When teaching this leadership principle in a workshop setting, I will oftentimes have every participant draw a picture of a seascape with beach and ocean.  Then I have them show their picture to the person sitting next to them.  Then I have the person who’s looking at the picture take their pen and say something like, “You need some birds in that picture” – proceeding to draw the birds on the other person’s picture.  Then we discuss how the initial artist felt when the person next to them drew on their picture.  The feelings are never positive.

Maybe this is only a reiteration of the poster Unsolicited Advice in which we learned how oftentimes unsolicited advice can be viewed as criticism.  Then again possibly we’re looking with more sophistication at the poster People’s Own Data.  Whichever it is, we aren’t saying that as a leader, you can’t help the person see that they might want to add birds to their seascape.  If they decide to draw the birds on their seascape, that’s a totally acceptable (even desirable) outcome.  However, if you as the leader merely lean over and add them, the resistance to that unsolicited advice and its subtext that the picture without the birds was less than desirable will undercut the very momentum and motivation you as the leader are going to want the follower to maintain as the project unfolds.

Asking a series of well-crafted questions (more about what the person wants than what they should do) or giving the person a set of multiple choices shared from the perspective of someone else you knew who was faced with a similar situation might allow the follower to choose to draw the birds themselves and feel energized at the same time.

Categories: Influence

Tags: influence