How to Fish for Success in 5 Ways

When your men come to you looking for answers to their problems, do you give them the fish or you teach them how to fish? When you give them the fish, they deprive themselves the chance to learn. Instead of leveraging on you, they rely on you. But when you teach them how to fish, they become leaders too. There are 5 ways to teach people how to fish:

Look for obvious and most pivotal answers to problems. Don't beat around the bush trying to cure symptoms of problems. Instead go to the root of the problem and look for permanent solutions. Like the solution to sales is not to look for new prospects, but to improve your offering first
Go for the kill, be daring and go all the way. Most followers like to do things step by step. But leaders know that it is more productive to take a few steps forward at one go than to take one step at a time and lose momentum along the way. Like in sales, the 3 steps to take to get more customers are to prospect more, prospect deeper and prospect wider
Ask questions no matter what. Resist the temptation to dish our solutions when asked. Instead, ask your followers, "What do you think?"
Challenge your team members to do the opposite of what most people do. When you do the opposite, you expand your thinking and you will achieve breakthrough
Teach them leadership. For it is far more profitable to lead leaders than to lead follower

Comments

What an Executive Coach and Business Coach Does

The Secret Under the Mattress: Why would a 79-year Man Bet So Big on 4D?

It was 2007 when we discovered his secret. While moving my father’s mattress, we found them: heaps and heaps of Singapore Pools 4D tickets. They were stacked in layers, a paper trail of lost hopes. What shocked us most wasn’t just the volume, but the stakes. He wasn’t betting a few dollars for fun. He was punting hundreds of dollars per draw—nearly ten times a month. At the time, my siblings and I were furious. Our father was a 79-year-old retiree. We wondered, with a mix of anger and confusion, why a man at his stage of life would need to win such "big money." What was he going to do with the money? We saw it as a reckless habit, a sign of poor judgment in his final years. Some of us would say, "If I were to give him money to buy 4D, why don't I use the money and buy 4D myself? At least I have better discipline". It has taken me two decades, and the experience of raising my own three grown-up children, to finally see the truth that was hidden under that matt...

Head Bleeding when the Chair Falls

The Weight of Silence: What Were We Really Arguing About? My earliest memories are punctuated by the sound of shouting. In 1970, when I was barely 6 years old, I stood as a small witness to the fierce quarrels between my father and my late eldest brother Kah Yang (he passed away in 1971 at the age of 17). As I grew up, these contradictions became the soundtrack of our lives, usually centered around our family's shoe shop and clothing stalls in Chinatown. In the court of family opinion, the verdict was almost always the same: my father was "wrong." He was judged as a man who didn't fulfill his role, who wasn't "burdening" enough for the family’s success. But as I look back from the vantage point of 2026, I have to ask: Was that actually true? Let me finally put to rest what my father did right: the truths that were buried under decades of criticism: Unseen Labor: He worked grueling, long hours. I remember him hauling boxes of goods and equipment to set u...

Business and Money Tips

Search This Blog