Page 174 - Make Work Great

Leading Your Crystal

is the very reason your advisee sought you in the fi rst place. When
this happens, your advice begins to seem impersonal and detached.
As you can see, to give truly outstanding situational advice, you need
to combine personal experience with the framework of a model and
offer your advisee insights and suggestions that make use of both.

Culture-Driven Advice: The Best of Both Worlds
The good news is that at this point in your development as a cultural
crystal builder, you already have a perfect set of practical models and
a body of related experience to use as an advisor. Your models are
designed to enhance workplace performance and have a built-in set
of questions to help you hone in on the most important issues of the
moment. You’ve practiced using them yourself, so they are integrated
with your personal experiences and allow you to blend theoretical
suggestions with practical examples. Your models are targeted yet
fl exible, so they almost always lead to useful discussion and action.
Best of all, you probably have them memorized by now.
These models are the cultural patterns you’ve been demonstrating:
your practices of overtness about task and clarity about relationship.
The use of your new cultural patterns as an advisory framework
should strike you as being, if nothing else, extremely logical. These
patterns of workplace activity have led you to receive more requests for
advice in the fi rst place. Why not use them as part of your response?
After all, at a conceptual level, advice seekers who perceive you mov-
ing toward the right of the graph in Figure 7.1 are really asking you to
explain what you’re doing differently. The specifi c complaint or issue
they bring up is the context for having the conversation, a particular
excuse to ask about the general pattern. By incorporating the general
pattern in your response, you help them with the specifi c issue while
still having a broader discussion and helping them become that much
more self-suffi cient for the next similar issue that arises.
Using your new cultural precedents as an advisory framework is
actually quite straightforward. After your advice has been requested,

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