Page 172 - Make Work Great

Leading Your Crystal

opening of a door, and doors don’t stay open forever. Small, useful
insights offered at the moment of receptivity may have more impact
than well-thought-out analyses presented days later.
After you’ve heard the request for advice and set the stage for giv-
ing it, it’s best to quickly transition from understanding your advi-
see’s situation to offering insights about it. To do so, you’ll need an
interpretive framework—some set of experiences or concepts that will
help you effi ciently make sense of what you’ve just heard.*

The Framework of Experience
The fi rst and most common framework is personal experience. As you
listen to another person’s situation, you naturally seek similarities with
your own. You hear of Mary’s unwillingness to complete her regular
reports, you observe the frustration it causes, and you naturally recall
being frustrated when a member of your own staff wouldn’t comply
with reporting directives. Or perhaps you had an employee who wrote
confusing status reports or a manager who set ill-defi ned expectations
regarding your own reporting. Any of these experiences may occur to
you and naturally become your fi rst interpretive framework.
Personal experiences provide excellent starting points for under-
standing someone else’s situation. They allow you to empathize, give
you a context for asking questions, and provide the opportunity to
share personal stories, which is a powerful form of advising. On the
other hand, personal experiences are limited by your memories. You
risk recalling only the most positive or—especially—most negative
situations, and you risk “selective memory” of your own role. Worse,
your experiences may be only peripherally related to your advisee’s
current situation. The looser the connection, the more of a stretch it
is to fi nd relevance in the story. Perhaps most signifi cantly, you often

*This, by the way, is another good reason to seek to fully understand the situation before asking the
other person if he or she is requesting your advice. Once you know for certain that you are expected
to provide advice, your thoughts will naturally gravitate toward what you are going to say. If this
happens too early in your colleague’s disclosure of his or her situation, it is far too easy to miss critical
details of the situation because you are distracted by the planning of your responses.

160