Advice Trap

A few days ago, I asked everyone what you do when someone seeks your advice. Surprisingly the answers were contrary to what happens.

My take

Most of us feel valued when people seek our advice, our pulse starts racing, and we want to share all we think we know from experience. We don't realize that the recipient's mind switches off when we start doing so and carries very little of what we shared. The first step is to understand what the seeker wants, then help them explore all the options they have by asking at least two to three times, Anything else. Encourage seekers to evaluate the options and how they will feel if they pursue the best option. Your effort is to facilitate self-exploration. The choice they pursue after that will be backed by ownership and will be most rewarding.

Just have the patience to lend your ear and ask powerful questions to facilitate the seeker's solutions.

I am sharing below excerpts from an interview conducted by  Kevin Kruse, CEO of LEADx, with Michael Bungay Stanier.

What's the advantage of being the person with the answers always? You feel like you're the most intelligent person in the room. You sense that you are critical to everybody. Everybody looks at you with that kind of glow in their eyes. Oh, he's so intelligent. She's so clever. You feel, even if you're getting old like I am, like, "See, I haven't lost it yet. I've still got something to offer this team, this organization, this part of the world. I've got some suggestions there." You've got that high status of being the person people go to ask for solutions.

What's the downside of Tell It Advice?

Bungay Stanier: Those are short-term wins. They're a little, let's call it ego-based, to get into kind of a bit of therapy speech. Because balancing out, the prizes are punishments. 

So what do you think about the punishments? You become the bottleneck. You become exhausted. You become inefficient because your advice is not nearly as good as you think it is. There's a more profound thing, which is the act of disempowerment. You're putting out a key message, "Hey everybody else, you're not smart enough to figure this out yourself. You're not good enough. I'm better than you are." 

There are short-term wins. Save It makes you feel noble. Save it makes you have that self-identity of look at me, I care for everybody. I'm a person with a big heart for this organization and this team.

The downside of the Save It advice monster?

First of all, it is exhausting. You are exhausted trying to rescue everybody. It's impossible. And you're opening your veins and bleeding into the ground to keep everything going, and it doesn't work. 

And here's the other thing. Rescuers like you create victims; you disempower others in the very act you're trying to help others. Somebody once said, "wisdom enters through the wound." But you're not letting anybody get wounded. You're not allowing any wisdom to come in. You're not allowing anybody to take responsibility. You're not allowing accountability to flow through to the appropriate level where it should sit in your organization. You are infantilizing the people who are around you. 

Control It advise monster

Bungay Stanier: Control It is the sneakiest of the three. It convinces you that the only way you win is by maintaining and holding onto Control at all times. It's your white-knuckled hands on the steering wheel. It would help if you kept Control of everything from the start through the middle, through the end. If you step away for a moment and invite others to step in and step up and lean in, if you delegate Control, if you give up Control, if you empower other people, chaos will come. And, of course, when chaos comes, failure is not far behind. Please don't give up Control, even for an iota, or we will all fail. 

What are the prizes of Control It? With Control It, you've got that sense of status, that sense of power, that sense of security, that sense of we'll keep it safe around here. That sense of I'm not made anxious by any unexpected things coming in. That sense of I'm not being bothered by other people's opinions and other people's insights. 

Should we never give advice?

Bungay Stanier: This whole conversation between us is me giving you advice. So I'm not against advice. I am against your reflexive, habitual response to advice giving the first thing you always do. You won't change this until, as a first step, you begin to see your advice monster and the prizes and punishments of your current behavior. Then you can start to change to become more coach-like. Stay curious a bit longer, and move to advice-giving a bit more slowly.