5 Star Coaching is a five-move structure for the conversation that starts with somebody putting their head round your door: frame, ask, options, commit, follow. Run in that order, it ends with the other person owning the next step rather than you owning it. It costs you more time in the first week and less every week after that.
The alternative is what most owners do by default. You know the answer, it takes ninety seconds to give it, they go away happy and you feel useful. You have also just bought their problem back, taught them to return tomorrow, and added one more line to the list of things only you can decide.
What are the five stars?
Each star is a move. They only work in sequence, because each one depends on the one before it being genuinely done rather than nodded at.
1. Frame
Agree what you are actually talking about and what a good outcome from the next ten minutes looks like. “What do you want to have decided by the time you walk out?” Thirty seconds here saves ten minutes of circling.
2. Ask
Get their version before you offer yours. Real questions — ones you do not already know the answer to — followed by a silence that lasts slightly longer than is comfortable.
3. Options
Make them generate at least three. The first is what they had already decided on the way in. The second is the safe one. The third is where the actual thinking starts. You may add one, last, and only after theirs.
4. Commit
They choose. They say out loud what they will do and by when. The moment you say it for them you own it again, and the previous four minutes were decoration.
5. Follow
Fix the check-back before they leave the room. A time, in both diaries. Coaching without follow-through is a chat.
The name doubles as a scoring device. After the conversation, mark yourself out of five — one star for each move you actually made. Do that for a fortnight and read your own scores back. The two moves most likely to be missing are the ones that cost you something: asking for their options before offering yours, and fixing the follow-up in both diaries before anyone leaves the room.
Why it matters more than it sounds
Every owner-run business has a hard ceiling, and it is the number of decisions that have to route through the owner in a week. You can raise it slightly by working longer. You cannot raise it much. The only real move is to increase the number of decisions that get made properly without you in the room.
Telling does not do that. Telling produces a correct decision and no new capability. The person leaves with an answer rather than a method, so the next variation of the same problem comes straight back to your door. Six months of telling produces a team that has become extremely good at finding you.
There is a second effect, quieter and more expensive. People defend decisions they made and merely comply with decisions they were given. When a job goes wrong at four o’clock on a Friday, the person who chose the approach tends to stay and fix it. The person who was told phones you.
Put rough arithmetic on it. Say ten questions of that kind arrive in a week. Telling costs you about fifteen minutes and builds nothing — every week, permanently. Coaching the same ten costs you around an hour in week one. As that same person starts bringing four instead of ten, with two options already worked through, each conversation shrinks to a couple of minutes. Telling has a flat cost that never falls. Coaching has a front-loaded cost that does.
How to use it this week
- Pick one person and one recurring question. Not the whole team. One person, and the single category of problem they bring you most often.
- Put the five words on a card on your desk. Frame, ask, options, commit, follow. Under pressure in week one you will not remember the order.
- Set a rule: no answer in the first four minutes. The urge to solve peaks at about ninety seconds and then passes. Hold on past it.
- Ask for three options, then wait. The silence after “what else?” is where the second and third come from. Count to seven before you fill it.
- End every conversation with a time. “When will you have done it, and when are you telling me?” Write it down while they watch you do it.
- Score yourself out of five that evening. Five conversations, five scores, on paper. By Friday you will see which star you keep dropping, and it will be the same one each time.
Two ways to get this wrong, pointing in opposite directions. Fake asking — questions you already know the answer to, delivered in a tone that makes the required answer obvious — is worse than telling, because it wastes their time and patronises them at once. And coaching in a genuine emergency is self-indulgent: if the building is flooding, tell. The skill is telling the two apart, and most owners classify far too much as urgent.
Questions to ask yourself
- Out of 10, how much of last week did you spend making decisions somebody else in the business should already be capable of making?
- Which of your people has been with you longest without getting materially better at deciding things? What have you been doing in those conversations?
- When you solve something in ninety seconds, what are you protecting — the business, or the feeling of being needed?
- If you were unreachable for a month, which three decisions would simply not get made?
Where this fits in coaching
This is the practical skill at the centre of our leadership coaching, because most owners do not have a delegation problem. They have a conversation habit, repeated ten times a week, that quietly teaches capable people not to think. Two models are worth reading alongside it: The Forgetting Curve, which is why the fifth star carries more weight than it looks, and The 5 A’s of Change, which applies the same sequence to a change rather than a conversation.
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Frequently asked questions
Is 5 Star Coaching just delegation with extra steps?
No, though the two support each other. Delegation is about who owns a task or an outcome. This is about what happens in the ninety seconds after somebody brings you a problem that is already theirs. You can delegate a whole function and still answer every question about it yourself, which leaves the work moved and the thinking exactly where it was. The five moves are what stop that: the person arrives with a problem and leaves with a decision they made, so the capability transfers along with the task. Run properly, it is the mechanism that makes delegation stick rather than an alternative to it.
What if the person genuinely does not know the answer?
Then teach, and be honest that you are doing it. Coaching is not a rule that you must never explain anything — somebody who has never seen the situation before cannot generate three options about it. The distinction worth holding is between missing knowledge and missing confidence. If they lack the information, give it, then hand the decision back: “now you know that, what would you do?” If they have the information and are checking with you anyway, that is a confidence or an authority problem, and answering it again makes it worse. Most questions that reach an owner’s desk are the second kind.
How long does one of these conversations take?
About six minutes once you are used to it, against ninety seconds for telling. In the first fortnight it will run longer, because you are both learning a new shape of conversation and the silences feel uncomfortable. Budget an extra hour across week one and treat that as the investment. The cost falls quickly: the same person starts arriving with options already worked through, which turns a six-minute conversation into a two-minute one, and starts bringing fewer problems in the first place. Telling never gets cheaper than ninety seconds and never stops. That is the whole trade.