Advice: To Take or Not to Take!

Over the course of your career, you will undoubtedly receive a LOT of advice. When do you just listen and save/contemplate, even ignore, those words vs. immediately put them into action? The answer can be trickier then one might think.

Advice will come from many places... Peers, Supervisors, Mentors, Customers, Partners, etc.

Let's explore 3 Phases of your career and how each will influence how you handle advice from those in your orbit. I'll also provide you a great real-life example of taking advice in a way that's different then simply applying what you've been told.

The Junior Employee

Your theme is to try new things, learn from others, ask for clarification without questioning the integrity of the advice givers.

1. You don't have many choices when supervisors and others in authority offer advice. You may not see the horizon for their opinions, but you're often best served to head in that direction. Like Mom always told you... Don't criticize something until you've tried it!
2. Beware blindly following, however, ask questions, understand if there's options. Understand the WHY and the HOW!
3. Find a trustworthy mentor, someone who you can follow at all times, who you want to emulate and in return, someone who shows a real belief in you. When they believe in you, they will hold themselves accountable to give you great advice, and have your back if anything goes sideways.

The Manager

Your theme is leading by example while still actively seeking mentorship from those with more experience. Your peers are not your competition, treat them as information givers.

1. You've made it to management, now everyone expects you to be giving the advice right?! Don't fall into that trap, seek Mentors, including your direct supervisors. Everything from your more junior days still holds true as well!
2. The advice of supervisors still holds sway, but now it's your job to bring facts and contemplation to the table. It's ok to question opinions, just be ready to back that up with facts and figures. They promoted you into management, it's ok to flush out the How's and Why's of the advice you're getting.
3. Peer advice becomes more important at this stage, but you often must seek it out. Build your network, look for those who will be the "Ying" to your "Yang" in how they see things, as it will broaden your perspectives and give you more to contemplate.

The Executive

Your theme is data, patience, and contemplation. Advice you give and receive, will have far reaching impacts.

1. With great power comes great responsibility! Everything from your Manager days still rings true, but it's also important to get upward feedback from your team. Think of this as input to your process, it's not a mandate, but it should be considered part of your direction and data for your eventual decisions.
2. Don't be afraid to say "No"! You are in your role for a reason, it's not unreasonable to get advice that is counter to your beliefs &/or experience. Sometimes, it just may not make sense to say that out loud. At the same time, don't just discard that advice, instead "file it" for later use. Your experiences may allow you to use it some way in the future (see example below!).
3. Your peers and the few superiors you have may not see the world like you and that's OK. Diversity of thought is absolutely critical to any successful business. Take advantage of the vast wealth of knowledge and experience around you and collect as much advice as you can. Executing on it is a completely different beast and decision point! Remember, data, patience, and contemplation!

The Example - Senior Leadership

I was leading a $150M practice with several hundred practitioners in multiple countries. I'm very detailed orientated and would provide monthly team updates including operational results, project updates, & forward looking strategies. While we did live meetings, I also issued a 1-2 page detailed synopsis monthly.

I was in a partner peer review and my reviewer gave me advice to cut "way back" on the detail, just give everyone a briefer view, the highlights. They believed I was providing too much detail and the team wasn't seeing value.

Taking my own advice, I had always sought team feedback, and in fact had team members helping me compile the facts, metrics, & many of the monthly update details. No one on my team had complained, but I'm aware enough to know that not everyone complains about their boss's habits!

Truthfully, this advice bothered me. It felt like I was being told I did something wrong, when the business was up 4X over my tenure, our utilization was the highest of any peer group, and our turnover the lowest. I talked to several of my peers, bounced the situation off of them, although I was somewhat annoyed during the process, in those discussions I discovered a "gem". If I looked at the advice differently, some of my audience wanted to know how they were going to spend their time before reading a detailed update. I made the decision at that point to focus a lot more on the Executive Summary, provide the highlights in the first paragraph and make sure my audience could make a decision on whether to read the detail or not. Feedback from subsequent updates was very positive from the more senior leaders. It may not have been exactly the advice I was given, but it steered me down the right path after having the patience to solicit more data and take additional time to contemplate the impacts.

Interesting side note... the leader who gave me the advice was soon given much broader responsibilities for operational groups like mine. Their first few updates were brief, but the messaging was not clear to the various audiences and people clearly wanted more. Soon, their updates encompassed 3-4 pages of details, far more then I ever provided. To this day, this person provides extremely detailed updates, even on Linkedin! In that, I believe they also finally understood my initial position and we helped each other find the right balance, not by blindly taking advice or trying to copy anyone, but by applying information in a way that made sense on the basis of both our foundational knowledge and experiences.

I hope you enjoyed this.

Brian