Don’t advise team members.

It’s difficult to advise someone, isn’t it?

Advice correct weaknesses but lose strengths

Advice is usually given to fix the person’s bad behavior or weaknesses. However, correcting a person’s weaknesses often leads to losing that person’s strengths. Therefore we should be aware of this point.

From my experience, I can finish many tasks in a short time and want to improve team members’ working speed.  I asked some questions to understand why they spend so long time on that kind of work and Why they have so many unread emails in their inbox. And then I gave some advice on how to finish tasks quickly and read & write emails shortly.

What was the result?
Yes, their work speed has improved, but there are more mistakes than before. Also, reading and writing emails became faster, but there were cases where their intention was not conveyed accurately, so extra email communication is needed. As a result, the communication speed via email did not increase.

Based on this experience I learn that eliminating their weaknesses leads to losing their strengths. Their weakness may have been the slowness of their work, but their strength was that they were able to work reliably with few mistakes.

In the past, there were cases where they could find my mistake and deal with it in early timing to avoid the problem. If I force them to work faster, they won’t be able to expect that reaction either. Eventually, I admitted that my advice was inadequate and asked them to put it back.

Please remember that it is easy to see people who are not good at the fields you are good at, such as the speed of work.

Advice lose team capability

If you give advice to team members, they will have the same strengths as you and the same weaknesses as you. This reduces the diversity of your team and reduces the ability of your team.

For example a soccer game, your team can’t win if all members are forwards. If you are a forward and advise about shooting for defenders and midfielders, your team will not become strong. So we need diversity and various personalities to win the game.

Advice work for some cases

I don’t want to say we should advise anymore.

There is a case that I should advise to correct something. It is the case of a proven mistake that causes failure. For example, being late for a meeting with customers is a mistake we should fix. It is not related to personality, weakness, and strength.

Thank you for reading this post.

Please also check Coaching is not teaching. Children can find their answers

This is a post about the advice from another aspect.