Asking for Help is Not a Bad Thing
Check your ego at the door!
Or better yet, bring your ego with you, only if you can keep it in check!
Why do we think that we have to do everything? Perfectly, every time? Do we honestly believe we have answers for everything that is presented to us? That we have to answer every person that comes to us with a deep, meaningful response, solving their problem for them — because we can (or think we can)? Is it because of ego? Is it because we do not want to be seen in a position of weakness? Or do we want to be seen as superior to others around us?
Ego? Check!
When you are struggling under a heavy load, what do you do? Do you continue to struggle under the heavy load slogging through it trying to complete it yourself? Killing yourself to get the work finished? Then running out of energy and not getting it complete? Do you think that it would be faster for you to do the work yourself, rather than recruit support — or *gasp* — delegate the work?
Stop.
You are hurting more than yourself, you are hurting your team, your peers, and the business. We know you are Wonder Woman, and we need you to stay Wonder Woman! Yet you cannot be spectacular if you are twisted up in the bed that you made! This bottlenecked mess you created for yourself because you did not ask for help. Or do you believe you do not need help?
There is too much work for any one person to accomplish and you need to learn how to ask for help. You need to learn how to task, delegate and share the work indicated on your list of uncompleted tasks. Learn how to leverage the Mechanical Turk — the crowdworking version — to be more effective and be the Wonder Woman we need you to be.
By learning how to task and delegate to your team is the first step. To quickly show distinction for each, tasking someone with an action means YOU still own the action. So if you task Sam to do something and he fails at it, then YOU fail at it. However, if you delegate the activity to John, then John now owns the action and the ramifications of the work needed to complete it and report that it is completed. Yet the biggest benefit of both of these activities is that you are now able to get more work accomplished by having them help carry the load. In addition, they are now learning how to fish — which expands your network, once again allowing you to increase your capacity and become more effective in your role!
Remember, Mom always told us it was nice to share — so share! The benefits certainly outweigh the negatives. You reduce the load on your shoulders, you are able to pass the burden to others while still maintaining control. Or when you do not want to maintain control, and you can push the action to someone else to become the new expert at that action, it relieves you of that mental stress of having to worry “when am I going to find time to get that done” and you move to “whew, now I can work on that really important thing” today instead of two weeks from now.
Learn to be a linchpin instead of a bottleneck. Become the best at everything you can — become that polymath. However, you need to recognize that if you are trapped in doing mundane, repetitive, and simple (to you) tasks, you are not growing your team around you. You are also hampering growth, slowing things down. By carrying all the load yourself, is that what your intent is? To limit your growth? And to limit the growth of those around you, too?
No, I didn’t think so.
Go forth and be brilliant.
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