Welcome to the Monthly Newsletter by Amer Kaissi
Edition #7, May 2020
The book for this month is “The Advice Trap” by Michael Bungay Stanier (MBS), published earlier in 2020.
MBS is a remarkable coach and an intelligent and very funny author. The main premise of this short book is that as human beings and especially as leaders, we love to give advice to others, whether that advice is needed or not. In most cases, however, we try to solve the wrong problem or we propose a mediocre solution, which invariably demotivates the other person. What others really need from us, instead of advice, is curiosity and listening. They need a coach, not a consultant.
In his typical hilarious way, MBS call this tendency to give advice the “Advice Monster” that lives inside of us. Taming that monster is very hard change because it involves changing our thinking. We need to change our thinking from giving advice to others to empowering them through questions, from making choices for others to supporting them in making their own choices. In brief, as leaders, we need to take a back seat and teach people how to drive, rather than doing all the driving ourselves.
A cool connection that MBS makes is between coaching and humility (one of my favorite topics!). He argues that when we give advice, we do it because deep inside we believe that we are better than the other person. But when we listen and be curious, we show empathy and humility. Humility doesn’t mean pretending that we know nothing. It means knowing our strengths and weaknesses, our wisdom as well as the wisdom that is in the room. “Being humble means that you control less and influence more than you realize, that you’re both important and not that important,” he notes.
If you prefer to start from the beginning, I recommend that you check MBS’s first book “The Coaching Habit,” a coaching classic on the seven most important questions that leaders can use to better coach their people.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of the Newsletter. Every month, I will share with you one leadership or management book that I am reading, and tell you what I learned from it.
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Dr. Amer Kaissi is a Leadership Keynote Speaker and a workplace culture and high-performance teams’ expert.
