The truth about giving advice for a living...
(This is from Edition 73 of The Upleveler, our weekly smartletter)
...is that much of it is rarely implemented personally by the people giving the advice
(wherever it applies, of course). Consultants, parents, coaches, leaders: anyone with the power to advise is guilty of this.
So s/w companies will tell their customers how to create great tech experiences for their employees, but will provide terrible payroll and HR software for their own. Consulting companies will be roped in to make teams better learners, while wondering why their own folks have stagnated. Leaders will advise their employees to become innovative, more curious, and present better, while rarely doing it themselves. As for parents who want their children to read more, their own cupboards are likely to be bare.
That's because:
Knowing-Doing Gap: Putting ideas into action is much harder than knowing about them.
The Status Quo: Change is tough. The human machine isn’t quite optimized for doing difficult things now to ensure a better future.
Opportunity Cost and Urgency: If someone pays you to fix their leaky tap today, you tend to ignore the dripping sound in your own basement. Especially if it takes time and money.
Plain Old Blind Spots: It’s easier to spot flaws in others and prescribe fixes for them. But the gaze is rarely turned inwards.
The result is a sort of low grade, often benign, hypocrisy.
Some of CTQ's work falls into the “can you bring us ideas to solve a knotty problem?” category. So we are in danger of making the same mistakes. So we’ve tried hard to overcome these gaps. We try and put a lot of ideas into action in our own working and personal lives. ‘Dog-fooding’ gives us a first-hand view of what pitfalls these ideas must overcome to see the light of day. Being our own guinea pigs helps create credibility. And why not benefit from great ideas ourselves?
So, over time, we’ve deliberately brought great ideas into our own work:
Fostering curiosity in others led to the Daily Reading Compound.
Helping customers improve future readiness led to our in-house Future Fitness program.
Before encouraging managers to become better decision-makers by using great mental models, we integrated the idea of ‘pre-mortems’ in our planning.
Getting teams to become more innovative led to ‘Thinkathons’ and practice grounds.
You get the idea. Yes, we often trip up and forget our own medicine, but at least it hurts less when we do. Sometimes, it's hard to tell how successful we have been in upleveling others. But we have no doubt that we’ve done it for ourselves.
So, if you are an advice-giver, what can you do to ensure you get the benefit of such advice yourself?
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