“Got a sec? Quick question.” Someone leans into your doorway, you hand back a clean answer in thirty seconds, they leave looking relieved — and you feel that small, satisfying pulse of being useful.

That pulse is worth distrusting. Most of us were promoted for having good answers, so we keep reaching for them — even in the moments that were never really about the answer. Peter Senge named two ways of meeting a problem: advocacy (here’s what I think) and inquiry (what do you think?). Under time pressure we collapse almost entirely into advocacy, because telling is faster than asking and feels like leadership.

Here’s the cost. When you answer, you solve today’s problem and quietly teach tomorrow’s lesson: bring the question to me. They get relief, you get the hit of being needed — both sides rewarded, so the pattern hardens. Their judgment never gets exercised, because exercising it was never the point of the exchange. Multiply that across a team and you become the bottleneck you’ll later complain about. What often looks like a team that “won’t take ownership” is, underneath, a team whose thinking kept getting handed back too fast.

So this week, catch the pulse — that flicker of usefulness just before you answer. Treat it as a cue, not a reward. Then, just once, say “what’s your read first?” and wait through the silence, even when you already know the answer.

When did you last answer something that, held for ten more seconds, they’d have answered themselves?