by Eddie Pipkin

My best advice for you on giving advice: Don’t.  Unless someone has asked explicitly asked you for it, don’t offer it.  That is one of the secrets to a happy existence.  Of course, most of you reading this blog are ministry professionals or volunteers, and you are quite comfortable offering opinions, and, frankly, quite qualified to provide them – it’s part of the gig – and sometimes the assignment requires us to provide advice, solicited and otherwise.  If you want some thoughts on how to give your valuable advice a better chance of being listened to and having impact, all you have to do is read on. (See what I did there: I offered you advice, but I’m giving you the power to accept it or discard it.)

It is one of the hardest disciplines in interpersonal and professional relationships to refrain from giving unsolicited advice, but it’s also one of the most powerful tools of restraint a person can master.

The brutal truth is that a person who has not invited your advice is highly likely to reject it, and rejected advice creates a dynamic of tension and potential conflict.

There is also a fine line between what’s advice and what’s just an opinion.  An opinion is an expression of our preference – what we like and don’t like or how we would prefer that things should be done.  Advice is wisdom or insight that is offered in service to the greater good for the individual to whom we are giving it or the organization that they serve.  You can clearly see that it’s motivation that is at stake in analyzing which is which (opinion or advice), and one of those motivations is clearly more noble than the other.

There is nothing wrong with offering our opinion and stating our preferences in a healthy personal or professional relationship, but such statements do not carry the same weight of expectations.  When we give advice, particularly if it is strongly worded advice, we clearly anticipate that action will be taken.  When the advice is rejected, especially depending on how it is rejected, we’re back to that uncomfortable tension.  Advice can be rejected with a gentle, detailed demurral, or it can be ignored with a dramatic eye roll, but that’s up to the person to whom the advice is directed.  By offering our unasked-for counsel in the first place, we set the wheels of relational reckoning in motion.  That journey does not always lead to our intended destination.  It’s wise to think through our words before we offer them.  I mean this literally: take time to choose them carefully and offer them at the right moment and in the right context.  Don’t be that person opining like an unfiltered fountain of feelings.

Once you’ve figured out what you’d like to say, it is always a great idea to lead off with this question:

“Would you like some advice on ________?  I have some thoughts, but only if you are interested in hearing them.”

Just by virtue of politeness, most people will respond, “Sure.”  But you have established a social contract in which they have explicitly agreed to hear with an open mind what you have to say.  That changes the whole dynamic going forward.  If they respond, “No,” you’ll know where you stand.

This dynamic is different if you are in a work relationship with a clearly established chain of command.  Part of your job description is offering advice, but there are still ways to do so that differentiate whether you are a leader who is a bully or a leader who is a partner and mentor.  One of the key factors that determines the vibe of a working relationship is the format and tone of how advice is routinely offered.  In a supervisor to supervisee interaction, there is a difference between a managerial directive and offering advice.  If we frame our suggestions as advice, even though we are “the boss,” we have established the possibility that the suggestions can be disregarded or modified.  Many times we will gently put forth advice which we mean as a directive attempting to seem gentle, pliant, but if we take this approach, we should be willing to let the person we are advising make their own choices.  It’s not fair to imply a decision is their choice and then insist on our preference anyway.

Advice is also received from some sources better than others.

This can be frustrating.  People have all manner of mental hang-ups about whose advice they value and whose advice they resist.  We may possess excellent insights into a situation, but the person to whom those insights would be useful may not trust us a source.  That can be the result of past drama or current judgmentalism, but it doesn’t really matter.  If we are solving for results and best outcomes, we need them to take the advice seriously, and that may mean that our best strategy is to get the advice to them by another, more trusted channel.

Just this week, I had an incident in which a relative needed some direction in working through a problem, and, while my wife would have been in a position to provide excellent words of wisdom, this relative struggles to receive wisdom from the women in his life.  He’s an older gentleman, and that’s an age-old problem – and if you are leading an organization, it’s important to move the culture away from such damaging stereotypes – but in this case we chose the strategy that I, a man (with less wisdom in this event), would offer the exact same advice, and it would be accepted with less friction and more response.

We made the decision in our context that results were more important than long-term labor of changing the bias.  As leaders and as team members, we are constantly faced with making those kinds of calculations, and sometimes the principle at stake is worth jeopardizing the actionability of the advice.  Sometimes short-term practical gains win out, while we strategize on adjusting attitudes in a later and different context.

My hope is that these paragraphs have you thinking about how and when advice is best offered and maybe even how you receive and respond to advice yourself.  Take a few minutes to make some notes about the dynamics of advice and how they work in your relationships and for your team, and the next time you get that team together, set aside a few minutes to talk about this topic.  Setting the ground rules for advice giving and understanding each other’s perspective in giving and receiving it can result in a markedly more  successful process.

Share your own insights in the comments section.