The Advice Trap

 

2020 BOOK-OF-THE-YEAR (2 books this year!) Issue No. 432 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (March 26, 2020) recommends the perfect coaching book for leading your team from home—and why you must tame the Advice Monster! It’s top-of-my-list, so far, for 2020 book-of-the-year. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies).   Tame Your Advice Monster!  Hello. My name is John and I’m an Advice Monster. Yikes! If you’ve got the guts to read this book, you won’t come out unscathed. Yikes! Once again, I apologize to the hundreds of colleagues I worked with over the years (especially direct reports). Had I read this book during my CEO years, I coulda/woulda been a more effective (and healthier) CEO. So, so sorry. And even though the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The good news: the second best time to plant a tree is today. And one more Yikes! Another superbly incredible book will have to pop out in 2020 to dethrone The Advice Trap from being named my book-of-the-year—it’s phenomenal. Michael Bungay Stanier says “Your job is to make your coaching an everyday interaction.” He quotes a colleague, “Coaching is no longer an event. It’s a way of being with each other.” And get this: “Coaching is no longer a one-off, occasional, ‘come into my office so I can coach you’ way of managing someone.”  During this current COVID-19 crisis (and the next crisis, and the next crisis…), The Advice Trap is absolutely the first book you and your team should read. Now. Today. The author’s coaching principles are easy-to-remember:    1. Be Lazy (“…about jumping in and solving other people’s problems for them Just stop it!”)    2. Be Curious (Tame your Advice Monster by “staying curious and managing the process of the conversation.” This is the essential principle.)    3. Be Often (You can be more coach-like outside of the “hierarchical, formal event.” Think meetings, phone calls, Zoom calls, email—all forms of communication.) Whew! Perfect timing! While huge numbers of team members are working from their homes during this COVID-19 crisis, this book says you can be more coach-like today. And curiosity is a big key. He quotes Dorothy Parker (and three cheers for all of the full-page easy-reading quotes in this gem): “THE CURE FOR BOREDOM IS CURIOSITY. THERE IS NO CURE FOR CURIOSITY.” In my 2016 review of The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever, I shared a personal experience with Michael Bungay Stanier’s “AWE” Question (“And What Else?”). The big idea: keep asking the AWE question until the person you’re coaching fesses up to the real challenge. It was powerful—and the four-minute exercise was a conversion experience! (Read my review.) Pick One. Michael Bungay Stanier says “Your job is to stop seeking the solutions and start finding the challenges.” He adds, “You can be known as the person who helps articulate the critical issue or as the person who provides hasty answers to solve the wrong problem. Which would you prefer? Exactly.” How? “From now on, frame your role as helping to find the real challenge. What this really means is being relentless: staying curious long enough to allow the other person to create the insight and space to reach the heart of the matter.” View this 14-minute TEDx Talk, “How to Tame Your Advice Monster,” by Michael Bungay Stanier (March 13, 2020). It’s meaty, funny, and might be your best use of 14 minutes this week! Since reading this book, I’ve used the practical tools and phrases six times. A caller wanted my advice (Yeah!), but I resisted giving advice and instead dug deeper for the real challenge (very hard, but very satisfying). Over several evenings, I made the mistake of reading 20-30 probing and hilarious paragraphs to my wife, Joanne. She now throws the “Advice Monster” phrase back at me. Yikes!  Even my email responses are shorter. “Joe, so sorry, but I just read The Advice Trap, and taking it to heart by asking YOU questions and NOT giving advice. Sorry!!!” (See pages 150-152 for ways to graciously and effectively respond to those long, rambling emails. Worth the price of 20 books!) I just shipped the book to a client and will recommend The Advice Trap on a webinar next week. If you’re still thinking you’re a great coach—and this would be a great book for everyone else—check out page 43, the “Mix ‘n’ Match Advice Monster Table.” The author says “you can’t tame your Advice Monster until you know what sets it off." There are 12 types of people who activate your monster persona (pick one!)—coupled with 12 situations (pick one!).     • My deadly combination: someone who asks me for advice—paired with a “time is short” situation.    • Yours might be: someone who challenges you—coupled with “they keep making mistakes.”  Remember my “unscathed” comment? Caution: Scathing Ahead! Oh, my. There’s so much more meat—delivered with wit and wry wordsmithing. The layout, the end-of-chapter questions, the abundant resources. So stunningly fun to read! I’ll end with these teasers:    • Most of your people are working very hard on the wrong problem. You can fix this. (See the “Practice Masterclass” options and abundant online resources.)    • The “Advice-Giving Habit” (AGH!) “generates waste, leaches innovation, and reduces the capacity to scale for success.” (Understand “Easy Change vs. Hard Change.")    • Advice Monsters come in three packages: Tell-It, Save-It (the rescuers), and Control-It (Yikes. He writes about me!).    • There are “prizes” and “punishments” with each style. (My style: “I protect us from chaos.”)    • In “A Bonus Bonanza of Extra Goodness” resource section, the author tweaked my curiosity (he’s good!) with a HBR article about “chaos pilots.” (Wow—we need chaos pilots more than ever! Yes or No?)    • And this quote: “Hire for intellectual curiosity.” Per Liz Wiseman, “Intellectual curiosity is the stem cell of good leadership behaviors.” To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Advice Trap: Be Humble, Stay Curious & Change the Way You Lead Forever, by Michael Bungay Stanier.   Reminder! Delegate your reading! Ask a team member to also read and report on The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever, by Michael Bungay Stanier. To listen to the audio version (3 hours, 10 minutes), visit Libro.fm YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS: 1) You’ll find dozens and dozens of practical ideas for being more coach-like, such as “Place the seven questions from The Coaching Habit near your keyboard. Set yourself the goal of asking at least one of them before you fire off advice, opinions, and suggestions. Maybe even ask two." OK, team! I have a Starbucks card for the first five people who text me that you have done this! 2) The author quotes Peter Drucker, “The leaders of the future will know how to ask.” So how will you tame your Advice Monster—and move from telling to asking?   1:1 Weekly Meetings: Scrap the Agenda! Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook  Yikes! Michael Bungay Stanier has a radical idea for my Meetings Bucket, Chapter 20, in Mastering the Management Buckets. Whether in person or on a Zoom call, he urges us to flip the script:  “Let’s face it, the standard weekly one-on-one meeting can be a dispiriting experience. It can easily become a ritualized reporting that, honestly, bores both sides of the conversation. You want to know what they’re up to…kind of. They want to reassure you that all’s OK and that they’re a good person who’s working hard, but they don’t love the 'prove it!' nature of the conversation."  Instead, the author says a “coach-like approach can revitalize the experience. Cast aside the standard agenda that’s part of why the meeting feels stuck, and open with ‘What’s on your mind?’” Read more on pages 152-153 and don’t miss this acid test: “See how long you can go in this meeting before you have to share an idea or an opinion.”  Click here for more resources from The Meetings Bucket, including the template, “Weekly Update to My Supervisor”—needed now more than ever during these work-at-home days. This tool pushes need-to-know info into the pre-meeting report, saving you time in the meeting for being more coach-like!                      JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Many times…your breakthrough will come from an outside set of eyes and ears—and one or two powerful and probing questions. Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video), including the new book by Jason Pearson and Doug Fields, THIS. 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love. (Read John’s review here.)   MORE LESSONS: Effectiveness, Excellence, Elephants! Click here to order More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom, by Dan Busby and John Pearson. Click here to follow the new blog with 40 guest bloggers. MORE RESOURCES: • Blog: Pails in Comparison • Subscribe: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews • John's book reviews: on Amazon  • Website: Management Buckets • Blog: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations ECFA Tools and Templates Blog Click here to access the index and links to John's blog series on 22 downloadable tools and templates for effective board governance, including his commentary on Tool #22, "A Quick and Courteous Way to Give Every Board Member a Voice." Note: This is the NEW location for John Pearson's Buckets Blog. Slowly (!), the previous 650+ blogs posted (between 2006 and 2025) will gradually populate this blogsite, along with new book reviews each month