Advice on Advice
To be effective
leaders, we all need good advice, and we need to give good advice to others.
Problem is, advice sharing is not as easy as it sounds, explain David Garvin
and Joshua Margolis.
In business, good
advice is priceless.
Managers who are
anxious and confused when confronted with corporate challenges can find that a
piece of sound advice from a colleague can instill a sense of calm and clarity
that leads to more thoughtful and strategic business decisions. In turn,
offering advice to others is considered an important mark of a leader.
Yet business
executives aren't always making the most of advice—on both the giving and the
receiving end—because they may not realize that it involves skills that can be
learned and refined, according to Harvard Business School professors David A. Garvin and Joshua D. Margolis.
Highly skilled
advisers pay close attention to how they advise as much as what kind of advice
they give, Garvin and Margolis contend in the recent article in Harvard
Business Review, The Art of Giving and
Receiving Advice, which is based on
research and discussions with advice experts.
The advice
give-and-take is not always easy to pull off. Both the advice-giver and the
receiver are prone to common missteps that can cloud communication and even
damage relationships.
But when advice-giving
does go well, it is a beautiful thing, says Margolis, the James Dinan and
Elizabeth Miller Professor of Business Administration.
"If you've been
thinking about a problem in a certain way, and the advice and counsel you get
lets you see it in a completely different light, it allows you to see a path
through that you didn't see before," he says.
HESITANT
TO ASK FOR HELP
Some executives are
wary of seeking advice at all. For one thing, many people operate under the
assumption that they already have all the answers.
"People have a
remarkable degree of overconfidence, and that diminishes the amount of advice
they typically seek," says Garvin, the C. Roland Christensen Professor of
Business Administration. "But I don't see how a leader can make critical
big decisions without getting advice."
Plus, many executives
believe that if they seek advice, they will be viewed as incapable of making
decisions on their own.
Research shows that
people who seek too much advice—those who ask for a wide range of opinions, for
example, before making every little decision—are viewed as overly dependent and
receive lower performance ratings from their bosses, but then again, people who
rarely seek advice receive lower performance ratings as well. The folks in the
middle—those who seek advice regularly but not too often—earn the highest
scores.
ADVICE-SEEKERS
MAKE MISTAKES
People who seek advice
make a variety of mistakes, including:
- Choosing the wrong advisers,
particularly by turning only to those with like-minded ideas, rather than
seeking out people who will provide a devil's advocate point of view
- Defining the problem poorly,
either by taking the conversation to unrelated tangents or by omitting key
information that might cast the advice-seeker in a poor light
- Misjudging the quality of the
advice they are given
Once advice-seekers
have received counsel, perhaps one of the biggest mistakes they make is
discounting the wisdom they were given, often because of an egocentric bias
that has them naturally favoring their own viewpoints. Sometimes people will
ask for advice from others, but their true goal is to seek validation or praise
for their own solutions.
Experience shows that
people in powerful positions are often most guilty of doing this, in some cases
because they actually feel competitive when receiving advice from experts—which
may lead them to dismiss the advice those experts are giving.
"Powerful people
often say to themselves, 'I have to be in this position for a reason. I trust
my opinions implicitly and discount others, especially if they suggest a
different direction or approach,'" Garvin says. "They see such advice
as a threat to their expertise."
Yet the advice-giver
may also play a role in the advice falling flat by failing to clearly outline
the reasoning for the advice.
"As an
advice-seeker, you're in a dilemma. You know how you got from A to Z, but an
adviser says, 'What you should do is X,' and often [doesn't] tell you how [he]
got from A to X," Garvin says. "You have two reasoning processes—your
own, which is clear and well understood, and the other person's, which is
completely opaque. People tend to favor clarity. All too often, they discount
advice because they can't get the adviser's reasoning process clear in their
minds."
That's why it's
important for the advice-giver not only to provide suggestions, but also to
clearly lay out how he or she got to the recommended options from where the
advice-seeker started.
MISTAKES
OF ADVICE-GIVERS
Those who give advice
often make several mistakes of their own, such as overstepping invisible
boundaries with unsolicited advice that may be seen as intrusive, or by giving
advice when they're not qualified to do so.
The first question an
advice-giver should ask is: Am I the best person to help?
If someone comes to
you for advice and you know you're not able to provide helpful, thoughtful
input, it's OK to pass, says Margolis, noting it's better to shy away from
giving advice than to give poor advice. Advice-givers often feel so flattered
to be sought out that they provide advice about topics they may not be
qualified to discuss.
"You want to be
helpful. You feel like you're now the expert in the room," he says.
"It's hard to sometimes say, 'I don't have the field of vision necessary
to help.'"
But if that's the
case, perhaps the adviser can recommend speaking with someone else more
qualified.
Other advice-giving
mistakes include:
- Communicating the advice poorly
- Misdiagnosing a problem, either
by prematurely believing you see similarities with issues you have faced
or by neglecting to ask the kind of probing, relevant questions that will
get to the heart of the matter
- Giving self-centered guidance
According to Garvin,
advice-seekers should see a red flag when advice-givers limit themselves to
saying, "Here's how I would respond if I were in your
shoes."
"They're not
thinking about you and your circumstances and limitations; they're thinking
[about] how they would act, and their experiences, expertise, and standing may
be very different from yours," Garvin says. "When a junior faculty
member goes to a senior faculty member who is tenured, and the senior faculty
member says, 'If I were in your shoes,' that may be poor advice because the situation
facing a nontenured faculty member is very different than that facing a tenured
one." For this reason, skilled advisers often add the caveat, "But
since I'm not you, here's the way I'm thinking about the problem, and here are
some factors you might want to consider."
A key problem for both
advice-seekers and -givers is a lack of careful listening.
"What listening
requires is suspending judgment," Garvin says. "You have to hear the
person out—at length and in depth—before shifting to action or making recommendations."
Garvin says when he is
advising someone, he listens for emotion and tone, something that may indicate
that a deeper issue underlies the problem; and he also listens for whether the
person is leaving certain things unsaid. Sometimes the advice-seeker is leaving
out key pieces of information inadvertently or because of discomfort with his
contribution to the problem.
"If someone says
I have interpersonal issues at work and mentions a lot about peers and
supervisors, but nothing about subordinates, there may be something more to the
story, " Garvin says. "So I will ask if anything is going on with
them. The part that's left out of the story is often the key to understanding
it." He adds that is one of the reasons people come to you for advice:
They aren't able to see the full picture on their own.
That's why it's
important for both the advice-seeker and the advice-giver to ask questions of
each other. The advice-seeker needs to get clarifications on the adviser's
thinking to determine whether the advice fits the situation, and the
advice-giver needs to fully understand the problem—and that might mean teasing
out some unflattering facts the advice-seeker may have been shy about
revealing.
"One of our very
talented advice-givers said you shouldn't presume that the version you heard at
the first telling is a completely accurate story," Garvin says.
Plus, the advice-giver
needs to remember that the goal is to understand the problem and then convey
the advice in a way that can be heard—and often this means talking through the
pros and cons of various options with the advice-seeker, rather than zeroing in
on one answer too early.
"There's a
tendency to forget it's not about you, how smart you are, and how helpful
you feel you can be, but it's about being experienced by the advisee
as helpful," Margolis says. "The danger is that you immediately jump
to a conclusion about the best solution. It's better to see advising as a
process where you inquire, listen, and talk through the issue, and once you've
got a sense of the problem together, you need to generate some options and
explore them. That way you increase the likelihood of producing advice that is
actionable and feasible, and in fact helps."
Margolis says he was
thrilled to work on the advice project with Garvin since he has turned to his
colleague for professional advice and has found him to be especially skilled in
providing it.
"I was curious
about the method and skill set he had that made his advice so helpful," he
says. "In some ways, this was a search to say, does my experience and what
David does correspond with what we see other great advisers do?"
Meanwhile, the person
Garvin is most likely to turn to for advice is his wife. Why?
"It's precisely
because she not only knows me so well, she's willing to tell me what I don't
want to hear," he says. "In fact, I've have learned that when I'm
most resistant to the advice I'm hearing from her, that's when I need to listen
even more closely."
by Dina Gerdeman
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7622.html
No comments:
Post a Comment