What Are You Going to Ask For?
Posted on June 06, 2013 by Ruth Schwartz, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
Vulnerability does not make you weak. Vulnerability builds alignment with your team. It's a great way to communicate.
Julie has trained her employees to perform exactly the way she wants to perform and her procedure manuals would make you cry to see them. But asking for help is completely alien to her. She told me that she didn’t know what not to do, and that is a very important question to ask yourself sometimes. What is it that you do not want to do? I told her to gather her team and ask for help.
The fact of the matter is that sometimes we don’t even know what to ask for. We can use our skills of not knowing everything and ask a great question to ask for help. Now, you could just go up to somebody and say, “Hey, would you help me do this?” But what’s really important is that you show your own humanity and vulnerability.
You see, the fact of the matter is, when you’re wearing the Golden Handcuffs you don’t even know what to ask for. And that’s okay. So I said to Julie, “Go to them and ask a great question. Tell them that you need help and you don’t even know what to ask for. But working sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week is not what you want to do anymore.”
The result?
When I saw her two weeks later, I looked her square in the eye and said, “Well, what did you do?” I half expected like so many other business leaders that she would completely chicken out and not ask for help. But she smiled.
I said, “You asked didn’t you?”
She said, “Yes.”
“Well, what happened?” I wanted to know.
As it turns out, she had gathered her whole office team together. Four of her people on her team are full-time staff, and those four people listed over ten tasks that she was doing that they would be more than happy to take on as their own. No problem. They just needed to create, well, you guessed it, a couple of new systems for the procedure manuals. I asked Julie how she felt about that. She smiled a huge toothy grin and said, “Wow, that’s a whole lot less that I have to do.”
Great.
So ask yourself this: What are you going to ask for?
The exercise that’s really going to stretch this new habit for you is to think of the things that you hate doing, are not good at, don’t want to do, or procrastinate with. Thenask for help. Vulnerability does not make you weak. Vulnerability builds alignment with your team. It’s a great way to communicate. It’s one of the most important habits that you can form whether it’s with your employees, your vendors, your friends, your clients, or your family. It is a part of the Key to the Golden Handcuffs. Set yourself free.
I’m going to give you the big secret as I have learned it: You are the Key. The lock on your handcuffs will open as soon as you stop making yourself successful and start making others successful.
