Career tips #3: Learn to ask
A series of thoughts now published into writing pieces.
I used to think that asking at work is pretty easy, and I carried that thought with me for many years then later when things started to strike, I realised I missed out a lot. Asking isn’t just about how to phrase your questions properly, but more about the urge to dig deeper our inner curiosity, to proactively challenge our thoughts and also to get involved. How? Let’s start.
There are 3 types of questions everyone needs in their career.
1/ Ask to find out whys and hows
Most of our issues at work often involve our analytical thinking - which means we need to go and understand the problem at hand well enough in order to arrive at reasonable solutions.
One day you might hear someone presenting data and say - our category has not been performing well for a year and it has declined by 10%. Then the person moved on to the next topic.
It’s better to stop ourselves and wonder - why it is so? what happened? how did it happen? how to prevent this or how to do this better?
One of the powerful question is: Do I understand this situation/plan/idea well enough to explain to someone fully?
By forming questions in mind, we have a mission to find out the truth. That then paves the way for conversations with people to get those questions answered. Without questioning ourselves, we just simply absorb the information just the way it’s presented and it’s not insightful.
2/ Ask to help or to be involved
It’s linked to the impact article that I shared previously. Usually, this requires your observation and self-assessment. Your boss or co-worker is struggling with her work and you can simply offer to help or there is a project that you want to take part in to showcase your capabilities, then yes, just go ahead.
Asking to help or to be involved comes after our self-assesment such as:
Do we have capabilities to do it? i.e. your skillsets can help speed up the project, make it better?
Do we have capacity to do it? i.e. do you have extra time that can be spent on this?
While a lot of consideration is needed to go ahead, the tradeoff is not bad - your chance to deliver more impactful work, be recognised, get promoted or just simply learn a new area within the company.
3/ Ask for help
It’s assumed that we take the JD as it is and work on it, but what if you suffer? what if you think cannot fulfill the task required? Will you suffer in silence and just let it be the way it is?
Asking for help doesn’t kill. I often go straight to the point and tell my colleague or my manager that I need help and why, if I see that the chances to get things done by the deadline is hard or I need to solve something complex such as coding.
Some people I know - they were just so fearful of being judged as incompetent, thus preferred persisting through the challenges and later to know that their results are not up to the expectation yet. Only few actually succeeded.
It’s important that we think realistically of our situation in order to ask for help when it’s needed. Everyone at work at some points in time will ask for help, no matter how excellent they are. It’s just the nature of any company’s environment.
🔥Links for this week
An admirable story of Charles Feeney, the duty-free titan. If you cannot read this due to paywall, I can send you a copy (free).
How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in. Can you guess who? A very long but good read.