Monsters: Tell-It — needing to provide the answer.
Save-It — needing to rescue people from struggle.
Control-It — needing to maintain control over outcomes.
Amara recognised herself immediately as Tell-It.
She’d genuinely believed sharing her expertise was the most valuable thing she could offer.
Stanier’s research challenged this assumption directly.
When experts provided solutions, people learned how to follow those specific solutions — but didn’t develop the problem-solving capacity to handle novel situations independently.
When experts asked questions that helped people work through problems themselves, they developed transferable capabilities that made them progressively more independent and effective.
She’d been solving problems.
She’d thought she was developing people.
Those were not the same thing.
What Happened Next
A few weeks later, when her mentee Priya struggled with prioritising competing technical debt items, every instinct screamed to provide the prioritisation framework Amara had developed over years.
Instead, she asked: “What factors should influence technical debt prioritisation?” — and let Priya work through developing her own framework.
The conversation took three times longer than if Amara had simply shared her approach.
But Priya emerged with deeper understanding of the competing concerns — because she’d wrestled with the complexity rather than received a finished solution.
Amara also began recognising a pattern she’d been blind to.
She’d thought she was being helpful by asking questions like “Don’t you think you should consider X?” or “Have you thought about doing Y?”
But these weren’t genuine questions.
They were advice dressed up as inquiry — still keeping her at the centre whilst creating the illusion of helping others think for themselves.
Genuine coaching questions were different: open, curious, with nowhere they were required to go.
“What’s important about this?”
“What else should you consider?” “
What would good look like?”
The Shift
One insight changed how Amara approached mentoring.
From
Sharing her expertise
To
Surfacing others’ thinking
Instead of asking: “What do I know that would help here?” She started asking: “What do they already know that they haven’t yet reached?”
And the conversations changed almost immediately.
When the Hardest Test Arrived
Two months into practising Stanier’s frameworks, Amara faced the situation she’d been dreading.
Her mentee Dev arrived visibly stressed about a major architectural decision.
The deadline was tight.
Stakeholders had conflicting requirements.
He was paralysed by the complexity. A
mara could see the solution clearly.
Her Save-It monster activated immediately.
Dev was struggling.
She could resolve this in ten minutes.
Why make him wrestle with something she could solve?
But something made her pause.
She remembered Stanier’s warning about swooping in with quick solutions that make leaders feel effective but leave others feeling inadequate.
“What makes this decision feel so difficult?” she asked instead.
Dev looked frustrated, clearly hoping for guidance.
“There are too many constraints. I can’t satisfy everyone.”
“And what else?”
“I’m worried about making the wrong choice and disappointing you.”
There it was.
Dev wasn’t primarily struggling with technical complexity.
He was struggling with fear of making independent decisions without Amara’s validation.
This was, Amara realised uncomfortably, exactly what Stanier had warned about.
By being so available with solutions, she’d inadvertently trained Dev to doubt his own judgment.
Her helpfulness had created the very anxiety she was now tempted to rescue him from.
They had a difficult but necessary conversation.
Dev acknowledged he’d come to rely on her validation.
Amara acknowledged her role in creating that dynamic by being too ready with answers.
Dev solved the architectural decision himself — not with Amara’s solution, but with a thoughtful approach that balanced competing concerns intelligently.
He solved it with growing confidence in his own judgment.
Not increasing dependency on hers.
The Teaching Insight
Amara discovered that the most helpful thing she could offer wasn’t her expertise.
It was her belief that her mentees were capable of figuring things out themselves — demonstrated through her willingness to stay curious about their thinking rather than rushing to share her own.
When she stopped asking “What do I know that would help here?”
And started asking “What do they already know that they haven’t yet reached?”
Two things changed.
Her mentees became progressively more confident and independent.
And the dependency she’d been inadvertently creating began, slowly, to dissolve.
Why This Matters
Professional development often focuses on expertise — accumulating knowledge, developing skills, building experience worth sharing.
But developing others requires something different.
The willingness to hold back what you could easily give, to stay curious longer than feels comfortable, to trust that the struggle of figuring things out is where capability actually develops — not the receiving of solutions, however good those solutions might be.
When we read research-based non-fiction, we gain access to frameworks that reveal our own blind spots.
Not because the book tells us what to do.
But because it shows us what we’ve been doing — and why it produces outcomes we didn’t intend.
Amara’s story shows what happens when that recognition moves from the page into practice.
And like the best management books, it keeps revealing new things the longer you stay with it.
This is an extract from How a Management Book Develops Coaching Capacity and Transforms Leadership — a School of WorkLife Story Lesson.
You can find every book featured in the Book Club Books stories, with links to read and listen to each story, in The Reading List for WorkLife Learning.
The Book Behind the Stories
This story was inspired by my book, WorkLife Book Club Volume One Shoreditch by Carmel O’ Reilly, available to order from bookshops — following members of a London book club as they navigate WorkLife challenges through the wisdom found in the books they read together.
The featured book is The Advice Trap by Michael Bungay Stanier
Disclosure
Book links go to Bookshop.org UK, which shares its profits with independent bookshops. You can choose from the formats available. It currently ships to UK addresses only, so these links are for readers in the UK. I hope to find a way to offer something similar for readers elsewhere. If you buy through them, I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you, which helps support this work.
Continue the Learning
The complete lesson follows Amara’s full journey — including how insights from The Advice Trap changed how she approached her mentees, her team, and her own relationship with being the person who has answers — and what she discovered when she returned to the book several months later. It shows how you can apply the same perspective in your own work — learning to recognise when your helpfulness might be preventing development, and developing the coaching capacity to build genuine capability in the people you lead.
Experience the complete lesson:
How a Management Book Develops Coaching Capacity and Transforms Leadership Learn how research-based non-fiction that explores the science of coaching and capability development can transform how you develop others and change what you understand genuine helpfulness to actually require.
Deepen the practice with the WorkLife Compass Guided Programme:
The Power of Non-Fiction: Developing Connection Through Reading — Discover how research-based reading strengthens belonging, trust, and the collaborative intelligence that shapes a working life.
Work With Me: Individual WorkLife Coaching, Commissioned Learning Resources, Speaking Engagements and Organisational Partnerships.
Support This Work: Your support makes a difference and helps me to continue creating resources that are accessible to everyone. Thank you. Carmel
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