A teammate started describing a problem today and I was three sentences into the solution before they’d finished the setup. Motivational Interviewing has a name for that itch: the righting reflex, the urge to fix what looks broken the second you spot it.
It feels helpful. It usually isn’t. When someone’s working something out and you leap to the answer, you take the thinking away from them, and people defend their own conclusions far more than the ones you handed them. MI came out of addiction counseling, where the righting reflex backfires hardest: argue for change and the person argues right back for the status quo. The counselor talks them into staying stuck.
The framing that stuck with me is change talk versus sustain talk. Your job isn’t to supply the argument for change; it’s to ask the questions that get the other person voicing it themselves. “What would make this worth doing?” beats “here’s why you should do this,” because they believe their own reasons.
For an engineer turned manager this is a hard rewire. The whole craft trained me to see a problem and close it. In a 1:1 the problem is often theirs to close, and the most useful thing I can do is sit on my hands and ask one more question.
