The Advice Trap; join the Recovering Know-It-All Club
Giving advice is not the most helpful way to help.
Which is sad, because giving advice is fun.
Giving advice feels useful. Indeed, it is one way to help. It shows people we care, and that we are supportive.
Giving advice helps us feel valuable, and therefore safe. (I am so worth this money I get paid! I’m good at my job!) It can be a hard habit to break, because it goes deep in our sense of self-worth. Also, we can’t stop altogether. Advice does have its place.
But when we want to grow a team of creative, independent problem-solvers, giving advice is not the most helpful way to help somebody.
Why is this?
Advice is a quick and shallow fix that prevents growth.
We want our team members to get started with their own ideas, and ask for help when they are truly stuck. Telling people what they should do deprives them from figuring it out themselves. Advice is a shortcut that prevents learning.
We do not want to encourage people to ask for help as soon as they feel uncomfortable or frustrated. This tendency to ask for help early and often is an issue for younger generations in the workplace. The world they have lived in has been chaotic and generally unsupportive. (COVID school, macro-economics stacked against their success, etc.) Also, they are simply newer to the work world. They have less experience owning their work and seeing how many ways there are for different people to do work differently.
The fast, reflexive nature of advice is another reason it’s tempting. Fix it and move on. And when the scenario is more than just a simple task, if there’s any level of nuance or complexity, that reflexive “asked and answered, next!” approach will often provide bad advice. Because the advice-giver does not know enough to offer the appropriate solution.
Advice-giving is a trap for the giver and the recipient. Advice promotes copy-cats.
For the recipient, it sets them up to do it just like the giver would do it. Which is high risk, since each of us has different strengths. And if the work is new and challenging (the most likely to lead to a request for help), for that type of work, there are a range of different approaches that will be effective.
An example:
I am delegating the facilitation of a meeting to someone on my team. I could tell the person: “Start with a little joke, then share the goals of the meeting, then get people talking about their ideas within the first 5 minutes, then cover the agenda.” But that won’t work for every facilitator and every meeting. If this new facilitator has a more serious personality than my chatty casual personality, a little joke and a discussion prompt at the top might go over like a lead balloon.
When I hand this work of facilitation off, who cares how I facilitate meetings? I mean, I like how I do it. I have had years and years of practice, and formal training in adult learning. But what matters now is how this person will do it. I can help the new person own this responsibility by giving them room.
What’s the alternative to giving advice?
Double down on curiosity and humility.
Break the rescue habit. The “Oh, I know this one!” habit. Give up providing everybody with your expert answers all the time.
If you want, you can join me in the club I founded, The Recovering Know-It-All Club.
Think “My job is to help this person, or this team, figure this out. My job is not to fix this and create a bunch of Mini-Me’s.” (Is this reference too old? Do Austin Powers references still work? I’m old. Somebody needs to tell me.)
“Be humble and curious” is the first Culture Builder in my leadership curriculum. Humility and curiosity is the place to start for effective, creative teams and strong trusting relationships. That’s where we are here. Foundational stuff.
What this looks like, in the moment that someone comes to you and says, “I need help.”
Take a breath. Slow down and resist rescue mode.
Switch to coaching mode.
Ask good questions.
What to do instead: Ask good questions. Think like a coach. Build coaching skills. Provide constant reminders about the goal, so the person or the team can make progress.
There are so many good coaching questions out there, like “What have you tried?” and “What’s the real challenge here for you?”
Here are prompts and questions that help me when I’m on the verge of offering advice, to pull me back from jumping in with my own (beloved) ideas, or rescue the struggling person with how I have done this before:
“I have a few thoughts, in case you are truly stuck. I would like to hear from you first.”
“What’s your instinct? How would you proceed if there were no one here to talk to about this?”
For good advice (ha!) about being a good coach-supervisor, see the work of Michael Bungay Stanier on coaching and avoiding advice-giving. I reference some of his coaching questions in my leadership courses and workshops.
The next time you wonder what you can do to help a team member be a confident owner of their work, less advice and more curious coaching might be the answer.
If you want my advice.