[context: I’m one of the advisors, and manage some of the others, but am describing my individual attitude below]
FWIW I don’t think the balance you indicated is that tricky, and think that conceiving of what I’m doing when I speak to people as ‘charismatic persuasion’ would be a big mistake for me to make. I try to:
Say things I think are true, and explain why I think them (both the internal logic and external evidence if it exists) and how confident I am.
Ask people questions in a way which helps them clarify what they think is true, and which things they are more or less sure of.
Make tradeoffs (e.g. between a location preference and a desire for a particular job) explicit to people who I think might be missing that they need to make one, but usually not then suggesting which tradeoff to make, but instead that they go and think about it/talk to other people affected by it.
Encourage people to think through things for themselves, usually suggesting resources which will help them do that/give a useful perspective as well as just saying ‘this seems worth you taking time to think about’.
To the extent that I’m paying attention to how other people perceive me[1], I’m usually trying to work out how to stop people deferring to me when they shouldn’t without running into the “confidence all the way up” issue.
in a work context, that is. I’m unfortunately usually pretty anxious about, and therefore paying a bunch of attention to, whether people are angry/upset with me, though this is getting better, and easy to mostly ‘switch off’ on calls because the person in front of me takes my full attention.
[context: I’m one of the advisors, and manage some of the others, but am describing my individual attitude below]
FWIW I don’t think the balance you indicated is that tricky, and think that conceiving of what I’m doing when I speak to people as ‘charismatic persuasion’ would be a big mistake for me to make. I try to:
Say things I think are true, and explain why I think them (both the internal logic and external evidence if it exists) and how confident I am.
Ask people questions in a way which helps them clarify what they think is true, and which things they are more or less sure of.
Make tradeoffs (e.g. between a location preference and a desire for a particular job) explicit to people who I think might be missing that they need to make one, but usually not then suggesting which tradeoff to make, but instead that they go and think about it/talk to other people affected by it.
Encourage people to think through things for themselves, usually suggesting resources which will help them do that/give a useful perspective as well as just saying ‘this seems worth you taking time to think about’.
To the extent that I’m paying attention to how other people perceive me[1], I’m usually trying to work out how to stop people deferring to me when they shouldn’t without running into the “confidence all the way up” issue.
in a work context, that is. I’m unfortunately usually pretty anxious about, and therefore paying a bunch of attention to, whether people are angry/upset with me, though this is getting better, and easy to mostly ‘switch off’ on calls because the person in front of me takes my full attention.