The Shift from Solving to Leading: Why Having Every Answer Isn’t the Goal

I have something important to share.

For most of my career, I was the person who had the answer. Fast, clear, confident. In a room full of smart people, I was usually the one who could synthesize the problem the fastest and arrive at a solution. That skill got me promoted. It built my reputation. It made me someone people trusted with difficult situations.

And for a long time, I thought that’s what leadership was.

I was wrong. It took a coach to show me, and the showing was uncomfortable in ways I didn’t expect from someone whose job I thought was to help me get better at what I was already doing.

What I Thought Coaching Was

I’ll be honest about my starting point because I think it’s the same one many high performers share: I thought coaching was for people who were struggling.

Not in a dismissive way, I genuinely believed it was a useful intervention for someone in crisis, someone who’d hit a wall, someone whose career had stalled or whose team was falling apart. I recommended coaches to people around me when I could see they needed one.

But for myself? I was delivering. My teams were performing. I was getting recognized. I had a clear path forward.

What did I need coaching for?

That question — asked with more certainty than it deserved — is probably the single most expensive assumption I’ve made in my career. Not in a dramatic way. In the quiet, compounding way that assumptions you never examine always cost you.

The Thing I Couldn’t See

Here’s what was actually happening, underneath the performance:

I had built my leadership identity around being useful to everyone around me. When someone on my team had a problem, I solved it immediately, efficiently, with the same directness that had made me effective as an individual contributor. When a stakeholder needed an answer, I gave it to them. When ambiguity entered a room, I reduced it. Fast.

I thought that was what my team needed from me.

What they actually needed was to develop their own capacity to navigate hard problems. And every time I stepped in with the answer, I was quietly, unintentionally telling them they weren’t equipped to find it themselves.

I had built a team that was dependent on me. And I had called it leadership.

I couldn’t see this from inside it. The feedback I was getting was positive. My results were strong. There was no obvious signal that something was off because, from the output perspective, nothing was.

But I had started to notice something I didn’t yet have language for. A kind of ceiling. A sense that no matter how much effort I put in, certain things in my organization weren’t improving. My team delivered, but they weren’t growing the way I wanted them to. I was solving the same kinds of problems over and over. And I was tired in a way that rest didn’t fix.

I didn’t know what to do with that. So I did what I’d always done: worked harder.

The Question I Couldn’t Answer

When I finally started working with a coach, I came in with an agenda. I had specific things I wanted to work on — leadership presence, executive communication, and building toward the next level. I had framed it as professional development, which felt safe, purposeful, and sufficiently not about struggling.

My coach listened to all of it. And then he asked me something that derailed my entire agenda in about thirty seconds.

“What would happen if you stopped being the smartest person in the room — on purpose?”

I didn’t have a good answer.

Not because the question was complicated. Because answering it honestly required me to look at something I’d been organizing my professional identity around for over a decade: the belief that my value was inseparable from my ability to know more, solve faster, and be more certain than the people around me.

What would happen if I gave that up? I genuinely didn’t know. And the fact that I didn’t know — that was the beginning of everything.

What Actually Changed

I want to be careful here, because I’ve read enough coaching testimonials to know how easy it is for this part to sound like a commercial. I’ll be as specific as possible about what actually shifted, because that specificity made it real for me.

I started practicing one thing: when someone brought me a problem, instead of solving it, I asked what they thought we should do.

That’s it, one change.

The first few times I did it, it felt wrong. The silence that followed the question felt like failure. I was so accustomed to filling space with answers that sitting in the discomfort of not doing so felt irresponsible — like I was withholding something I was supposed to give.

But something started happening. People on my team began bringing me their thoughts instead of just their problems. Half-formed ideas started showing up in conversations that had once been pure status updates. Someone who had been quietly competent for two years started pushing back on approaches they disagreed with — not aggressively, but confidently, because they’d been asked enough times what they thought that they’d started believing their perspective mattered.

I did not become a different kind of leader overnight. That’s not how it works. But I started building a team that didn’t need me to be the answer. And that turned out to be the thing I’d been trying to build all along.

Why I Became a Coach

People ask me this more often than they ask almost anything else, and I’ve given a lot of mostly true versions, but the simplest is also the most true:

I became a coach because I experienced what it felt like to have someone hold up a mirror and show me something I couldn’t see on my own, and I thought that was one of the most valuable things one person could offer another.

Not advice. Not a framework. Not a performance improvement plan. A clear, honest reflection of what was actually happening, delivered with enough care that I could receive it without getting defensive.

I had spent years solving problems for other people. Coaching gave me the experience of being genuinely helped by sitting with someone whose only agenda was my growth. Being asked questions that weren’t designed to lead me somewhere the other person already knew, but to open up territory I hadn’t been looking at.

That experience changed how I understand leadership. It changed how I show up in 1-on-1s. It changed what I think my job actually is when someone brings me a hard problem.

And it made me want to offer that to other people — specifically to the kind of person I was before I started: capable, recognized, quietly stuck, and certain they didn’t need this.

What I Want the Skeptics to Know

If you’re reading this and you’re the person who recommends coaches to other people but has never seriously considered working with one yourself, I see you. I was you.

The performance is real. The results are real. The sense that you’re doing fine is probably accurate.

And there is almost certainly something underneath the fine that you can’t see from where you’re standing. Not a crisis. Not a failure. Something more like a ceiling you’ve built so gradually you’ve stopped noticing it’s there.

That’s not a problem. It’s the next layer of work. And it’s the most interesting work I know, not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s yours.

Coaching didn’t fix me. It helped me see more clearly. And seeing more clearly changed what I could do with everything I already knew.

That’s what I’m offering at Alpha Bravo Professional Coaching.

Not the answer. The right question.

Antoine E. Burrell, Sr., is a Senior Engineering Manager at Cloudera and the founder of Alpha Bravo Professional Coaching, a Co-Active coaching practice for technical and executive leaders. He has been on both sides of the coaching relationship — and believes that’s the only way to do this work with integrity.

If any part of this resonated — the ceiling, the quiet stuck, the certainty that you don’t need this — that’s the conversation worth having. Visit alphabravocoaching.com or connect on LinkedIn. First conversation is always free.