Advice ~ Both giving and receiving take practice.

Advice is both hard to give and to receive.

Giving advice:
I know what you're thinking. “Advice is easy to give.”
No it is not.

Good advice only comes after understanding the situation. Understanding the situation always includes genuine listening and clarification. It is a big challenge to learn about a complex situation and immediately provide solid advice.

“Ok, I believe I understand the situation and ideally I would need to give it some thought before I give thoughtful advice.” is what we all should say ~ but we rarely do.

Because we care and want to add value to the conversation immediately we tend to jump right in. That’s ok, as long as we first share that we are affectively going to “think out loud as we work the situation real time.”

We need to be mindful that the act of asking for advice is a huge deal for many of us.

To be a good advice giver, we must; assume its confidential, listen, clarify, think about it and get back to the person or ask for permission to think out load as we work through it.

Receiving advice:

Everyone needs advice from time to time. Even the people who end up giving advice need advice. That being said, we often have a sort of “asking for advice remorse” about 10 seconds after asking, especially if the person we asked goes off on a tangent with out taking the time to understand the situation.

Beyond the obvious goodness in advice, asking for advice can be a very powerful relationship building approach. In situations where you have a new partner, customer, supplier, employee and somehow things have not gotten off to a good start, asking the persons advice is often the kind of ice breaker you need.

“Hey Mike, I have been thinking a lot about our first month on this project. I would be really interested in your views on what we might do to improve going forward. I would just like to give you the floor and let you share with me what you think. I am listening.”

The above approach works amazingly well. Listen and clarify by playing back key points. The person you are asking is often first surprised, then intrigued, and even impressed if he/she feels that there has been an over due breakthrough in communications.

But what if the advice is totally off base ?
The cool thing about advice is that it is not binding in any way. I listen to lots of advice, take the best parts and implement, and put the rest in file 13.

In a situation where the “asking for advice remorse” sets in quickly and the advice is totally off base, take the best advice you probably have ever been given ~ from your parents. “If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t both saying anything at all.” Except for of course saying; “thank you, I haven’t heard that perspective before, I’ll think about what you said.”

We all should ask for advice more often.

Giving and receiving advice both take practice.

Dan MacDonald

Leadership Envy

If only we Canadians could vote in the current US primaries and ultimate election in November 2008.

Seems that Canadians are watching the US political scene more than usual these days. It is very easy to find someone who wants to share their opinion on who has the edge currently , how their favorite would reestablish America in the eyes of the world, etc.

The keen interest in the US political scene intrigues me. Why are Canadians so interested ?
I believe the answer is very straight forward. Envy.

Don’t get me wrong, the envy I am talking about here is relatively narrow. Canadians are very aware of their current strengths economically, relating to universal healthcare, having not gone to war in Iraq, etc, etc.

The envy here related specifically to leadership. We envy the Americans because they have high quality leaders in the race who people can not only relate to, but actually look forward to being lead by. Further it seems that people are participating in democratic process (voting) in record levels.

Wow ! How good it must be to be excited about an election and the candidates running. We in Canada can only dream in the short and medium term.

Unlike our neighbors to the south, we observe the now monthly games of "if you do not support this or that, we will be forced to call an election" chicken between the overly confident minority federal government and a very weak opposition.

I can only hope that the leaders in Canada are also intrigued with the US political scene. Further, I hope they can see the unprecedented engagement of the electorate.

I believe we will, in the next 5 to 10 years, have the opportunity to fully engage in the democratic process and cheer on our favorite top quality charismatic candidate.

Until then, when it comes to political leadership, we will live vicariously through our neighbors to the south.

Dan MacDonald