The Advice Trap: Be Humble, Stay Curious & Change the Way You Lead Forever

by Michael Bungay Stanier

That means building the simple but difficult habit of taming your Advice Monster so you can stay curious a little longer, and rush to action and advice-giving a little more slowly.

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. you can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. Naguib Mahfouz

The summary, in case you haven’t read it: by saying less and asking more, you can work less hard and have more impact.

Building a coaching habit is about staying curious a little longer and rushing to advice-giving a little more slowly.

But your advice works less well, and more often than you’d think, for two immediate reasons. 1. You’re solving the wrong problem

More often than not, you’re offering up insights and solutions (brilliant or not) to the wrong problem. You’ve been suckered into believing that the first challenge that’s mentioned is the real challenge. It rarely is. But because we’re all twitchy-keen to help and primed to get into action, we love to jump in and solve the first thing that shows up—even when it’s not the actual thing that needs to be figured out. At this very moment, throughout your organization, people are working hard on non-critical issues because leaders haven’t stayed curious long enough to find out the real challenge. Rushing in to give advice is wasting money and resources, energy and life.

There are reasons why your ideas are often not that great. To start with, you don’t have the full picture. You’ve got a few facts, a delightful collection of baggage, a robust serving of opinion, and an ocean of assumption. You think you understand what’s happening. Your brain is designed to find patterns and make connections that reassure you that you know what’s going on. Trust me, you don’t. What you’ve got is one part truth and about six parts conjecture.