Giving advice

Advising a mentee on what to do or how to approach an issue has a number of benefits. It focuses their mind on what is important (at least from the mentor’s perspective). It is a lot quicker than helping them work it out for themselves. And it allows the mentee to tap into the mentor’s experience with relatively high efficiency.

However, advising also has a number of significant disadvantages. When people work through an issue to develop their own solutions, they:

• Tend to be more committed to following them through.
• Are more likely to sort similar issues out for themselves.
• Take greater personal responsibility for the outcomes.

Mentoring has greatest impact when advising is kept to a minimum. Guiding is a middle path, which the less experienced mentor can use safely in some circumstances. Guiding involves:

• Using your own experience and knowledge to ask questions, which help the mentee follow a similar path of reasoning to your own.
• Only suggesting solutions with the mentee’s permission – asking them first if that is what they need.

The danger with guiding, however, is that a solution that works for one particular mentor may not work for someone else. A critical question to keep in mind, therefore, is how relevant is my experience and opinion in this situation? If in any doubt, fall back to a non-directive, questioning style.

When to advise and when not to advise

The decision on when to advise, guide or ask good questions depends on three factors:

1. What is the situation?

There are times when immediate, directive advice giving is important. For example, if someone is about to make a serious or hazardous mistake, the mentor has a duty to warn them of outcomes they may not have foreseen. However, the conscientious mentor will always look for an early subsequent opportunity to revisit the issue, to review it and help the learner draw out lasting lessons from it.

Mentors should ensure that both they and the mentee fully understand the situation in its context, before they even consider advising or guiding. In most cases, through the process of dialogue and reflective space, the solutions become obvious to the mentee without the need for advice. If they are still struggling, the mentor may eventually help by guiding and, if necessary, by advising – but this is the last resort not the first.

Importantly, don’t expect the mentee always to find their solution within the expected timeframe of the mentor or within the timeframe of the mentoring session. As long as they have a better understanding of the problem, encourage them to reflect on it for a period (a few hours, days or even weeks); then to pick it up again once their own subconscious has had time to work on it.

2. How can the mentor help?

Useful questions here are:

• How will giving advice or guiding help the mentee now? And when they encounter similar situations in the future?
• What is my possible range of helpful responses in this situation? (Responses include advising, guiding, questioning, simply listening, challenging and so on.)
• What is my motive for advising or guiding? Is it to make myself look good, or to relieve the internal pressure of having good ideas and wanting to express them?
• If I were the mentee, what kind of response would I most value at this point?

As a mentor it is important to practice pausing before responding to the mentee, for long enough to consider at least some of these questions. This slows down the pace of the dialogue (which will encourage the mentee to reflect) and helps the mentor to be more confident in responding appropriately to the mentee’s needs.

3. Where does the ownership need to be?

The more the ownership of an issue needs to rest with the mentee, the more important it is that they develop and implement their own advice.

Conditions for giving advice

Consider the following before giving advice:

• Is there a clear right or wrong answer?
• Is it a crisis moment which needs a quick decision
• Does action need to be taken to prevent the mentee from risk/ harm?
• Is the subject matter too bewildering that giving advice would be the best way for the mentee to get to grips with it?
• As mentioned above, as a mentor you need to consider your motivation.

Groundrules for giving advice

• Ask the mentee if they would like some advice or guidance.
• Consider why you want to advise. Is your intention to help the mentee find a solution or because you believe you know the answer?
• Ensure that the mentee understands that you are ‘offering’ advice but not ‘telling’ them what to do.
• Keep it short and to the point.
• Make it clear that your advice is offered as a means of initiating a deeper dialogue, rather than as a means of closing down the conversation.
• Having given advice, spend time helping the mentee think how they will adapt and merge it with their own experience and judgement.

Structuring advice

• Explain why you are advising.
• Explain the source of your advice (eg personal experience, personal observation, instinctive reaction, third party data, research).
• Succinctly give the advice.
• Check it has been understood in the way you intended.
• Check that the mentee is finding the advice relevant and useful.
• Review with the mentee how they will assimilate the advice in their own way; encourage them to do so.

Reflection time

What are your experiences of giving advice?

What might you do differently now?