Give Less Advice

This resource first appeared in issue #15 on 20 Mar 2020 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Coaching, Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals

Stop Rushing In With Advice - Michael Bungay Stanier, MIT Sloan Management Review
Don’t Fall Into the Advice Trap - Michael Bungay Stanier and Marshall Goldsmith

One trap that’s really easy to fall into for those in either technical roles or in research — and so doubly easy for those in research computing — is rushing to give answers or advice to our team members. We got where we are by being experts in stuff, and so it’s very easy to just naturally give answers to people who are hitting issues.

Stanier has recently written a book (the Advice Trap) on this issue, and has given a number of interviews on the topic. He points out that there are three big problems with rushing to give advice:

We may not actually be solving the real problem they have; e.g. the “XY problem”. (Worth remembering when consulting on any issue: if they could concisely state the exact problem, they’d probably already have most of the answer).
Even if we got the problem right, our answer’s probably not great. The thing we just thought of five seconds after hearing the problem is likely a pretty unsophisticated answer to the issue they’ve been wrestling with for a while (and let’s face it, they’re unlikely to tell us that).
Even if we got the problem right and the answer right, it’s just not good management. Shouldn’t we be teaching them to find the right answer themselves - for their own development and so we have to solve fewer problems?

Stainer has a pretty pragmatic approach to avoiding this trap - just don’t be so quick to give advice, even when asked. Instead, stay curious about the problem and their approaches so far (attempted or conceived). Keep asking questions and digging deeper, find out what they’ve been trying, and congratulate them on ideas they have that seem like a good approach. Crucially, even if you theoretically could have come up with a better solution, theirs is still probably the best approach if (a) it develops their problem solving skills and (b) it was come up with by the person who is going to implement it, so they’re fully committed to making it work.