How To Be A Better Consumer Of Leadership Advice

By Selin Kesebir, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, London Business School

Leadership advice is abundant—it’s in your podcast stream, LinkedIn feed, and the airport bookstore. With so much guidance available, you might well wonder how to tell good advice from bad and avoid being misguided by ostensibly helpful ideas. The answer lies in applying a critical filter to any leadership idea, whatever its credentials. Before taking on any leadership advice, here is what to consider:

1. Would this advice work in my specific case?

Different situations call for different approaches. Ideas that are helpful in one case may prove counterproductive in another. Yet, those dispensing leadership advice rarely tell you when their ideas stop working. You need to use your own judgment to recognize the limits to an idea’s applicability.

Here is an example: We are told that we should believe we can grow in any skill, if we work hard and practice. This is a very helpful idea if you are a student who needs to study algebra, or a computer programmer who writes code full of bugs. But there are limits to the usefulness of this idea: You probably shouldn’t pursue a career in a field where you lack all talent, just because you think you will get better by applying yourself. Yes, with hard work you will most probably get better—but so will everyone else, and much faster. Maybe your time and effort could be invested more fruitfully somewhere else. Persistence is good but so is recognizing our human limitations and charting our path accordingly.

Good advice is aware of its own limitations and makes allowances for contextual differences. It will tell you when it may not apply and when it may run you into trouble. Bad advice reads like a timeless edict to be universally obeyed.

2. Is this good advice given who I am?

What is good advice for the vast majority may be very bad advice for you.

Micro-management is all too common and often entirely unproductive. But that doesn’t mean “don’t micro-manage” is the right call for every manager. A small group of managers should in fact move in the direction of more micro-management. They need to provide more guidance, because their employees are in the dark and clamor for more hand-holding.

“Never eat alone” is great advice if you are introverted and would benefit from connecting more with others. But if you’re already spending a lot of time with others, maybe what you need is the opposite—curbing your social life a little bit. Perhaps others are already thinking of you as a slacker or schmoozer, and you don’t want to further feed that impression.

In one study, people who expressed interest in learning more about how to increase their emotional intelligence were those with high emotional IQ. Ironically, it seems that we are more open to advice that we do not need. If you are already a social butterfly, “never eat alone” may sound like music to your ears. If you feel enthusiastic about adopting a piece of advice, it is worth asking yourself whether your real challenge is perhaps elsewhere.

3. Is this where I should be focusing my attention?

Advice focuses our attention. We may listen to a podcast on influence skills and decide to work on that. We may read an article on the importance of setting goals and may resolve to get clarity on our own goals.

But it takes self-insight to know whether the advice we stumble on or seek is what we really need. A student of mine came to me in search of resources on how to influence others. But she had misdiagnosed her needs. When she got her 360 feedback, it turned out that her peers were perceiving her as pushy and inflexible. What she needed to learn was not how to influence others, but rather how to open herself to others’ influence, and relax her assumption that she had to influence others.

Here is another example: An abundance of research shows that setting clear goals improves performance. Naturally, leadership experts urge people to set goals. And yet, the optimal strategy is sometimes postponing goal-setting, and working on gaining a better understanding of oneself and one’s environment. In a rush to set goals, we may overlook our deeper needs and values. We may end up spending months or years on goals that are not the right fit. If we don’t want to be misguided by seemingly good (and even science-backed) ideas, we want to ask if the advice focuses our attention where it should be, given who and where we are at this moment.

How to make the most out of advice

Advice can be a wonderful catalyzer for growth. But there is no substitute for our own judgment when it comes to picking the right ideas for us. Any leadership advice we encounter, we should take as a point of departure for our own reflection, and not the final word on the matter.

Selin Kesebir is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, where she teaches Executive Leadership and Negotiations. Her research interests include cooperation, competition, gender, inequality and cultural transmission.