How to give professional advice your colleagues will actually use

When a colleague or client presents us with a challenge from our area of expertise, it’s often tempting to start dishing out advice. Picking up on a few keywords, the next steps seem clear in our mind and we know exactly what we’d do next.

Unfortunately, that intuitive recommendation is often incomplete, difficult to understand, or just plain wrong. Here is how to give professional advice that others will actually use.

Instead of jumping to the solution, an effective way to equip someone with the ability to take on the challenge themselves is to casually inject some coaching and mentoring into the conversation.

Coach to understand

Effective coaching consists of “how” and “what” questions that explore the aspects of a challenge most aligned to a potential path forward. While “why” questions try to find blame and can put someone on the defensive, “how” and “what” questions encourage problem-solving.

A complete coaching session could consist of two phases:

• Observation and probing, revealing the real problem.
  e.g. How was ‘their vision’ communicated to you and the team over those three months?
• Understanding and reflection, helping to identify the right next steps.
  e.g. What do you think should be done next?

Mentor to provide examples

If coaching is not sufficient for our colleague to identify the right next steps on their own, an anecdote about a similar situation we’ve faced can help clear things up further. Just like coaching, by not giving them the answer directly, we equip them with the tools necessary to not only work through this problem but to also deal with similar situations in the future.

While this framework might be sufficient to help our junior colleagues, it can feel bossy or presumptuous with a client or someone more senior to us. To avoid unwelcome advice or even just an awkward pause in the conversation, checking in during the transitions between coaching, mentoring, and advising can smooth out the path to a resolution.

Wait for feedback to ensure engagement

By asking permission between coaching and mentoring, we ensure that a story about our own experience is useful.

By waiting for a request for advice, we avoid bombarding someone with unwanted advice.

There you have it. A 5-step framework to get from dialogue to action.

1. Coach by asking thought-provoking questions to help someone facing a challenge gain a new perspective on their situation and identify the right next steps.
2. Ask for permission to mentor.
3. Mentor by telling an anecdote where you faced a similar challenge and were able to work through it.
4. Wait for a request to provide advice
5. Advise by explaining how you’d approach the challenge.

Use ChatGPT to generate coaching question ideas!

One more thing! It’s often difficult to come up with context-sensitive coaching questions. Luckily, ChatGPT appears to be pretty good at it. Here are a couple of prompts that I’ve been using on https://chat.openai.com:

• Which ‘how’ and ‘what’ questions should I ask a <role> struggling with ”<challenge>” in order to help them observe, probe, and identify the underlying problem? Provide categories and examples.
• Which ‘how’ and ‘what’ questions should I ask a <role> struggling with ”<challenge>” in order to help them reflect, identify the right goals, and immediate next steps on their own? Provide categories and examples.

As with all AI, these will just yield some ideas, they won’t be exhaustive. You’ll still need to make sure that each question moves the conversation forward and that you’ve explored the challenge sufficiently before moving on.