Many successful leaders build their professional identities based on being the smartest person in the room (because they really are quite smart). But as a leader of people, the reflexes of that identity keep getting in the way. I see this time and again in my practice. Maybe you see yourself here too.

A subordinate walks into your office struggling with a career decision or a stakeholder uncertain about a strategic pivot, and your reflex kicks in: You’ve been there, and you see the board clearly. You know what they should do, so why wouldn’t you tell them that?

So you tell them. You may call it mentoring or even coaching.

I’ve worked with a few dozen clients where this was the theme of the engagement. These are very intelligent people, who just happened to have a blind spot. To them, it made sense to tell the answer the way they knew it.

Except, they were not doing their job. More often than not, they were not in that leadership position to figure out solutions to technical problems. They were supposed to help people figure out better answers without them. And they never knew when that changed.

So they’ve never considered the uncomfortable possibility that what they were doing wasn’t helping but just ego-stroking, or a refusal to sit in the discomfort of not being the savior.

And so the coaching engagement becomes a winding journey of admitting that ego is at stake, and building a new identity from which a different mindset and new behaviors can flourish.

It is in the realization that when you hand someone the answer, you might be stealing their reps and hijacking their ownership of the outcome, that you are training your people to comply with your thought processes instead of developing their own ways of solutioning.

This can be quite humbling – especially when you think you are a leader because you are the go-to person. When you sit across from a direct report, the hierarchy has to drop. You have to operate from the uncompromising truth that it is their career, their execution, and their consequences. You have to take on the role of a steward in many ways. This is more maturity than skill. This maturity requires something different from behavioral imitation. It requires actually growing into a leader that matches the title you are already holding.

You must develop the discipline to look at a blank slate with them and genuinely say, “I don’t know. What are you thinking?”

It takes zero leadership to hand an employee a map. To help them make their own map is a whole other game. It helps to know the one you’re playing.