How do you recognize situations where you need to resist the urge to provide solutions?

I think this gets to the teach, coach, mentor spectrum in the Army.  Coaching is the most effective way to ensure someone learns, improves, and takes ownership of a task.  However, it’s the most time-consuming for all parties and incurs the most risk in the short-term.  It also assumes a base level of competence.  You don’t want to coach someone on a task they’re starting from scratch on – it has to be more than discovery learning.

I think the best way to approach it in the Army is there’s always room for all three – just to varying degrees.  In an emergency situation you may have to bias most strongly towards direction/teach, but there’s always room to come back and say ‘what did you learn.’  That, to me, is the beauty of the AAR and 8-step training model.  Retraining is always a step in anything we plan and execute.  The idea has to be we’re always getting better, building skills in ourselves and others.

I think it also gets back to messaging.  When you teach/coach/mentor, when you’re directive, when you lay back and let them find the solution – what message are you trying to send, and what message are they receiving?  Depending on the Soldier they might find the leader micromanaging, disinterested, empowering/disempowering, decisive, weak-willed, etc.  It gets to the art of leadership alongside the science.  You have to maintain consistency beside flexibility to apply leadership principles.  Ultimately you have to ‘play the man, not the board’ in any organization.