Hold the Advice, Give ðŸ¤Â Attention
What’s gone wrong?
It is a frequently asked question. Hyper-vigilance is a very familiar inner voice that seeks to know what the danger is ahead or ruminate on what has already failed. It is a voice that has saved me from making mistakes. However, it has been equally powerful in saving me from experimenting and exploring beyond safe boundaries.
It is a question that is rooted in the expectation that things go wrong, and people make mistakes. When this is the mindset of a leader, the automatic reaction is that something or someone needs fixing. The form of feedback, that results from the propensity to tell employees how to fix their thinking and actions, is called ‘advice’. As I discussed in last week’s article on feedback, giving advice is rarely received well.
Asking ‘what’s gone wrong’ and its many variations, is a pervasive habit. If you are a leader that expects things to go wrong and people to make mistakes, you have primed yourself to notice even more problems and mistakes. You are in pattern of ‘policing for failure’. Even when nothing is wrong, you will find something that needs fixing.
Looking for and finding areas for performance improvement, aka ‘opportunities for growth’, and attending to them with advice for change, is a motivation killer. In performance review conversations and feedback sessions, the ‘fixee’ automatically reacts with a fight, fright, freeze, or appease stance.
If your goal is to have fewer problems and mistakes to fix, a very different question will get you there. It is simply…
What’s going right?
When you prime yourself to look for what your Team members are doing easily, efficiently, creatively (they might be ways that are different from yours) these are times to zoom in with ‘feed – forward’. Rather than correcting a past mistake with feed – back, you want to multiply right things with feed – forward.
In last week’s article I explained that feedback feels like advice and advice rarely gets a good response. A better strategy is to give…attention, positive attention. Positive attention increases engagement scores (according to Gallup Poll research) by 30 times more than giving negative attention (advice included). Positive future focused attention primes the brain to take in and access more information which leads to greater learning.
You might be thinking about how to handle the mistakes that occur no matter how much time you spend acknowledging what is going well. It is a leaders’ responsibility to set out the expectations and guidelines clearly and then get out of the way.
If you still think you need to correct a situation by imparting your knowledge, give the following questions a try before resorting to a monologue:
- What is working right now?
- What have you done in the past that worked in a similar situation?
- What do you already know works for you in this situation?
By asking these questions you trigger their problem-solving abilities, their unique approach, their confidence. Notice that these are ‘what’ questions. Avoid the temptation to start with ‘why’, such as why did you or why didn’t you… which only puts them on the defensive and as explained earlier, defensiveness blocks learning and creativity. ‘What’ questions and especially, ‘what if’ questions trigger curiosity and openness.
When you feed – forward, you are leading with influence towards growth!