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Are You Trapped in a Cycle of Solving Your Team’s Problems?
Struggling with the demands of management? Learn the 4-step STAR model to shift from giving answers to asking powerful questions. This framework helps you develop your team, reclaim your time, and drive better results.
If you’re ready to move beyond being a “fixer” and become a leader who empowers a self-sufficient, high-performing team, read on to discover the simple yet transformative framework that makes it possible.
Genres
Motivation, Inspiration, Personal Development, Management, Leadership, Career Success
Learn to stop solving problems and start developing people.
The Answer Is a Question (2022) reveals a practical framework that fundamentally changes how you lead and manage others. The four-step STAR model breaks your habit of jumping in with solutions – and teaches you to ask powerful questions that help your team think for themselves. By mastering this approach, you’ll reclaim hours of your week and create a more engaged, capable team that drives better results across your organization.
You’ve been promoted because you were good at your job. You delivered results, solved problems, and made things happen. But now you find yourself in a strange new world – one where your success depends less on what you personally accomplish and more on what you can help others achieve. You spend your days bouncing between meetings, drowning in emails, and somehow still doing half your team’s work while wondering if this is really what leadership is supposed to feel like.
In this summary, you’ll discover a practical framework that transforms the chaotic reality of management into something far more sustainable and rewarding. You’ll learn why traditional coaching programs fail in real workplace environments and how a different approach – one designed for the messy, interrupted nature of your actual day – can free up your time while making your team more capable. By the end, you’ll understand how to shift from being the person with all the answers to someone who asks the right questions, creating a ripple effect that changes how your team performs and fundamentally alters the culture around you.
Sounds good? Let’s get started.
The manager’s crisis
Most managers today share a common experience: their approach to leadership feels cobbled together from a dozen different sources. Without a clear, coherent philosophy to guide you, you’ve likely become a kind of “Frankenstein Manager.” Your leadership style is a patchwork, stitched together from scattered experiences. You’ve learned from past mentors and the people who managed you. You’ve even adopted tips and tricks from colleagues and attended training programs on time management, negotiation, presentation skills, and employment law. Whenever a new skill is needed, you simply bolt it onto what you already know.
This makes you a unique creation, but let’s face it – an imperfect one, built without any unifying philosophy that might guide you on how to drive the best outcomes from your team. You’re simply doing your best.
This internal state of confusion isn’t your fault – it’s actually a response to a work environment that’s become overwhelmingly complex. The pace of change is unprecedented. For the first time in history, you may be managing up to five different generations in the same workforce, each with its own set of priorities, career expectations, and ideas about how work should be done.
Digital transformation and hybrid work models make things even more difficult, presenting unique challenges that previous generations of leaders never faced. The expectation of being constantly available means work follows you everywhere – nights, weekends, and holidays – leading to escalating stress levels.
This combination of outdated management approaches and intense modern pressure has created a quiet but devastating global crisis: widespread employee disengagement. Research shows that employee engagement levels across 155 nations average just 20 percent. Think about that – the vast majority of the global workforce is either not engaged or, worse still, actively disengaged.
A significant reason for these poor engagement levels is the prevalence of poor quality management. Many managers are accidental managers – good employees who were promoted into supervisory roles because it was the only advancement available, not because they possessed unique skills or passion for developing people.
The consequence? A damaging cycle of inefficiency and high turnover, with studies showing that close to half of all employees in the US and UK have left jobs solely to escape poor relationships with their managers.
This widespread dysfunction signals that old command-and-control methods are obsolete. It reveals massive reserves of untapped human potential waiting to be released. With traditional methods clearly failing, the critical question becomes: What would a genuinely new approach to leadership, one built for this modern reality, actually look like? Let’s find out.
Introducing the STAR intervention
In the search for that new approach, many organizations have landed on what seems like a logical answer: coaching. You’ve probably seen or even participated in this solution yourself, through the rise of “Manager as Coach” or “Leader as Coach” programs. On the surface, they promise to build a more supportive, engaging culture where leaders help their people develop.
These initiatives are well-intentioned, backed by significant global investment, and often receive positive feedback from the managers who attend them. But here’s the thing – they consistently fail to produce any lasting behavioral change or measurable return on investment. In fact, when employees are surveyed about the skills their managers demonstrate most effectively, coaching skills consistently rank at the very bottom of the list.
So why do these programs keep failing? The reason is a fundamental mismatch in design. These programs typically teach models, like the well-known GROW model, which were created for formal, scheduled, one-on-one executive coaching sessions. They’re tools for a planned, hour-long conversation where an employee sets the agenda.
But let’s be real – this is simply the wrong fit for your day-to-day work, which is fast-paced, interruption-driven, and unpredictable. When you return to your desk after a two-day training course, you find it almost impossible to carve out the time needed to hold these structured sessions. The skills get neglected – and the binder gathers dust on a shelf.
This begs the question: What if the model was actually designed for you, the manager, instead? This is the core innovation of the STAR model. It was created from the ground up to be a behavioral change tool for the manager – period. It’s a framework designed to be used in seconds, in the natural flow of any conversation. It enables a new, pragmatic management discipline called Operational Coaching – an enquiry-led style that fits seamlessly into your daily work.
The framework itself is a simple, four-step mnemonic: S is for Stop, T is for Think, A is for Ask, and R is for Result. But here’s where it gets interesting – its true power lies in how it’s structured.
The model splits into two halves. The right side, Stop and Think, focuses entirely on your own internal, personal behavioral change. The left side, Ask and Result, is about the external application of your coaching skills.
This structure reveals something fundamental: before you can effectively coach anyone else, you must first learn to manage your own habitual reactions. The entire journey to becoming a STAR manager begins with mastering the internal discipline of the model’s first two steps. You start with yourself, with that moment of pause before you react.
Think back to those failed coaching programs for a second. They asked you to transform how you interact with others without first addressing how you manage yourself. The STAR model recognizes that real change starts internally. Only when you’ve mastered the ability to stop your automatic responses and think before you act can you genuinely help others grow. That’s where the real transformation begins.
Mastering Stop and Think
So let’s explore what this internal work actually looks like in practice. So much of your day is governed by a state of professional autopilot, where you react to situations without conscious thought. When a team member brings you a problem, your default response is likely to jump in and solve it for them. Why is that? Put simply, it’s because that’s the habit you’ve built over years of being rewarded for having the answers.
The first and most critical step in this new approach is to simply Stop. To master it, you must create triggers. A trigger is a pre-rehearsed mental cue for a recurring situation where you tend to react unhelpfully. Just imagine a colleague approaching your desk and, instead of instantly offering a solution, you see yourself pausing, taking a breath, and stepping back.
Here’s what’s fascinating – the brain struggles to distinguish between a real experience and a vividly imagined one. This mental rehearsal actually pre-patterns your neural pathways, making it far more likely you’ll interrupt your habit when the real event occurs.
Once that trigger has fired and you’ve successfully stopped, the next micro-step is to actively change state. Your emotional and mental state in any given moment is a product of your physiology, your focus, and your feelings. Think about it – a slumped posture and a scattered mind create a poor foundation for a productive conversation.
By practicing this association, the simple physical action becomes a reliable shortcut to summon your ideal coaching state on command. This allows you to become fully present and receptive, ready to engage constructively even in the middle of a hectic day. It’s a technique for transforming your own state of mind in a split second.
With your habit broken and your state managed, the pause you’ve created brings you to the T in STAR – Think. This is a rapid, in-the-moment assessment designed to help you choose the most effective path forward.
The decision-making process is refreshingly simple. First, you ask yourself: Is this a genuine emergency that requires a direct command, like a safety issue? The answer is almost always no. Second, you ask: Is there real potential for the other person to learn and grow by thinking through this issue for themselves? The answer is almost always yes.
This quick mental check reveals that nearly every interaction you have is a potential “coachable moment.” Once you’ve learned to control your own impulse to react and have consciously chosen this coaching path, you’re finally prepared to engage effectively with others. This internal readiness opens the door to the skillful application of the model’s external actions: Ask and Result.
The power of Ask and Result
Having mastered your internal state, you’re now ready to engage. This is where the model shifts from silent, internal work to skillful, external action. The primary tool for this engagement is the question, which is the heart of the A in STAR – Ask.
As a manager, your default communication mode is likely “advocacy” – telling, giving advice, and stating your views. The goal here is to consciously shift into a state of “enquiry” – expressing curiosity, seeking input, and being genuinely willing to listen.
Here’s the distinction you must make: ask questions for the other person’s benefit. Your intent isn’t to gather facts for yourself so you can solve their problem – it’s to stimulate their thinking so they can solve it themselves. This requires a sincere belief that your colleague is capable and resourceful. You’re creating the space for their own insights to emerge. It’s a powerful shift from being the provider of solutions to being the facilitator of their thinking.
To apply this principle effectively, you can start with a simple but profound change in your language. Avoid asking accusatory why questions, which can make people feel defensive and blamed. Instead, reframe them as solution-focused what questions.
For example, instead of asking, Why does this problem keep happening?, you’d ask, What are the reasons that this problem keeps happening? This small adjustment immediately removes the personal blame and focuses the conversation on the situation itself, inviting collaboration rather than justification.
Just as important as the question is what you do after you ask it – you actively listen. This means you must quiet your mind and resist the urge to interrupt. You must become comfortable with the silence that follows a good question. That silence? That’s the sound of productive thinking. Interrupting it is disastrous – you may extinguish the spark of a brilliant, emerging idea.
A great conversation is meaningless if it leads nowhere. This brings you to the final step of the model: securing a Result. The goal here is to empower the individual to take one small, confident, and manageable next step forward. This approach builds their capability and confidence incrementally.
To secure this outcome, you can use the model’s most powerful closing tool: the Commitment Scale. After your colleague has identified a potential action, you simply ask, “On a scale of one to ten, how committed are you to doing that?”
If they give any answer less than a perfect ten – let’s say an eight – you follow up with the crucial question: “What would have to happen to move that to a ten?” This masterfully prompts them to identify and solve their own final barriers to taking action, ensuring a much higher likelihood of success.
When you consistently apply this full STAR cycle – from internal pause to committed action – the effects begin to compound. They ripple out far beyond the initial conversation, creating transformative benefits for the employee, for you as a manager, and for your entire organization.
Igniting a STAR culture
For all the pressure you feel and the endless tasks on your list, the single greatest personal benefit you’ll receive from the STAR approach is the gift of time. This is a proven outcome. A major, academically robust research study conducted by the London School of Economics proved that managers who learned and applied this method fundamentally changed how they spent their day. They increased the proportion of time spent coaching their teams by an incredible 70 percent, while significantly decreasing the amount of time they spent “doing” the work themselves.
This shift happens for a simple reason: as you empower your team members to think for themselves and solve their own problems, they become more capable and confident. They stop leaning on you for every answer, which frees you from the constant cycle of firefighting and allows you to focus on the higher-value, strategic work that truly defines leadership.
Your personal gain in time and focus then creates a powerful ripple effect that benefits your entire team. When you consistently operate from a place of enquiry, you begin to cast what can be called a bright shadow onto those around you. Your questioning behavior is contagious.
Team members start to anticipate the kinds of insightful questions you’ll ask, so they begin to think more critically and prepare solutions before they even approach you. Soon, they start using this powerful questioning style with each other, fostering a more collaborative and innovative environment where problems are solved at the source.
When this bright shadow effect spreads, and multiple managers begin operating this way, the very culture of your organization begins to evolve. It shifts away from a stagnant and inefficient “command-and-control” system to a proactive, dynamic, and enquiry-led STAR culture.
This cultural change delivers tangible business results. The same LSE study that proved the time-saving benefits for managers found that organizations that adopted this approach saw significantly higher employee retention and stronger financial growth than those that chose other methods. The average return on investment was calculated to be an astonishing 74 times the cost of the training.
Think about that for a moment – 74 times. Where else in business can you find that kind of return? This approach transforms the very purpose of a manager. Your role is no longer to be the “fixer” with all the answers. Instead, you become a true enabler of potential.
By learning that the most powerful thing you can do is ask a brilliant question, you unlock the performance of your team and create a workplace where people can genuinely thrive. You shift from being overwhelmed by everyone’s problems to watching your team solve challenges you never thought they could handle. That’s the real transformation – and it all starts with that simple decision to stop, think, and ask rather than tell.
Conclusion
In this summary to The Answer Is a Question by Laura Ashley-Timms and Dominic Ashley-Timms, you’ve learned that the key to effective modern leadership lies in mastering your own reactions before attempting to coach others.
The STAR framework – Stop, Think, Ask, Result – transforms everyday management chaos into a powerful system for developing your team. By pausing your automatic responses and shifting from telling to asking, you create space for others to solve their own problems. This simple change has profound effects: managers who use this approach gain back 70 percent more time for strategic work while their teams become more capable and engaged.
The ripple effect extends beyond individual conversations, fundamentally shifting organizational culture from command-and-control to collaborative problem-solving, with returns of up to 74 times the initial investment.