Charmain Bogue | The Problem With Advice That Sounds Wise

 

Charmain Bogue in her office

Wise-sounding advice is often the most expensive kind, because it feels like enough.

The advice most commonly given to people early in their careers is also, in my experience, the least useful. Work hard. Be patient. Find a good mentor. Build your brand. Treat every interaction like an interview. Show up and stand out.

None of it is wrong exactly. It just does not tell anyone anything they can do tomorrow.

Why vague advice is so popular

Broad advice travels easily. It can be applied to almost anyone because it specifies almost nothing. "Find your voice" works as advice for a twenty-two-year-old in her first job and for a forty-five-year-old executive trying to communicate more effectively in the boardroom. The fact that it works equally well for both is a sign that it is not really advice. It is a sentiment.

Sentiments feel good to receive and to give. They communicate care and encouragement, which are real things. But they do not produce behavior change, because they contain no information about what specifically to do differently. The person who leaves a mentoring session with "trust the process" in her notebook is in almost exactly the same position she was in when she arrived.

What actionable advice actually requires

Giving real advice requires knowing something specific about the situation. It requires asking enough questions to understand not just the problem but the particular obstacles, the constraints, the history of what has already been tried. It takes longer than offering a perspective. It is less satisfying in the moment because the answer is not elegant. Elegant answers are almost always too simple for complicated situations.

The mentors I have found most valuable in my own career were the ones who said things like: in this specific situation, given what you have told me, I think the real issue is this, and here is what I would try first and why. The specificity felt less like wisdom and more like work, because it was. They had taken the time to engage with the particulars of my situation rather than offering me the same answer they would give anyone.

What I try to do in my own mentoring

I ask more questions than I used to before I say anything prescriptive. What have you already tried? What did that produce? What are the constraints you are working inside? Who else has a stake in how this turns out? I am not building toward a wise-sounding conclusion. I am trying to understand the actual situation well enough to say something useful about it.

The goal is not to be quotable. It is to be helpful in a way the person can act on by Thursday. Those are different standards. The first one is easier. The second one is why they asked.

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