For years, I thought leadership meant having every answer ready. When someone on my team hit a wall, I jumped in and fixed it. I felt useful. I felt in control. And honestly, I was getting in everyone’s way.
That realization took me a while to reach. Before Otto Media, I taught in classrooms, played in bands, and DJ’d hundreds of weddings. Each of those jobs taught me the same lesson, though it took me too long to listen. People do their best work when you stop telling them what to do and start helping them figure it out themselves.
So this year, I want to talk about the shift that changed how I run things. I went from boss to coach, and I’m not going back.
The Old Way Is Quietly Falling Apart
Here’s something worth sitting with. Gallup tracks employee engagement across the world, and in 2024, it slid to 21 percent. That dip cost the global economy roughly 438 billion dollars in lost productivity. But the part that really grabbed me was who’s struggling most. Managers. Their engagement fell faster than anyone else’s.
That makes sense when you stop and think about it. The old model asked managers to be the smartest person in every room. You set the targets, you checked the work, you handed down the orders. Yet the work itself keeps getting more complex, and no single person can stay an expert on everything anymore.
Gallup found something else that should be printed on every office wall. Managers drive around 70 percent of the difference in how engaged their teams feel. So if your people seem flat, the lever isn’t a new perk or a pizza Friday. The lever is you.
What Google Learned the Hard Way
Google ran a famous study called Project Oxygen. They had the data and the engineers, so they assumed technical brilliance made the best managers. Then they looked at the numbers, and the result caught them off guard.
The top behavior of their strongest managers wasn’t technical skill at all. It was coaching. Being a good coach ranked first. Technical expertise ranked dead last. The managers who asked questions, listened, and helped people think for themselves had lower turnover and happier, higher-performing teams.
When I read that, I recognized my own mistake straight away. I had been leading with my expertise because it felt safe. Meanwhile, my team didn’t need another expert in the room. They needed someone to back them while they became experts themselves.
Coaching Is Mostly About Your Questions
So what does coaching look like on a normal Tuesday? It’s simpler than people expect, though it takes a bit of practice.
There’s an old framework called GROW that I still lean on. You start with the Goal, get honest about the current Reality, explore the Options together, then land on what the person will do next. Notice that every step is a question, not an instruction. You’re not handing over the map. You’re helping them learn to read it.
Try this the next time someone brings you a problem. Instead of solving it for them, ask what they’ve already considered. Then ask what a good outcome would look like. After that, stay quiet long enough for them to answer. The silence feels awkward at first, but that pause is usually where the real thinking happens.
The Mindset Underneath It All
Here’s the part nobody likes to admit. Whether you coach well comes down to what you quietly believe about people.
Researchers found that managers who believe people can grow tend to coach far more than managers who believe talent is fixed. If you think someone either has it or they don’t, you won’t bother developing them. So the shift has to start in your own head, before it ever reaches your team. You need to believe your people can get better, because that belief quietly shapes everything you do next.
I won’t pretend this comes naturally to me. Some days I still want to grab the wheel. But every time I trust someone to find their own way, they surprise me, and they grow a little more.
When You Should Still Be the Boss
Now, let me be fair here, because coaching isn’t the answer to everything. Sometimes you need to be direct, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of failure.
When someone is brand new and has no idea where to start, they need clear instructions, not open questions. When a deadline is on fire or the stakes are genuinely high, you give the call and explain it later. Coaching a panicking beginner through a crisis helps no one. So the real skill isn’t choosing coaching every single time. The skill is reading the moment and knowing which hat to wear.
Where I Landed
Running Otto Media on a lean team taught me all this in a hurry. The repetitive, directive work gets handled by our systems now, which means the human side of my job is almost entirely coaching. My people don’t need a boss hovering over their shoulder. They need someone who asks good questions, trusts them with real responsibility, and steps in only when it truly counts.
So if you’re still leading the way I used to, here’s my honest nudge. Loosen your grip a little. Ask before you tell. Believe your team can grow, then give them the room to prove it. You might find, the way I did, that the moment you stop being the boss is the moment your team finally takes off.
Article Author:
Callum GracieFounder, Otto Media