An anxious manager: seeking advice without surrendering judgement
When facing an uncertain decision, consulting a colleague or an expert seems a reasonable precaution. The managerial question is more specific: how can the need for reassurance be prevented from replacing critical scrutiny of the advice received?
What the literature establishes
Francesca Gino, Alison Wood Brooks and Maurice E. Schweitzer (2012, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show across a series of experiments that anxiety encourages people to seek and use advice, notably by reducing confidence in their own judgement. Yet this openness does not guarantee better selection: their findings also reveal a reduced ability to distinguish between advice of differing quality. Seeking more advice and seeking better advice are therefore not the same thing.
Useful advice is not necessarily reassuring advice
Ilan Yaniv (2004, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) examines how people incorporate advice into estimation tasks. His findings show that receiving advice can improve accuracy, even though participants tend to give it less weight than their own estimates. Read alongside the research on anxiety, this finding suggests examining how advice is weighted rather than invariably prescribing greater independence or more consultation.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that an anxious manager should postpone any consultation or decide alone. That would confuse the risk of dependence on advice with advice being useless. For SHR’s Emotional Intelligence programme, the practical issue is to distinguish the need for emotional support from the need for expertise: the same person may meet the first without being qualified to meet the second. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
These studies rely on experimental tasks that do not reproduce the timescales, responsibilities or power relationships of professional decisions. They do not establish that a consultation protocol improves decisions in a bank or an international organisation. Common practice nevertheless has a blind spot: it often records who was consulted, but less often why their advice deserved to be followed.
A practical check in Genève
In a private bank, an international organisation, a luxury watchmaking company or a commodity trading firm in Genève, SHR can propose an exercise involving non-urgent decisions, without altering mandatory approvals. For two weeks, record the initial judgement and level of concern before each consultation, then document the adviser’s relevant expertise, any interests they may have, and the reason for following or rejecting their advice. The indicator is the proportion of consultations in which accepting or rejecting advice rests on a verifiable element — evidence, relevant competence or a checked argument — rather than reassurance alone. An anonymised review of the records can verify this traceability, without mistaking it for proof that decisions have improved. To go further: explore the Emotional Intelligence training in Geneva in the canton of Geneva, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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