5 Star Coaching

Someone puts their head round your door with a problem. 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.

5 Star Coaching is a structure for having that conversation differently. Five moves, in order, that end with the other person owning the next step rather than you owning it. It costs you more time the first week and less every week after that.

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 of the situation before you offer yours. Real questions, ones you do not already know the answer to, followed by 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, and the third is where 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. Most owners score two in the first fortnight, and the two are usually Frame and Options, with the options being their own.

Why this matters more than it sounds

There is a hard ceiling on every owner-run business, 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 the job goes wrong at four o'clock on a Friday, the person who chose the approach will stay and fix it. The person who was told will phone you.

What it looks like in practice

Take an owner of a fit-out contractor turning over about £1.2m, with four site teams and a contracts manager. The example is illustrative, but the shape will be familiar. Twenty to nine on a Tuesday, the contracts manager comes in: the tiler has walked off a job that has to hand over on Friday.

The telling version takes ninety seconds. "Call the tiler we used in March, offer him the extra hundred a day, and tell the client we are on it." Done. The contracts manager leaves with an instruction. The owner has made the decision, carries the risk of it, and has taught the business one more time that this category of problem belongs upstairs.

The coaching version takes about six minutes. Frame: "What do you need to walk out of here with?" Ask: "What have you already tried, and what is the date we genuinely cannot move?" It emerges that he has already called two tilers, and that the handover has about 48 hours of float in it that nobody had checked. Options: three, from him, inside ninety seconds. Commit: he will call the March tiler at nine, and if that fails he will ring the client at eleven with a revised date rather than at five with an excuse. Follow: text either way by midday.

Now the arithmetic, which is the reason this is worth doing rather than a pleasant idea. Say ten questions of that kind arrive in a week. Telling costs the owner about fifteen minutes a week and builds nothing. Coaching the same ten costs the owner around an hour in week one. By week eight the same contracts manager is bringing four rather than ten, and bringing them with two options already worked through, so each conversation runs to two minutes. The owner is now under ten minutes a week on that category and has one more person in the business who can think.

Those numbers are illustrative. The direction is not. Telling has a flat cost that never falls. Coaching has a front-loaded cost that does.

The mistake most owners make

There are two, and they point in opposite directions.

The first is fake asking. Questions you already know the answer to, delivered in a tone that makes the required answer obvious, so the other person spends the conversation guessing what is in your head. "Have you thought about calling the tiler we used in March?" is not a question. People spot it instantly, and it is worse than telling, because it wastes their time and patronises them at the same time.

The second is coaching in a fire. If the building is flooding, tell. Coaching is for the great majority of problems that feel urgent and are not. The skill is telling the two apart, and most owners classify far too much as an emergency, because urgency is the state in which they feel most competent.

Then there is the quiet one. Owners run the first four stars well and drop the fifth. No check-back, no time, nothing said if it does not happen. The person reasonably concludes it did not really matter, and next time they will wait to be told.

How to apply it this week

1. Pick one person and one recurring question. Not the whole team. One person, and the single category of problem they bring you most often.
2. 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.
3. Set yourself a rule: no answer in the first four minutes. The urge to solve peaks around ninety seconds and then passes. Hold on past it.
4. Ask for three options and then wait. The silence after "what else?" is where the second and third come from. Count to seven before you fill it.
5. End every one of them with a time. "When will you have done it, and when are you telling me?" Write it down while they watch you do it.
6. 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.

The questions to sit with

• Out of 10, how much of last week did you spend making decisions that someone 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 actually protecting: the business, or the feeling of being needed?
• If you were unreachable for a month, which three decisions would simply not get made?

This is the practical skill at the centre of The Leader Programme. 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.