Face it: we wouldn’t heed management advice for two seconds in our personal lives.
“Jase,“ would say the coach I hired to help me manage my family, ”To deal with your daughter, you need to help her articulate her career goals for school and then provide her with a plan of action that ‘incentivizes’ her to achieve them. You may also want to work with her to create a second set of stretch goals. If she doesn’t respond well, then maybe you should review her course load.”
Uh-huh. Right. I can see that going over well. Real well. At bedtime. When I need a guaranteed way to help her fall asleep.
Think about how different this sounds from the advice we give our friends on domestic issues. While often unsupported through action, friendly home advice tends to be of an entirely different quality. We tell our friends things like:
“Of course your wife’s ticked off. You stuck her with the kids all day so you could play golf! Stop complaining. In fact, you should be glad you’re still married with all the crap you pull. Buy her a card, send her flowers… grovel… I don’t know. Just don’t tell her I was the one who made the tee time.”
Notice that there’s no big plan of action. No meaningless jargon. No BS about what to expect. No three year growth plan. There is simply a telling-it-like-it-is, coupled with some butt covering that is refreshingly upfront and honest.
What if that kind of advice were brought into the workplace? Let’s imagine it for a moment:
“So what you’re telling me is that your boss doesn’t appreciate you? That’s your big complaint? Really? OK, then tell me this: why should she appreciate you, when all you do all day is sit around, IM’ing me about the movie you want to see next weekend? Stop complaining. You’re no prize and you should feel lucky to have a job. And by the way, delete your IM account before someone discovers it’s been me on the other end of all this.”
Of course, with divorce rates topping 50%, I have to admit that good advice often isn’t good enough. Still, how nice would it be to see plain-English development plans replace the mumbo-jumbo that often finds it’s way onto 360s?! How nice would it be if corporate planners realized that org structures don’t need to be perfect to be effective? (After all, for those of us who grew up in families—which is almost all of us—many of us faced dual reporting structures, frequently unclear and shifting roles and responsibilities, subversive siblings, and a close-to-zero chance of ever getting fired, regardless of the infraction… and we still came out reasonably OK!)
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I'm Jason. I make people shine. My mission is to help 1 million people tell their stories better. 
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