In the workplace, Socratic method just feels like an unnecessary power move. Someone is trying to cement their role as teacher and the other person as student.

I had a manager who liked to use the Socratic method for everything. He communicated everything in the form of questions. If you gave the "wrong" answer, he'd give a sharp sigh and then rephrase the question, giving you another change to give a "better" answer.

This method was mildly annoying when he was right, but it was completely disastrous when he was wrong. He'd often arrive late to a situation that people had been dealing with for months and assume he knew exactly what was going on, better so than the people involved. He'd start his Socratic questioning, but you weren't allowed to explain the context or how you arrived at a solution. Your only option was to navigate his Socratic questioning until you could gingerly explain that he was missing a key constraint, or that we had already tried that, or that he had received bad information, and so on. It became a tool for him to control the conversation and put you in your place at the same time.

It was a very sad time in my career. I'd arrive to every meeting feeling like I was about to play a psychological game of "guess the right answer" as I navigated the Socratic questions until we could get him to reveal what he was really thinking, or why he was so frustrated, or why he thought we were wrong, or any other number of issues that he just wouldn't tell us.