Three Summary Ideas from The Advice Trap

The Advice Trap by Michael Bungay Stanier subtitled — Be Humble, Stay Curious & Change the Way You Lead Forever is a follow-up to a previous brilliant book titled — The Coaching Habit. In the Coaching Habit, Stanier taught us seven questions that can enable easier coaching conversations and he has followed that up in this book by challenging us to give less advice, coach more, ask more, and listen more.

Stanier emphasizes that this book just like the previous one is not about turning you into a coach. Rather, the focus is to make you a leader, manager, and a human who’s more coach-like.

So, what can you expect to learn from reading this book? A lot, I believe. The book is divided into three distinct parts with various topics. Following is a quick outline of each part.

Part 1: Tame Your Advice Monster

• Easy change vs. hard change
• How to Tame Your Advice Monster

Part 2: Stay Curious Longer

• Coaching Is Simple
• Uncover the Real Challenge
• Seal the exits
• Seek Saturation
• Move Away from Old Fears

Part 3: Master Your Coaching Habit

• Be Generous
• Be Vulnerous
• Be a Student
• Be an Advice-Giver

In the second part of the book, there are sections dedicated to practicing each topic.

Stanier has a way of writing that makes the book engaging, so you won’t get bored reading it. Though, he does like to dive into the research behind things a bit but not in a complicated way.

Here’s a statement from the book that tries to capture Stanier’s thinking about advice and why he wrote the book:

No matter our good intentions, we love to give advice. We love it. As soon as someone starts talking, our plan to be curious goes out the door and our Advice Monster looms out of our subconscious, rubbing its hands and declaring, “I’m about to add some value to this conversation! Yes. I. Am!” This is the Advice Trap: when giving advice is your default management style. I’m willing to bet you’re ensnared in this trap, and that a typical interaction with you looks like this…

Not very good, is it?

I have taken the following three takeaway lessons from the book.

1 — The Advice Monster and Four Steps to Tame it

2 — Three Foundational Principles for Easy Coaching

3 — The Coaching Habit of Being Generous

The Advice Monster and Four Steps to Tame it

What is the Advice Monster?

It’s the desire to keep giving advice because you believe you know the answers and your advice always works. But the reality is that it does not always work and always giving advice is dysfunctional because it takes responsibility away from those you are advising.

To understand the Advice Monster even more you need to know about its three personas. These personas are: ‘Tell-It’, ‘Save-It’, and ‘Control-It’.

Tell-It

This is the most obvious and loudest persona of the Advice Monster. It is the belief that you were hired to have and give answers. You are convinced that if you don’t have the answer, you have failed at your job. It is the mindset that having the answer is the only real way to add value and the only way you will be recognized as a success. Some of the qualities of this persona are that:

• You love the spotlight.
• You have the ‘I know best’ mentality.
• You appear all the time to solve problems.

Save-It

This one is less obvious and more subdued and it is about being there to save people. According to Stanier:

Save-It tactics is to take you aside and explain, earnestly, that if it wasn’t for you holding it all together, everything would fail. Your job is to be fully responsible for every person, every situation and every outcome.

Qualities of Save-It are:

• This is common but such people are good at pretending to be helpful.
• Prevalent when potential conflict is at play.
• Loves to seek out ‘so-called victims’ to help.

Control-It

The Control-It is the belief that you must be in control all the time. It is having the mindset that everything is controllable, so long as you’re in charge. The thinking with this one is, don’t trust others, don’t share power, and don’t cede control.

Qualities include:

• Ever present but discreet, manipulative, and in the background.
• Delusions of grandeur.
• Sometimes unable to let go.
• Wants you to believe that you’re the only one stopping chaos

While they are all different they really are the same because they make you believe you are better than the other person.

So, what can we do to tame the Advice Monster?

Here are four steps:

Step 1 — Who let the dogs out?

You can’t tame your Advice Monster until you know what sets it off. What triggers your Advice Monster? Do you know the people or situations that trigger it?

You’ve got to know the trigger before you can change the habit.

Step 2 — Confessions

Once you have identified what the triggers are, then ask yourself a honest question — what does the Advice Monster (Tell-It or Save-It or Control-It) actually make you do? What actions do you find yourself taking because of your Advice Monster?

What you’re doing here is confessing to bad behaviour, so it’s a little awkward. Powerful and useful…but still awkward.

Step 3 — Prizes & Punishments

What are the advantages and disadvantages of the behaviours you identified in the previous steps? While we’ve labeled Advice Monster behaviour as dysfunctional, we do it because in a way it benefits us, so identifying those benefits is helpful. Clearly articulating those benefits can further help you understand why you do it and those benefits may be stopping you from becoming better That prevention from becoming better are the punishments and disadvantages of the behaviour.

Step 4 — Future You FTW!

FTW stands for ‘Future You Wins’.

To make the transition away from the Advice Monster, you need to know what you are leaving behind and what you are stepping into which should be the Future You.

This is Future You: a way to think better, lead better, feel better, and be better.

Future You benefits (by stepping away from the Advice Monster) include:

• you add value by empowering others rather then offering up advice.
• You don’t always need to have the answer. You can depend on others to contribute.
• You can still share your advice and wisdom but in a deliberate and selective way rather than being reactive.
• You don’t need to be responsible for everyone else’s lives.
• You can support people by helping them make their own choices rather than making choices for them.
• You can focus on empowering people instead of controlling them.

Three Foundational Principles for Easy Coaching

The goal of coaching is to empower others to own their solutions and problems and think for themselves. Coaching does not mean we never give advice, it just implies that advice has its place.

As we work towards developing our coaching behaviour, here are three foundational principles that can help.

Be Lazy

Be lazy about jumping in and solving other people’s problems for them. Stop doing it. Remember coaching is about empowering people to own and solve their own problems.

Be Curious

We can’t be more coach-like if we are not curious. Being curious is the act of being eager to know or learn something. Curious people are more likely to ask than tell and this is what it means to tame your Advice Monster.

Be Often

Coaching should not be an occasional, hierarchical, formal event.

Every interaction can be a bit more coach-like because, after all, it’s just a question of staying curious a little bit longer.

In all our engagements we can be more coach-like whether it’s in meetings, on email, on the phone, when sending a text message or on collaborative platforms like Slack and Teams.

The Coaching Habit of Being Generous

How can we be more generous in our coaching habit?

According to Stanier:

It’s more about an open-heartedness that is welcoming and accepting, that sees the best in the situation and in the person.

People who coach well use generosity all the time and they use it in the following three ways.

Generous Silence

Be generous with silence. You are able to offer generous silence when you can welcome silence as a place of comfort and warmth instead of feeling anxious about it.

Generous silence gives people the space to think and reflect and it does not have to take long. At the same time it signals that you are patient in the conversation.

Generous silence can allow the delicate insights of a conversation to blossom and bloom.

Generous Transparency

This is about your willingness to be transparent about what the process is and how you are feeling about the conversation. People who do this well are able to describe how they are feeling in the conversation and be open about when they don’t feel in control. This takes time to master but over time and with practice we are able to do it.

Generous Appreciation

Stanier writes that:

The final form of generosity is the art of appreciating someone. Not as in admiring them from afar, but as in letting them know how they matter.

This involves you speaking to the person and acknowledging their qualities beyond what they have and haven’t done. You shine a light on who they are.

Generous appreciation sees the person they are beyond the things they do.

This is my review and quick lessons from Michael Bungay Stanier’s book — The Advice Trap. There are many more lessons in this book than I have not shared here.

If you read the book or have read it, why don’t you share some of your insights from the book?

Thank you.