Whose Agenda? (CCL Continuum)
A coaching continuum running from telling to asking, drawn from Myles Downey's coaching spectrum, so a coach or leader can choose, on purpose, how directive to be in a given moment rather than defaulting to one mode out of habit.
A ladder runs from telling at the bottom to asking at the top, with the stops in between labelled.
Reach for this when…
- A leader either always tells or always asks, regardless of the situation.
- A coach feels guilty for giving advice, even when advice is clearly what's needed.
- Coaching stalls because the coach won't say the obvious thing everyone's dancing around.
How to run it
- Lay out the spectrum from telling (advice, instruction, direction) to asking (inquiry, exploration, co-creation).
- Identify where you default to, and notice it's a default, not a rule.
- Name when telling actually serves: real expertise gap, safety, time pressure.
- Take a live situation and try it in three modes: telling, consulting, asking.
- Debrief what each mode actually produced, not which felt more comfortable.
A worked example
Situation. Diego Vargas ran every one-to-one at his SaaS company CondorSoft in Arequipa, Peru, the same way: pure inquiry, no matter what the person actually needed.
Applied. On the continuum, he recognised he'd anchored permanently at 'Asking' out of a fear of micromanaging. He deliberately ran the next check-in on a security incident in 'Telling' mode, giving direct instruction under time pressure, then switched back to Asking for a longer-term development conversation the same week.
Result. His engineering lead later said the direct call during the incident was the first time in a year Diego had actually helped in the moment, rather than asking her to find her own way through a fire.
The catch
The continuum makes the choice visible but doesn't make it for you; picking the wrong mode with full awareness is still the wrong mode. Coaches trained to avoid telling can swing too far toward asking even when someone just needs the answer. And the labels can become a script instead of a live read of the moment.
Asking a question you already know the answer to, to avoid telling, isn't facilitative. It's telling with extra steps.
Origin: Myles Downey