Instead of asking for help...
People will thank you for giving them work, if you use one of these 3 methods instead of just asking
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
A tale of three emails:
“Here’s a spreadsheet of raw data from Google Analytics. Can you use this to update our site?”
“I just heard from [other company]. Can we do a webinar with them?”
“Are we [you] doing any campaigns for World Emoji Day?”
Sometimes you have a good idea that you can’t execute on your own, so you ask for help. Other times you need another team’s work to contribute to a larger project, so you ask for it.
Oops.
It’s not always a mistake, but whenever you ask for work you’re asking someone to put down their priorities to focus on your priorities. There always seems to be more work to do than hours in the day, so dashing off a quick email is like saying “do you want to put your other projects aside, or work on them during nights/weekends.”
If you think “oh, well I don’t do that,” ask if you ever have these problems pop up.
You email a director or exec with a question and never get an answer
You ask for work from another team and their deadline keeps getting pushed back
You hear “this is definitely on our radar as something we want to work on soon,” but don’t get a timeline and never really hear about the idea again
Everyone does this. Hell, I do it, and I’m writing about it.
As someone who leads a team and often gets requests for help, I want to help. Unfortunately, the way people ask makes it harder for me to help them, because it means putting down something else I’m working on.
When you ask other people for help, it helps if you:
Have a good relationship with the person you’re asking
Ask for work that fits into that person’s existing priorities
If you can’t answer “what does this person want,” you should work on your relationship and learn more before you ask.
Also:
Show that you’ve put some thought and effort into what you’re asking for, and detail exactly how you’ll make your ask as painless as possible
The frustrating thing about getting an ask like “are we doing anything for World Emoji Day” isn’t just that no, I didn’t have plans for World Emoji Day and now I need some — it’s that asking the question demonstrates you haven’t put much thought into this but now I have to.
The flip side, sometimes you’ve put in a lot of thought that I can’t see. When I was asked to create a section of our website for a new program, I was pissed because the request made it sound like I needed to get background research on the program, source testimonials, work with design, and shepherd the project through development. In reality, most of that work was already done — but because the project owner told me the scope of the project without sharing what help I would have, it sounded like a much bigger demand on my time.
Eventually you’re going to have to ask for stuff. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s why we specialize. It’s why we have teams.
What I’m saying is that people (me, you) are more likely to get what they want if they (me, you) ask in a particular way.
I’m also saying that it’s worth looking at one of these three other ways to get stuff done.
3 other ways to ask for work (that people will actually thank you for)
There’s more to this thing than “ask for help” or “don’t ask for help.” You can change what you ask for, how you ask, who you ask, when you ask — there’s a whole pile of techniques. When I see people frustrated about not getting what they want, often those people are “ask ask ask” or “no I can’t ask for anything.”
Here are three other approaches.
1. Connect your work to their work in a way that makes their work easier. Whenever you ask for anything, you should of course be selling the project in a way that connects it to what the other person cares about. This is different from that — it’s specifically when you use your own expertise to eliminate a headache for someone else.
I recently went to our design team and said “hey, I know that you all want Jira tickets for every new design.” That’s been a challenge for when we’re publishing multiple pieces of content on a tight turnaround, so I found a way to automate actually creating the tickets. I said “here’s what they’ll look like, here’s who they’ll get assigned to, and here’s how you can work with individual writers.”
All I needed was an agreed upon timeline. Because I led by smoothing out a lumpy process in a way that was easier for everyone, we could work on a faster timeline and get more designs done per piece of content. Everyone wins.
2. Celebrate work that’s already done, then suggest a way to add to it. I like to say that success leads to more success — people want to attach themselves to projects they think are successful, because they expect the future to go as well as the past. That means an already-good project is likely to get more and more resources over time.
When you connect to work that’s already been done, people also feel invested in the project from the start. They’re already involved and committed. When our design team recently created over 70 new email templates for our product, we realized that this was an opportunity to update the email templates section of our website as well. We went from a single page designed in 2015 to a full site area with multiple pages optimized for search.
Yes that took more work from everyone, but it was a logical extension of previous work.
3. Forget your shit. Figure out how to make what other people are doing more successful. It’s easy to get project tunnel vision, where you use the projects you’re currently working on to hit your numbers. But other people’s work probably has connections to your goals too, if you can find a way to support them.
When we run a massive virtual event, it becomes a platform to announce all sorts of other projects — a much bigger audience than what I could access solo. I’ll do what I can to support that project, because the bigger it gets the more effective it is.
Help documentation has a ton of opportunity as a marketing access, but it’s not managed on my team. But if I can have my team run with keyword research and pass it to the team that does write them, or find a way to improve the conversion rate of those pages, we can be more effective than if we tried to start a new project from scratch.
Fin. You want things and other people have them. Asking for work can put you on opposite sides of a problem — you’re facing each other in a negotiation. When you ally on a project or solve a problem or celebrate a success, you’re stepping around the table to work side by side.
You don’t want to become the person whose emails people ignore. Think about the full range of methods you can use to get work done.