I Tried GROW Coaching in My 1:1s. It Cut Them in Half.

Last week I ran a 1:1 that lasted 12 minutes read more about leadership and delegation. The engineer walked out unblocked, with a clear next step, and didn’t ping me for the rest of the day. A month ago, the same engineer would have walked out of a 45-minute 1:1 with a vague explore one-page procedure for team clarity “I’ll think about it” and pinged me twice before lunch.

The only thing I changed was the questions I asked. I stopped solving problems in the meeting. I started running them through a 30-year-old coaching framework called GROW — Goal, Reality, Options, Way Forward.

The 1:1 That Triggered the Switch

An engineer — let’s call her Rina — came to a 1:1 with a bug she’d chased for two days. I listened, drew a diagram, proposed three solutions. We picked one. She left. 47 minutes gone.

Two days later she pinged me. The solution we picked didn’t work either. I had spent 47 minutes solving my version of her problem, and we were back to square one.

The issue wasn’t technical. I was using the 1:1 as a consulting session when it should have been coaching. A consultant gives answers. A coach asks questions. I was giving answers Rina didn’t need me to give.

GROW: Four Questions, In Order

1. Goal — "What Do You Actually Want?"

Engineers open with a problem, not a goal. “The build is slow” is a situation. The goal is the outcome they want. When I asked Rina “If we fixed this in 30 minutes, what would that let you do?”, she said: “Ship the new dashboard by Friday without burning my weekend.” That’s a real goal — and only one path to it is “fix the bug today.”

2. Reality — "Where Are You Now, Really?"

The temptation is to skip from “I want X” to “here’s how.” Without a clear current state, the options you generate are fantasies. Rina had tried the docs, a Stack Overflow fix (wrong data shape), a manual workaround (didn’t scale), and a vendor ticket (pending). Her mental model was correct — she was at a dead end, not in a maze.

3. Options — "What Could You Do?"

She generated five: wait for the vendor, roll back the buggy change, write a custom workaround, pair with a teammate to find the root cause, or cut the affected feature from this release. I had a strong preference. I kept it to myself.

4. Way Forward — "What Will You Do, by When?"

Rina picked pairing with a teammate. She asked me one thing: sign-off to ship the workaround if pairing didn’t surface a fix by Thursday. I said yes. Total time: 14 minutes.

Three traps I kept falling into: skipping Reality to jump into solutions, judging options mid-brainstorm (kills the flow), and re-absorbing ownership at the end (“well, what I’d do is…”). The fix for all three is the same — ask the next GROW question, don’t give the answer.

What Changed After Four Weeks

My 1:1s dropped from 45 minutes to 15. I stopped solving problems in the meeting. The engineer picked the solution, not me. The engineer owned the follow-up, not me. I got about 8 hours a week back.

Try It in Your Next 1:1

Ask exactly four questions: 1. “What do you actually want?” — push past the first answer 2. “Where are you now, really?” — stay silent until they’re done 3. “What could you do?” — write everything down, no judgment 4. “What will you do, by when?” — confirm what they need from you

Run four 1:1s before you judge it. The first will feel awkward. The third will produce a decision the engineer owns. The fourth will be the moment you stop wanting to go back.

If the person can’t even name the goal, that’s a different framework — I’ll write about that one next.

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Have you tried GROW in your 1:1s? Drop a comment with the messy version. Or read the previous post in this leadership series.