Most management advice is garbage.

Managment advice is, by and large, garbage. We wouldn’t heed it for two seconds in our personal life.

“Jase, 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. Friendly home advice tends to be of an entirely different quality. We tell our friends things like:

“Of course your wife’s annoyed. You stuck her with the kids all day so you could play golf. Suck it up. In fact, you should be glad you’re still married with all the crap you pull. Buy her a card, send her flowers or something. 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 buzzwords. No BS about what to expect. There is simply a telling-it-like-it-is… coupled with a form of ass covering that is (almost 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 saying is that your boss doesn’t appreciate you? That’s your big complaint? Really? So then tell me this: why should she appreciate you, when all you do all day is sit around, IM’ing me about what a pain in the butt she is? Suck it up! 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.”

I wonder what would happen if this type of advice did get a firm hold within the business community… a lot of jargon-happy managers would get canned, and a good number of executive coaches would go out of business, that’s for sure, and yet… what a wonderful world it would be! People taking responsibility and addressing issues openly and honestly… Wow! Can we even still imagine this? Is there still space in our collective psyche to allow for this type of open dialogue?

I hope so!

(See the video for an at-home performance review!)

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Tagged as: bs-ometer, common sense, communicating