Personal Development

Most advice is useless. How can you be more helpful?

Giving good advice is seriously hard. And often the advice itself is the least valuable part. Here is how to do it better and provide more value.

I often get asked for advice — by family, team members, or start-ups I mentor. People regularly ask for my opinion on a large variety of topics — some in my area of expertise, others really outside of it. Which is fairly typical of the way most people go about asking for advice. Rather than identifying someone who has struggled well with similar issues, they often take shortcuts and ask a person they are close to, or a person who they feel is in a position of leadership.That already poses the first problem.

There plenty of people ready to jump in with opinions, which might end up being more harmful than useful:

Such individuals, firmly entrenched in the ego-gratifying habit of telling others what they should do, rarely can wait to be asked for their opinion. Routinely anxious to declare that they know something you don’t, they’re apt to offer suggestions or solutions prematurely. (Psychology Today)

One option for you is, of course, to turn the advice seeker away because of the lack of comparable experience to avoid doing harm. You might have no direct reference to the posed problem, or your own experience might be irrelevant in the context. On the other hand, there are ways you can still add value and help the person seeking your support. It might now be through a direct opinion — but have you tried elaboration?

The advice itself often matters least

When people come looking for help, they usually have framed their problems already. And with that framing, they typically have a few possible solutions in mind. When a start-up founder comes too me asking for hiring advice regarding his second-in-command, they usually have a few options thought through already. The direct request is then for my input on which of their options might be the best choice.

Subconsciously, however, people are often looking for confirmation. They would already have a preferred option, yet might seek validation before acting on it:

A related tendency is to ask for advice when one’s real goal is to gain validation or praise. People do this when they strongly believe they’ve solved the problem but still want to “check the box” with bosses or peers. Or they do it when they have lurking doubts about a solution but dread the time and effort it would take to do better. (HBR)

They are typically not all that interesting in input that diverges from the choice they are looking to validate. While that is never expressed, it often comes through in the way the potential solutions are framed. There is no real point in giving an opinion in this scenario.

What I have found more helpful than to weigh in on the topic at hand directly is to offer a personal experience as a referential narrative. Rather than telling them how they should act, find a story from your own past experience and explain the situation you have been in, how you thought about it, how you acted and what the result was. That might not directly address their problem, but gives them a new dimension to consider.

In the case of the start-up founders asking for hiring advice, rather than telling them which candidate I’d choose, I’d elaborate on my dilemma five years back. I was in a very similar position of having to hire a right hand for myself to free myself up and continue developing the organization. Yet my first choice ended up being suboptimal for multiple reasons, which led to a negative outcome. And I’d explain what happened as a consequence.

This gives the person asking for advice a reference of how a potential choice could go and what pitfalls they need to look out for potentially. But without the discomfort of invalidating or contradicting any of their subconscious decisions.

They are free to adjust those with what they took from the story, as they see fit under their own circumstances.

Reframing the problem

Another powerful tool can be to help reframe the problem. We often jump into problem frames without questioning them thoroughly. By, for example, framing the hiring problem as a choice between different candidates, the start-up founder directly assumes that: a) The only way to free up is hiring, b) only one person can be hired, c) they need to scale up right now.

The problem framing comes with many assumptions.

These assumptions are often implicit rather than explicit. Problem framing is usually done on intuition, rather than purposefully. Therefore alternatives frames are rarely considered, and possible alternative solutions to the root problem, which remains unexpressed, are not discovered. This leads to local optimization at the cost of the big picture.

Many seekers also take for granted background essentials (often about past incidents or organizational politics) that their advisers don’t know. Or they may misdefine the problem by placing arbitrary boundaries around it and excluding important data, which skews their own and their advisers’ assessments. (HBR)

The start-up founder could, for example, widen the frame. Instead of asking, “Who should I hire to support me?” they could ask, “How can I lessen my workload?”. Or they might perform a root cause analysis first — “Why am I so busy?”. The best answer might not be a new hire, but instead automating some busywork, redefining personal focus or similar.

As the person being asked for advice, you can help them open up the frame and rethink the problem.

Instead of jumping into giving an opinion, help them to analyze some of their hidden assumptions first, and potentially support them in reframing their problem. This can be much more valuable, then giving any concrete advice right away.

Everyone makes their own decisions

In the end, you will never be deep enough in the context of a person to make the right decision for them. Therefore I believe that the actual giving of concrete advice is the least valuable part of the whole experience. It is often in direct conflict with a sub-conscious choice that is already there, in which case it is usually discarded. Or it just reconfirms the decision that was primarily made anyways, such no one gains.

If you want to add some value, it can be much more insightful to share a story of your own.

This story should be somewhat related, yet should give all the context also to highlight differences. By elaborating on your situation, how you decided and what happened, you add new dimensions and references for the person seeking your support.

Another great way to help them is to question the assumption inherent in the problem framing.

They might have landed on a problem too quickly, which is not the real problem they need to solve. Questioning the hidden assumptions and problem framing can help them see the actual problem more clearly and therefore find better solutions. And in the end, it is up to them to make a decision. All you can do is to try to shine a broader light on the path so that they can choose more consciously.

The next time someone asks you for advice, here are some techniques you can try to be more genuinely helpful to the advice seeker:

• Help them reframe the problem. Ask questions to better understand the structure of the problem, and potentially help them redefine the struggle.
• Offer anecdotes and reference experiences, instead of answers. Most likely your answers won’t be their answers, but by sharing your own struggles and similar situations, they might be able to get a new view on theirs.
• Avoid telling them what to do. Most likely, they will have a (subconsciously) preferred answer already. By jumping straight into solutions, you most likely won’t add much value.

If you have any thoughts, responses or questions to add, I would love to hear from you in the comments below, or feel free to reach out to me directly via LinkedIn. Thank you for reading.