When managers stop providing answers

The case for coaching. Elina Kazantseva, who led coaching training for managers at Amazon, observes that leaders often fall into the 'advice monster' trap by providing quick solutions to team problems, which inadvertently trains engineers to stop thinking for themselves (Alex Ponomarev from Thriving In Engineering). When managers supply immediate answers, they relieve temporary pressure but create a cycle of dependency where team members return with the same expectation for every subsequent blocker. Richard Hughes-Jones, an executive coach, notes that technical leaders are wired to provide answers to succeed, yet at higher levels, pretending to have all the answers is counterproductive in an environment defined by ambiguity (Refactoring).

The case for directive clarity. Some argue that the fundamentals of management, such as setting standards and holding people accountable, remain unchanged despite the rise of new tools (Andrew Barban Practical tools, insights…). Leaders like the executive at Docusign maintain that clear guardrails are essential, requiring human review and quality gates before any AI-generated code is merged into the system (Nick Lucchesi from The New Stack). This approach emphasizes that while coaching is valuable, certain situations demand explicit direction to ensure safety and operational reliability, as demonstrated by Docusign’s requirement that no agent can take an irreversible action without human approval.

The synthesis. Both approaches prioritize the team’s long-term capability, whether through designing safe-to-fail experiments to build autonomy or establishing rigid guardrails to manage risk. The most effective leaders identify which problems require a coaching intervention to foster thinking and which require a directive standard to maintain production integrity.