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The Greatest Superpower You Already Have with Michael Bungay Stanier

Lace Gilger
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In this episode, we share some incredible insights into how you can improve your life, improve your thinking, and why advice so often gets it wrong with our guest Michael Bungay Stanier.

Michael Bungay Stanier is a leading expert in teaching organizations around the world about being coach-like as essential leadership behavior. His book The Coaching Habit is the best-selling coaching book of this century, with over 700,000 copies sold and 1,000+ five-star reviews on Amazon. In 2019, he was named the #1 thought leader in coaching and was shortlisted for the coaching prize by Thinkers50. Michael is also the founder of Box of Crayons, a learning and development company. His newest book, The Advice Trap, focuses on what it takes to stay curious a little bit longer and tame your Advice Monster.

  • Managers, leaders, and humans need to change their behavior to be more curious for longer and rush to advice-giving more slowly. 

  • “There is a TON of research that curiosity is a superpower"

  • Everybody gets that in theory.. but in practice it’s much harder. 

  • Think about how much bad advice you get daily. 

  • Advice is usually missing context, specificity, or isn’t quite right. 

  • We are almost schizophrenic about the way we give advice - we love giving other people advice, but 

  • Advice is important, but it’s our response that needs to change - we jump in and give the wrong advice or we give advice too soon. 

  • There are 3 ways that advice often goes wrong. 

  • If the person you're talking to doesn’t know what their real problem is, then the chances of your advice solving that problem are pretty minimal. 

  • Your advice isn’t nearly as good as you think it is. 

  • We have TONs of cognitive biases tricking us into thinking we’re smarter than we are. 

  • The more sure you are that you have great advice, the more likely it is that your advice is not that strong. 

  • Advice, in some ways, is condescending

  • Even though you have the answer, what might be the most powerful way to help someone could be to allow them to find the answer for themselves.

    • Help people develop accountability and self-sufficiency 

  • Advice is a massively overworked muscle for most people. 

  • We have a lot of very smart people in the world, working very hard, trying to solve the WRONG PROBLEMS. 

  • School, university and early career - it’s reinforced that you have to have the answer to add value, but the more you study leadership - you start to realize that your answers aren’t that great, and it’s more about great questions and helping people find the answers for themselves. 

  • One of the most powerful questions you can ask as a manager or leader is the FOCUS question:

    • What’s the real challenge here for you?

    • This question helps swing the spotlight from the challenge to the person - it stops being about the external issue, it starts being about why it’s hard for the person you’re talking to. 

  • Powerful questions give the people you work with the opportunity to learn, grow, and get smarter.

  • Asking questions and holding space for those you work with allows them to become more competent and more confident. 

  • Be more coach-like. How can you stay curious just a little bit longer?

  • Curiosity feels a bit touchy-feel and soft - but the reality is that it’s one of the most powerful leadership skills you can cultivate. 

  • Curiosity fuels 3 leadership virtues:

    • Mindfulness

    • Humility

    • Empathy

  • Another POWERFUL question to ask yourself:

    • "What do I know to be true?"

    • It’s really powerful to understand what’s actually going on instead of what you think is going on. 

  • Ask yourself: “Who am I at my best?"

  • Don’t give people the answer, help them find the answer for themselves. 

  • Leaders should provide a balance between certainty and curiosity.

  • Curiosity opens up the power of agility, creativity, and possibility. 

  • In times of stress, we have to be thinking BETTER - and curiosity is a key component of that. 

  • “Slow-motion multi-tasking” and using the power of creative incubation to get powerful new insights on the projects you’re working on.

  • Different moments require different leadership styles. 

  • The 3 personas of the advice monster

    • “Tell It"

    • “Save It"

    • “Control It"

  • False beliefs about giving advice:

    • Do you think that, as a leader, you need to have the answer to everything? 

    • Do you think that you’re responsible for everyone and that you must rescue everyone?

    • Do you think that the way to succeed is to never give up control?

  • All three of these false-beliefs set impossible standards for you to achieve or attain. 

  • Giving advice in some way conveys that you think you’re superior to the other person - it diminishes them. 

  • How do you tame your advice monster?

  • The difference between easy change and hard change. 

    • An easy change is adding content to what’s already there. 

  • What will you say no to now, so that you can say YES to in the future?

  • Become a connoisseur of great questions and collect them as you come across them. 

  • How do you become more curious? Start asking questions. Just start asking. Plunge into the action immediately, just ask the question and then shut up and listen to the answer. 

  • People grow and learn when you allow them to reflect? 

  • Powerful Questions

    • STRATEGIC Question: What will you say no to now, so that you can say YES to in the future?

    • FOCUS Question: What is the real challenge here for you?

    • LEARNING Question: What was the most useful or most valuable here for you?

  • When should we give advice?

    • Less often than you think. 

    • It’s very situational.

    • Give advice after curiosity has run its course. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than five million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we share some incredible insights in how you can improve your life, improve your thinking and why advice so often gets it wrong, with our guest, Michael Bungay Stanier.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous wide-spanning interview, we discussed the founding of a multi-billion dollar public company, the inside baseball of what it takes to build a truly massive business and we dug into some of the biggest questions in life, how do we deal with the problem of evil, how do we merge science and spirituality and much more with our previous guest, Scott Shay.

Now for our interview with Michael.

[00:01:38] MB: Michael Bungay Stanier is a leading expert in teaching organizations around the world about being coach-like as an essential leadership behavior. His book The Coaching Habit is the best-selling coaching book of this century with over 700,000 copies sold and a 1,000 plus five-star reviews on Amazon. In 2019, he was named the number one thought leader in coaching and was shortlisted for the coaching prize by Thinkers 50. Michael also is the founder of Box of Crayons, a learning and development company. His newest book, The Advice Trap, focuses on what it takes to stay curious a little bit longer and tame your advice monster. Michael welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:02:19] MBS: Matt, I’m happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:21] MB: Well, we're so excited to have you on the show today. I’d love to dig into this topic, because it's such a fascinating one and something that is really relevant, personally for me for sure, but for everyone is how do we tame our advice monster? Before we even get into that, what is an advice monster?

[00:02:38] MBS: Well, I love you asking that, because actually as soon as I start explaining it, everybody's going to know exactly what I’m talking about. To take one step backwards before we step forward, I would say that if I’ve got one key message that I am banging a drum about and waving a flag about and jumping up and down about it's this; I’m looking for a behavior change amongst managers and leaders and human beings to stay curious a little bit longer and rush to action and advice giving a little bit more slowly. This is what I mean to be more coach-like.

There's just a ton of research and evidence anecdotally and scientific that says curiosity is a bit of a superpower. If you can stay curious longer, you win, they win, the organization wins, we all win. Now everybody gets that in theory. In practice, we're not that great at being curious and part of our problem is our advice monster. This is what it feels like. Somebody starts talking to you, and even though you don't know that person particularly well and you don't really know what they're talking about and you don't know the people involved and you don't really understand the context and you definitely don't know the technical specifications and you don’t know the culture from which this thing is happening in, nonetheless after about 10 seconds, your advice monster looms up out of the dark and goes, “Oh, or you're going to add some value to this conversation and you've got ideas and opinions and advice and solutions and insights and actions that you are desperate to share.”

People recognize this, because they've been on both sides of the equation. They've been that person who's like, “Oh, no. I’m triggered and I’m instantly wanting to tell people what to do.” You've also been on the other side of the conversation, where you start telling somebody something and after five seconds, they have the audacity to start offering up some random piece of advice that they've just thought of. That's the advice monster and that's what we're about trying to tame your advice monster.

[00:04:32] MB: That's great. I think we've all had that experience. It's so funny. I love the way you describe it, because when you're the one giving the advice it's so easy to fall into that trap of oh, they need to hear this and this and this. Then vice versa, as soon as someone starts giving you advice, you shut down, or you just, “Oh. Yeah, no. That's not going to work. I don't need to hear that.” You know what I mean? You immediately start discounting it substantially.

[00:04:54] MBS: Just think of how much bad advice you get on a regular basis, whether it is jumping onto LinkedIn and going, “Oh, here's the people randomly pontificating about stuff,” or people who are generally your friends or colleagues and they're trying to help you out. If you think about it you’re like, “Oh, most of that advice isn't quite right, or isn't quite on point, or isn't quite useful, or is completely unuseful.”

Then even the stuff that you try, it doesn't even work that well. That's frustrating in terms of the advice that you get. We forget to realize that that's actually how people feel about our advice as well. Matt, it is worth saying that what I’m not trying to go on about here is to say never give advice, because that is – obviously, that's ridiculous. Advice is a key part of how we work, how we communicate, how we operate, how organizations and civilizations progress. It's not about advice. Advice is fine. Advice is important. What I’m trying to deal with is our default response to wanting to leap in and give ideas and give opinions and give solutions. That's the advice monster, that leaping in and trying to help every time.

[00:06:04] MB: You said something really important, which is that advice a lot of the time, especially when you jump in without really more deeply understanding everything often lacks context.

[00:06:16] MBS: Well actually, there are three ways advice goes wrong. I’ll go through one by one. The first is this, you don’t have any idea what the real problem is. You're busy trying to solve the wrong thing, because you don't have context. It's not just you, but the other person who's brought this thing to the table probably hasn't articulated the problem in a way that as clear and as insightful and as real as they might have. Often, they don't know what the problem is.

If they don't know the problem, what are the odds of you providing advice to solve the real problem? Pretty minimal. Even if, let's just say miraculously, somehow you've actually figured out what the real challenge is, it's the thing that if you could solve this, it will make a difference. Let's say that's the scenario.

Well, here's the second way that advice goes wrong. Your advice isn't nearly as good as you think it is. If you're listening to Matt in my conversation you'll go, “Yeah, Michael. I know that is true about other people's advice, because frankly that’s terrible, most of it.” My advice is actually pretty amazing. What you need to do and I’m sure there are some episodes on this is to go and listen to people talking about cognitive biases, because we have a ton of them all designed to make us feel that we're smarter than we actually are.

In fact, the more sure you are that you're smart and you have great advice, the more likely it is that you're actually not that great and your advice is not that strong. Even if, Matt, we go okay, let's say that you've somehow got the right challenge and you have a piece of gold dust advice, a really helpful, useful, powerful solution that could make all the difference, then you have this leadership moment, a leadership crossroads where the question, or what's at risk, what’s at play is this, on the one hand, you could be the person who provides the fast, right answer. In doing so, disempowers other person. In doing so, says the other person, always come to me and says to the other person, don't think, don't try and do it. Says to the other person, “By the way, I’m a little bit better than you are.”

Or you can say to yourself, “You know what? Even though I have the answer, what might be most powerful right now is to help them figure out how to find out the answer themselves,” because even if their answer is not quite as good as mine, it's probably good enough. The benefits that I get from that, they feel empowered, they feel smarter, they feel more autonomous, more competent, more confident can make all the difference to how you lead and the longer-term game that you're playing, which is you want to have people in your life who are confident and competent and self-sufficient and autonomous and all of those good things.

[00:08:59] MB: That's such a great point. I love the insight. It's funny, because if you think about it, it really comes from if you look all the way to people like Buddhist monks and teachers of Eastern religion up to something as simple as parenting, often the strategy is to help someone, or give someone a little bit of guidance, so that they can find the answer for themselves. In many ways, that's if you read stories about how Buddhist monks and stuff like that teach, that's often how they do it. They don't give you the answer. They force you to find the answer for yourself. It's such more powerful.

[00:09:30] MBS: I mean, it's a classic. Teach a person to fish, rather than giving them fish. It's a much more generative act. Now there are times when you need to give the person the fish, just to keep saying that. There's times when advice is the right thing to do. It's just a massively overworked muscle for most of us.

We're recording this at the time of crisis. COVID-19 is going on, so it's part of that cyclical part of life that all hell breaks loose. I was thinking back to the last significant crisis that showed up, which was the financial crisis back 12 years ago in 2008. One of the people I’ve come to know recently is a guy called Alan Mulally, who was the – he was very senior in Boeing and then he moved to Ford during the financial crisis to save Ford. He was the first CEO that wasn't a part of the Ford family.

At the time, Ford was losing 17 billion dollars a year. I mean, it's like, how much money is that? It’s 300 million dollars a week that they're losing. If ever there's a moment when if you're the CEO you want to be giving you advice, it would be coming into that sinking ship. For what's really distinctive about his leadership style is he said, “Look, my job as the CEO even when I thought I knew I had the best answer was really to never give the answer.” It was about making sure accountability and self-sufficiency and confidence rested in the right level of the organization, so the problem got solved in the place where it needed to get solved.

If you read his biography, he's got these great stories about going, “Yeah. Even as we were burning cut loads of cash, his job was to hold the meeting and create the space and ask the questions and not actually provide the answer.”

[00:11:19] MB: It's funny. I’ve heard a couple people recently say that that biography is awesome, so I’ll definitely have to add that to my list to check out.

[00:11:26] MBS: Yeah, and he's a very nice guy. I mean, he is one of those – if you like Jim Collins’ work, Good to Great, he's one of those level five leaders. Fairly quiet. Not super brash. Not a CEO superstar. But just absolutely committed to the two engines of successful organization, which is impact and efficiency, and also engagement and empowerment.

[00:11:49] MB: Really interesting. Well, I want to come back to something you said a second ago that I thought was another really great takeaway, which comes back to the idea of advice, which is this notion that oftentimes the person describing their problem, or challenge to you may not even themselves understand what the real issue is. The fact that you're trying to give them advice on that surface level manifestation almost guarantees in many cases, or makes it extremely likely that the advice probably isn't going to be very helpful.

[00:12:22] MBS: Right. This is part of our challenge, which is we've got a lot of very smart people in the world working very hard trying to solve the wrong problems, because the reason we have an advice monster, well there's a number of reasons, but one of them is we've spent our lifetime being rewarded for being the person with the advice. From school to university to our early career, it's all about do you have the answer? Are you a subject matter expert? Have you passed the test?

We've had a lot of training and a lot of reinforcement to say, have the answer, have the answer, have the answer. That's how you add value. It's really clear that effective leaders are the ones who recognize, actually my answers are probably not that great. Even if they are great, they may not be the best thing for me to be doing. The best thing I can do is to shift how I think about my role from the provider of the answer to the person who helps us figure out what the real challenge is.

In my earlier book, The Coaching Habit, I talked about these seven questions that anybody can start using and it will make them a more effective manager, leader, human being, because this is isn't just about a corporate setting. This is if you interact with other human beings, this stuff rings true. One of the most powerful questions and the one that's really been taken up and used by lots of people around the world now is the focus question. The focus question is this, what's the real challenge here for you? The way that is built, the way that's constructed actually matters.

Let me break this down, because I know people like a good practical tip. This may be one of the questions you want to add to your repertoire. What's the real challenge here for you? If you just ask somebody, “Okay, what's the challenge here?” It's not a terrible question, but you're likely to get a bit of a high-level executive summary of what's going on. Somebody comes in and goes, “Blah, blah, blah,” and you go, “What's the challenge here?” They'll go, “Blah, blah, blah.” They'll repeat what they've just told you.

The question becomes better as soon as you say, “All right. What's the real challenge?” Because now you're saying to them, “Look, there's more than one thing going on. This is a complex situation. I want you to think about this. Of all the things that are there, what do you think the real challenge is?” Now you're forcing them to be smarter. You're forcing them to prioritize. You're forcing them to get to the heart of the issue, the systemic problem. The question becomes even more powerful when you add the phrase, “for you” at the end of the question. What's the real challenge here for you?

Because the magic that happens here is that the spotlight swings from the problem to the person solving the problem. Now it's not, “Hey, Matt. What's the real challenge with this issue?” But you're like, “Matt, what's the real challenge here for you with this issue?” It stops being about the external issue and it starts being about why this is hard for the person you're talking to. Two amazing things happen here. The first is you are giving them an opportunity to learn and grow and get smarter.

They actually become level up in terms of their own capacity and you also solve the actual problem. You get this double benefit of solving the real issue and helping the person get smarter by the way that they've solved it.

[00:15:40] MB: That's such a great insight. The notion that we need to unlearn the conditioning from school and our early careers that we have to have the answers, the reality is that as leaders, it's often best to do the opposite of that. Both by asking questions and holding the space for other people, you give them the opportunity as you said, to learn to grow, to get smarter and to ultimately find better solutions.

[00:16:07] MBS: I mean, this way we talked about this definition of being more coach-like is to say look, can you just stay curious a little bit longer? I’m not talking hours, or days, or weeks. I’m going, “Look, I’ll take two minutes.” If you can prolong your opening conversation with two minutes of curiosity, it can be interesting to see how those conversations shift. I think you'll be stunned.

[00:16:30] MB: I’d love to dig in it a little bit on something you mentioned at the very beginning of the conversation now that you brought curiosity back up. Tell me a little bit more about the superpower of curiosity and even maybe some of the research behind it, if you know of any.

[00:16:41] MBS: Sure. Well, what they find is it's easy to sideline curiosity, because it feels a bit touchy-feely. It feels a bit like, “Oh, that was great when I was eight. I was meant to be exploring the world.” Now I’m a grown-up. I’ve got to get stuff done. I’ve got to be focused on what matters. I’m going to try and pursue what actually needs to happen here.

There was a relatively recent issue in 2019 of the Harvard Business Review dedicated entirely to the power of curiosity. This is if people are looking for a resource, that's a really great place to start, because there's seven or eight strong articles about the power of curiosity and the research behind it. What you find is that when you have people building curiosity into the way that they work, the impact of that actually moves up and down an organization. When you are working with curiosity, it allows the person you're working with, it allows them to become more confident, more self-aware, more self-sufficient.

There's a way that curiosity fuels three virtues for you potentially as a leader. There's I would say, mindfulness, humility and empathy. Let me just talk briefly about what I think those three virtues are. Those are three words that come with a lot of baggage, but I’ll give you my quick definitions of them.

I think empathy is being more other aware, so you're more conscious of the other person and what's going on for them. Mindfulness is being more situationally aware, or more reality aware. You're better aware of what's actually going on around you right now. Humility is actually being more self-aware, understanding who you are, not just your flaws and your messiness, but your complexity and your strengths and that whole mix together. Curiosity allows you to step forward into empathy and humility and to mindfulness, because when you stay curious, you are able to understand the other person more, because you haven't rushed to action, or advice, or telling them what to do. You're staying curious about what the real challenge is for them. You get to know more about who they are.

When you are more empathic, you better understand the other person across the table, or across the Zoom screen from you. With mindfulness, if you're willing to ask yourself and here's the powerful question around mindfulness, what do I know to be true? It actually allows you to be more grounded in terms of what's actually happening in a situation. If you think to yourself, for me as a leader, it's really powerful to understand what's going on, rather than what I have made up is going on, what's my judgment based on the facts, then that curiosity around, “Well, what is true? What do I know to be true right now,” is very grounding and very clarifying in terms of these are the facts, here's the data and then here's the cloud of opinion and judgment and feelings that I’ve got that swirl around that.

It's another good coaching question around, so who am I at my best, is a great question to reflect on for humility. I know who my best doesn't quite seem to fit with people's idea of humility. If you take humility as being more aware of who you are in a grounded, realistic way, then it's about actually going, so who are you at your best and what are your strengths and how do you play to those strengths?

Well, I think if you find that you are more aware who you are and you're more aware of who the other people are and you're more aware of what reality is, you're inevitably going to make better decisions and more courageous decisions, because you have a clearer eye view of exactly what's going on from three different perspectives.

[00:20:31] MB: I love all these questions. To me, one of the most important leadership skills has always been exactly what you're describing, this idea of awareness and acceptance of what's actually true about yourself, about the world, about the situation. To me, that is one of the most important skills in being successful in anything.

[00:20:50] MBS: Yeah. That then scales up to being important at a team level at an organizational level. There's a lot of talk at the moment, particularly around resilience and the need to be resilient. Well, what people want in their leaders is a balance between certainty and curiosity and finding that appropriate mix. In times of anxiety and stress and uncertainty, then people tend to default to even more certainty than before. Just tell me what to do. Just tell me what's happening. Just give me the answer.

Or if you're on the other side it’s like, “I’m just going to tell you stuff. I don't even know if it's true. I’m just trying to create certainty around here.” Obviously, there is a place for certainty. We look to our leaders and we go, actually, give me clarity here because my amygdala, that lizard brain, I don't like uncertainty. It's swirling at that moment where I’m like, I don't know what's happening. I don't know what the facts are. I’m anxious and I’m worried. The brain, that reptilian brain craves certainty. You have to find a way of giving it enough certainty to calm it down.

Curiosity is what opens up the powers of agility and the powers of possibility and innovation and creativity. If you think to yourself in times of stress, we have to be thinking better and in a more open way and in a more creative way, so we can find the next path and the next solution and the next business model and the next way of working, then that's when you need and want curiosity as well.

[00:22:26] MB: That's a great insight too. On times of stress, we have to upgrade our thinking. We have to think as clearly and creatively as possible and curiosity is such an important component of that.

[00:22:36] MBS: Yeah, and in times of stress, our brain is going the opposite.

[00:22:39] MB: That's right.

[00:22:39] MBS: It’s going, “Shut down, shut down. Narrow your vision.” Everything's black and white. Everything's fight or flight. I mean, in times of stress, it's hard to realize this because you are you, so you don't really see it the difference, but you're just thinking less well. You are just not as smart as you are when you are less stressed and able to be more open and be more subtle about what you see.

[00:23:04] MB: To me, that comes back to one of the things that I’ve seen so much in the research and I’ve heard many, many times is the importance of having some what they often call in the science, contemplative routine as part of your life, to give yourself an ability to step back, to think, to get more clarity on the situation, instead of being just stuck in a constant state of reactivity.

[00:23:25] MBS: I mean, you've talked to a lot of people, so you must have heard about a lot of people sharing their contemplative routines. What are some of the ones that you've heard most often and seem to really work for people?

[00:23:36] MB: I think it could be something as simple as I think meditation is a component of it. I don't think it's the whole solution. Just because I think you need to – I’m a huge fan of meditation, but I think you need to couple it with some journaling practice. To me, without going super deep on this, because I want to get the insights from you, turning the tables a little bit, but to me, one of the most powerful strategies is harnessing what the neuroscience calls creative incubation and essentially, planting ideas, or questions, or challenges in your mind and then consciously shifting your focus away from those for a period of time, whether that's sleeping, working out, whatever, and then returning before you get mired in e-mail and text and crises and all the stuff and just spending 10 or 15, maybe 20 minutes journaling about that challenge.

There's a ton of neuroscience around all the creative process that's unlocked by doing that. To me, leveraging that practice even once a week, or a couple times a week, or whenever you have a big challenge is such a great way to get tremendously powerful insights and get a little bit of distance from the challenge you’re dealing with.

[00:24:38] MBS: There’s a writer called Tim Harford. He’s a UK guy; has a number of really brilliant podcasts and a number of really great TED Talks as well. In one of his TED Talks, he talks about slow motion and multitasking, which is to have a series of projects on the go, and moving between the different projects, because what you allow is effectively that incubation. You work on one project and when you get stuck, you move on to the next project. When you get stuck, you move on to the next project.

There's a cross fertilization that happens in between the different projects. There's that incubation process, which is like, “I’m not actively thinking about project A. But even as I work on project B and C, part of my brain has taken away, so when I come back to project A, stuff has shifted and stuff gets unlocked.”

[00:25:27] MB: I love that term. I haven't heard that before, but I’ll definitely have to check that out and maybe we'll get him on the show, because that's a great insight.

[00:25:32] MBS: He's so articulate. He was a debating champion as a kid and a public speaking champion as a kid. He is smart and funny.

[00:25:40] MB: That's great. I was a debater in high school too, so maybe we'll have something to chat about. I really want to come back to this core theme that you've shared to me is just such a powerful learning, that this idea that instead of – and we're using the example of being a leader, being a manager, being an entrepreneur and whatever, but it applies so many areas of your life. Instead of focusing on being the person that always says the answer is commanding everyone, some of the most powerful leaders and even especially really in times of crisis, the people who really create the best results are the people who are focused on being humble, being curious, being mindful about the situation and trying to figure out how can I get the most information possible and how can I empower other people to grow, to learn, to become smarter, to become more confident and help them find the answer for themselves, as opposed to me just giving it to them?

[00:26:29] MBS: Yeah. I mean, there's an article Daniel Goleman wrote and it's in the Harvard Business Review about 20 years ago, so I think the year 2000. The article is called Leadership that Gets Results. He actually did a cross-country, cross-sector survey and found six leadership styles emerging. Actually came to the conclusion that the best leaders know how to use all six at the appropriate time. Typical leaders tend to use two, maybe three.

You don't want to walk away from here going, okay, at all times and every way I should just ask questions, because you'll become very annoying, and an inefficient leader and influencer, because this isn't just about leading a team. It's about how you interact with humans. It is about knowing that different moments require different mixes of leadership styles. It's also knowing that your curiosity and that coach-like approach to being a leader is your underutilized leadership skill right now. You default to certainty, you default to direction, you default to giving answers, and learning how to attain that advice monster and stay curious a little bit longer is the powerful step to take.

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[00:28:57] MB: Let's bring that back then to some of the different personas that the advice monster can manifest in people's lives.

[00:29:05] MBS: Perfect. Yeah, there's actually three. When we talked about that the first reason why we have an advice monster, which is practice, it was when a lifetime being rewarded and encouraged to be the person with the answer. There's a way that our advice monster there has deeper roots than just that. The three advice monsters are tell it, save it and control it. I’m going to go through each one of them.

If people are interested to know which advice monster is most real for them, there's actually a quiz, a questionnaire people can take at theadvicetrap.com. There's 20 questions, or maybe five minutes. You'll actually get a reading on which advice monster is strongest for you. You'll probably figure it out as you listen to me explain them, so here we go.

Tell it. Tell it is the noisiest of the three. Tell it basically persuaded you that your job and in fact, your vital job is to have all the answers. I mean, you need to have all the answers. In fact, if you don't have all the answers to everything, you are failing. Of course, it's actually impossible to have all the answers to everything, because even the answers you think you do have are not that great and the answers that are good, honestly people can just look up on Google anyway. That's what the advice tell it has persuaded you. That's your job. You don't have all the answers, you will fail.

The second advice monster or persona of the advice monster is save it. Save it is softer, whereas pastels put its arm around you and going, your job is you're responsible for everybody. I mean, you need to rescue everyone. You can't let anybody stumble, or struggle, or fail, or get it wrong. In fact, your job is to make sure everybody is protected and safe at all times. If anybody finds it difficult at all, you have failed. Now because you haven't picked it up, it's just impossible to do that as it is to have all the answers, but this is this advice monster, which is the save it piece. I’m a happy child free man, but parents I’ve heard particularly resonate with this one.

Then the third of the advice monsters, which is the most subtle of the three is control it. Control it has convinced you that the way you succeed, the way you win is to never give up control. I mean, keep your hands on the wheel at all times. Don't let others in. Don't share responsibility. Don't share power. Make sure that you manage and micromanage from start through the middle, or to the finish on everything, because if you give up control even for a moment, all hell will break loose, chaos will arrive and you and all will fail.

All three of these advice monsters, they're going, “No, no. You've got to jump in and give the answer, because the alternative is chaos. The alternative is failure. Now as I described those, I hope you're seeing that they actually set impossible standards. They're actually attached to if you want to get fancy about it, ego states, that sense of having the high status, having the right answer, being the rescuer, the savior, being the person who's in control at all times. That gives us some short-term wins. Look how smart I am. Look how much I care about everybody. Look how in control I am.

The short-term wins start to pale against the immediate cost to you, which is you're exhausted, you're got an impossible task, you're disempowering other people, you're effectively saying, “I’m better than you. You're not up for this. I need to take control here.” The price you pay and the price they pay and the price your organization pays far outweighs those short-term wins that you're getting from letting your advice monsters loose.

[00:32:40] MB: That's such a good insight and that's something you touched on that earlier too and I had a note to follow up on, because I think it's a very subtle part of giving advice that we often miss, which is there's a subconscious message that's being conveyed, which is, “I’m better than you. I’m smarter than you. You can't handle it. You can't do it.” Tell me a little bit more about that.

[00:33:00] MBS: If you are on the receiving end, or somebody who every time you go and talk to them goes, “Here is my answer and my answer is the right answer,” and just act on my answer, the message you're getting is you're not here to think. You're not here for you to grow, or to learn. You’re here just to do, just to implement what I’m thinking. Because you've got that advice wants to driving you and that controller and they save it in a colored piece, all of those states where you’re like, “To do that, I obviously have to be better than you, because if I’m trying to save you, obviously I have some form of superiority to you. If I’m in control of it, obviously I’m superior. If I have all the answers, obviously I’m superior as well.”

It is an act that is deeply diminishing. If that is your constant response. If you are driven by your advice monster. If everybody in your team goes, “What you do? We just show up and wait for Michael to pontificate,” then you are actively diminishing these people. By diminishing them, you're disengaging them and you’re not getting the best out of them. Of course, they're suffering from that as well, but you pay a terrible price for that, which is like, “Now, you're responsible for everything and everybody and that's exhausting and impossible.”

[00:34:14] MB: Yeah, that totally makes sense. It's many ways, the underside of giving advice that we often don't see. I want to come to – we've talked a lot about some of the pitfalls of giving advice and the way that the advice monster can manifest itself in our lives. How do you think about taming the advice monster?

[00:34:34] MBS: Curiosity is the great cure-all for this. It's about understanding that if you can move to staying curious a little bit longer, then that is the specific behavior that will make a difference. Now part of the reason I wrote The Advice Trap, was I wrote The Coaching Habit and The Coaching Habit says, “Look, here are seven solid, tested, reliable questions. If you can build those into your everyday routine, you'll be a more effective person.”

There's hundreds of thousands of people who went, “I get it and I’m using it,” and it's true. I am a better, smarter, manager, leader, human being as a result of these seven questions and it's fantastic. There are also a bunch of people who probably read the book, went, “Michael it's a good book, but you know what? It's really hard to change my behavior to actually shift to doing that.” I think for the people who don't just pick up the questions and go, “Oh, this is what I was waiting for. I’ll just start adding those to my repertoire,” you have to do a little deeper work.

In the book, I talk about the difference between easy change and hard change. Easy change is the metaphor is it's like downloading a new app. You're adding content to what's already there. That can be as simple as going, here are the seven questions. Use these. Okay, great. I’ve got the app. I’ll use the questions. Things are better.

For some of us downloading a new app, doesn't work. I mean, we've all downloaded apps that are exercise apps and we're not exercising. What's going on about that? Well, turns out that for some of us, it's not an app we need, it's a new operating system. For some of us, taming our advice monster is actually rethinking about how we show up and what it will take for us to level up to get to that next stage.

It's not a fast, simple answer. It takes, this is self-work, this is hard change. It's hard. I’ll share the question that's at the heart of this work, which is what we say no to now about the way you currently work, so that you can say yes to a better way of working in the future. What that means is you need to say to yourself things like, “I need to say no to being the person who thinks he's the smartest person in the room, so that I can say yes to inviting others in my team to have answers, so that they can actually contribute and actually grow in confidence and competence and autonomy like I’ve been hoping.”

[00:37:04] MB: That's another great question. You have so many fascinating questions and I am writing all these down, because I definitely want to use these in the future. I think all of them are so good at shaping your response in a way that you get really productive answers.

[00:37:18] MBS: Yeah. When I started doing my coach training formally 20 years ago, but informally 30 years ago, I used to just collect questions. Anytime I see somebody ask a question and I see it land and really work I’d be like, “Oh, that's a good one. Write that down.” Then I’d see other questions that didn't seem to work as well and we're like, “Okay. Why didn't that work? Why didn't it land?” Often, it's too complicated, or too cerebral, or too long, or there's too much of an introduction, or whatever.

To everybody who's listening, one of the ways for you to become more curious is to become a connoisseur of good questions. Keep your ears out, keep your eyes out, collect the ones that work and practice and see which ones start working for you.

[00:38:04] MB: I think that's great. I’m curious, how do you think about both asking better questions and I love the idea of becoming a connoisseur of questions and collecting them. I think that's a great strategy. Beyond that, how do you think about asking really good questions and what are some of the other really powerful questions that you've uncovered or discovered along the way?

[00:38:23] MBS: Well, in terms of asking good questions, I’m going to just start with the most obvious thing, which is ask questions. Actually, ask a question. Because in the classic way, what's the best form of exercise routine? It's the one you do. What's the best question? It's the one you ask. If you want to start asking good questions, just start asking questions.

If I was going to offer up one suggestion, it would be you don't need an introduction, you need a lead-in, you don't need an explanation of why you're about to ask this question, just think like a James Bond film. James Bond films, they're like, you plunge into the action immediately. Do the same with your questions, which is plunge in and just ask the question. Then shut it up and listen to the answer. This stuff doesn't sound that complicated and it's not. It's ask a question, shut up, listen to the answer.

It's really powerful, because it's difficult, because not many of us are good at doing that. If I was to share some other questions for people to listen to perhaps use and to add, we've heard the focus question, which is what's the real challenge here for you. You've heard the strategic question, which is what am I going to say yes to? If I’m going to say yes to that, what must I say no to?

I think one of the most powerful ones you can add is the learning question. The learning question is the seventh question in the coaching habit book. If you say to yourself, “Look, my job is to actually help my people be better and smarter and to grow and learn,” you need to understand how people grow and learn. People don't grow and learn from you telling them stuff, or even by them doing stuff. They grow and they learn when you give them an opportunity to stop and reflect.

The learning question is what was most useful, or most valuable here for you? We can put that into play right away, because Matt and I coming to the end of this conversation now and we've covered quite a lot in the 45 minutes or so that we've been chatting away. I’d be curious, dear listener, what was most useful or most valuable here for you? What I hope you noticed is I asked that question and you immediately start thinking, is it starts making this podcast episode more useful for you right away, because previously you're like, “Oh, that's pretty good. Mike was entertaining. Matt's a great interviewer. This builds on some other stuff that I knew about. I enjoyed it.”

Now I go, Yeah. What was most useful or most valuable? Was it the strategic question? Was it the advice monsters? Was it the advice monster questionnaire? Was it something that Matt said? Was it something that Michael said? Now I’m forcing you to get the value and extract what was most useful for you. Then if you were to write a review of the podcast and go, “This is a great episode and this is what I learned from it.” Of course, every podcast host wants a review, so you should think about writing a review if you haven't done that already.

What would then happen is that Matt and I would read the reviews and we go, “Oh, that was what was most useful,” and we would learn as well. That question has a double benefit. It helps you get smarter and helps the other person get smarter at the same time.

[00:41:41] MB: That's great. You know, we ask guests at the end of every single interview, what's one practical action step that you'd recommend that listeners take to start taking action on what we talked about today and you may have already answered it with that question. I love how specific and actionable and direct that was.

[00:41:58] MBS: All this stuff can say theoretical, but it only becomes interesting if you're actually practicing it and trying it out and stumbling around a bit and just getting better question, by question of being curious.

[00:42:09] MB: Yeah. That's certainly true. That reminds me of something you said a second ago that is another great point, which is this idea that you don't have to be an expert at asking questions to just start. The way you build that muscle is by getting out there and plunging into the action and just asking whatever comes to mind and starting to get comfortable with asking a lot of questions.

[00:42:32] MBS: I’m going to really want to unweird the whole idea of coaching. If you're thinking yourself coaching is for special people, then we need to get over that fast, because be more coach-like is simply, can you stay curious a little bit longer, and anybody can do that. Coaching is not weird. It's just asking a good question and then shutting up and listening to the answer.

[00:42:51] MB: Almost reminds me of that anecdote about Abraham Lincoln, or there's a couple other ones, but the idea of if you had an hour to chop down a tree, you spend 55 minutes sharpening the axe.

[00:43:01] MBS: Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a quote similarly and Einstein going, “If I had to solve a problem, I’d spend 59 minutes trying to figure out what the real problem was and 1 minute trying to solve it.” The same insight.

[00:43:12] MB: Yup. Yeah, that's great. One other thing that I’m curious about and you hinted at this a couple times in the conversation as well, but when should we give advice?

[00:43:23] MBS: Well, it's situational, so it's hard to say. I will say that generically, it's less often than you'd think. You give advice after curiosity has run its course. Sometimes that's immediately. Somebody comes into your office and goes, “Hey, Michael. Where do I find the paper for the printer?” You don't really want to go, “How do you feel about the wood pulping industry?” Because they’d be like, “What the hell?” You're like, “It's just over there.” They're like, “Great. Thank you.”

I would say that anytime somebody shows up, you have full permission to give them advice, just stay curious a little bit longer. Ask questions. See if they know what the real challenge is. See if they've got ideas on how to solve this themselves and you'll find that there's a time where you're like, “Oh, this feels like the right time now for me to offer advice. It's just less than you think and it's later than you think.”

[00:44:16] MB: Yeah. That's a great point. It comes back to something you said earlier, which is not that you shouldn't advice and nothing necessarily inherently wrong with advice. It's really that our default mode, our default setting reverts to jumping in action too quickly, giving advice too rapidly and not being just a little bit more curious and a little bit more contemplative.

[00:44:39] MBS: Exactly.

[00:44:40] MB: Just making sure that we ask and answer this, what is one action step or concrete thing you would recommend for listeners to do to implement?

[00:44:50] MBS: Well, look. I would say that if this sounds interesting to you, then the most powerful steps to changing your behavior is start noticing your advice monster. I know that sounds a bit ethereal, but until you start noticing how quickly you leap in to start solving things and offering up ideas and opinions, then you are going to get seduced every time into thinking that it was a good idea for you to offer up ideas and opinions.

It's start noticing your advice monster. Like I say, you can go to theadvicetrap.com and do the questionnaire to figure out which advice monster is most real for you. That might make you more sensitive to what's going on. Do that or don't do it, but start noticing your advice monster. Because once you start seeing the pattern of bad behavior, you can then start thinking about how you might want to change that to be curious a bit longer.

[00:45:39] MB: Michael, where can listeners find more about you, your work and the book online?

[00:45:44] MBS: Oh, thanks for asking. The hub for me is mbs.works and you can find courses and access various bits and pieces and podcasts and the like from me. If you want to go deeper in the book, there's lots of free resources at theadvicetrap.com, the questionnaire, some video processes that people can test out and practice taming their advice monster on.

[00:46:05] MB: Well Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show, some great insights. I really learned a lot in this conversation. I love all of the really powerful questions that you shared.

[00:46:15] MBS: It’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me, Matt.

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