Management advice is, by and large, garbage. We wouldn’t heed it for two seconds in our personal life. Too many useless words.
“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. Actually, let’s try it and see what happens:
Think about how different the second half of the conversation sounds from the first! We use a different—and dare I say, often more effective—form of communication when advising friends and family on personal issues rather than business issues. Friendly home advice tends to be of an entirely different quality. We tell each other 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 butt covering that is (almost refreshingly) upfront and honest and a call to action that is simple and direct.
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, I’m building my career on the bet that this is exactly what people in business would respond best to!
(This post is an updated version of one that ran in March 2007.)
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Jason, I loved this! You are so right about how people speak to each other in business. For instance when did we stop talking and start dialoging? And how many times to do we have to say, “at the end of the day”?
Jargon really does get in the way of our ability to talk to each other with any meaning.
Great post. Thank for the smile. Your daughters are seriously cute.
It’s so interesting how this experiment with your daughters translates perfectly over into the business world. Talking to someone in plain English doesn’t make you any less intelligent, it makes you understandable. Along with getting your point across clearly, I think you’ll also find you get better feedback from employees when you discuss performance issues in simpler terms. Great post!
So true and what a great way to illustrate your point!
Had a somewhat similiar experience with a candidate in my office a few weeks ago. She was having problems putting together a resume and I asked, “Well…what exactly did you do at ABC Company?” It took her forever to tell me, in simple “resume” terms, her duties and responsibilities. And believe me, her job wasn’t that complicated or difficult!
Unless beautiful words or clever idioms just roll off of your tongue, stick to the basics!