Questions does a career cost? It doesn’t have to be
No time right now?
Always stay on the ball and manage everything by yourself? Or would you rather ask someone? How to learn to ask for help, why it’s worth it for any business – and how to do it skillfully.
Admitting that you can’t do something is the basis of all learning. And so it is precisely this willingness that should be the basis of any good career. Unfortunately, the opposite is true in many corporate cultures: People who ask for support worry that this step will be interpreted as incompetence. Seeking help could then become an obstacle to promotion.
This creates an environment in which everyone fights for themselves. Work may be redistributed when a person has taken too much of it. But are you looking for support for technical reasons? That often feels bad. As if you had missed something that was important for the job.
We live in a time in which the requirements are constantly changing. There are always new technologies to consider, new laws to be observed, new developments in the political or economic world to be taken into account, in large corporations internal instructions can already initiate changes – which are quickly missed on vacation. This uncomfortable feeling prevented many employees from working from home in the first few months of the corona pandemic: They were simply afraid of missing out on career-relevant things.
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If you don’t ask, you get crooked
So, there are now two solutions:
- Always stay on the ball and do everything by yourself.
- To ask for help.
The former leads – via many complicated and very strenuous detours – to burnout. It is too exhausting to want to do everything by yourself, to want to center all knowledge and skills with yourself. That doesn’t serve your career – you risk an early end.
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Most people cannot cope with working life alone. And that’s fine. The very structure of the working conditions requires cooperation. But cooperation is often understood to mean that tasks are delegated. It works pretty well at management level: I don’t know? Then let someone else deal with it.
If you don’t ask, you’re acting stupid
But someone is always at the bottom, it is difficult to delegate from there. Still other tasks require a certain basic skill. The orthopedic surgeon who comes across a scratched organ while straightening the ribs would also call in the internist.
Not quite as serious as in the emergency room, but nevertheless important, in many professions it is important to know and accept what you cannot do. Only in this knowledge lies the possibility of solving problems in a customer-oriented manner – or just as the manager would like it to be.
Trying to solve all problems yourself is usually simply ineffective.
Good questions as a career factor
Therefore, a culture in which employees ask for help is worthwhile. Because if you ask, you are not restricting your independence in solving problems – on the contrary. He signals that he values ​​the product higher than himself. Good questions and the courage to recognize your own limitations should therefore be the ultimate career factor.
If you ask for help in your own work area, you can simplify this step for yourself if you define your questions precisely in advance. In the conversation looking for help, you can then describe exactly how far you have come and what the problem is. Precise questions enable precise, useful answers.
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Instead of reading all your emails after a vacation and trying to capture every news event, you can make it standard in your department that colleagues are briefed after a long absence. That also strengthens cohesion. Anyone who knows that they will miss out on a lot can explicitly ask for such a briefing. This shows more caution than the laziness of not staying on the ball on vacation.
Give and take
How you react to questions is crucial for dealing with ignorance. If you want answers yourself, you should react accordingly when asked questions. Friendly, respectful, informative – but please not instructive. A good question culture in the company also needs a good answer culture.
