To be a great leader, you should have all the answers and always know what’s best for your teams, right? Wrong! “Great Man” leadership ideals are going out of style, and humbler, more collaborative leadership ideals are taking their place. Along with this shift, asking for and receiving help has become a sign of managerial courage and strength. Here are tips on how to build this increasingly important leadership skill on-the-job!
Based on
« How Leaders Can Ask For Help and Keep Their Team’s Confidence », by Stephanie Vozza (Fast Company, June 2015), « Asking for Help Reveals Strength, Not Weakness », by Margie Warrell (Forbes, March 2015)and « 5 Ways to Getter at Asking for Help », by Wayne Baker (Harvard Business Review, December 2014).
1/ RECOGNIZE AND ACCEPT YOUR LIMITS
With today’s pace of change and explosion of available information, it’s impossible for you as an individual leader to know everything and be entirely self-reliant; pretending otherwise only serves to undermine your credibility and effectiveness. Recognize your limitations and embrace your dependence on others:
Confront your fears: The fears that can stop from you from asking for help are numerous: fear of over-stepping boundaries; fear of appearing too needy; fear of imposing on others; fear of revealing your vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, when your fears prevent you from asking for help, it cuts you off from support when you need it the most. Perhaps even worse, as a leader, you fail to model to others that asking for helping is acceptable.
Help others first: If you find it difficult to ask others for help, try helping others first. You will likely find it easier to accept help once you’ve already been helpful yourself. What’s more, building a reputation for being helpful increases your chances that others will be willing to help you in return. Option B’s coauthor Adam Grant first explored the power of altruism in business and leadership in his groundbreaking 2013 book, Give and Take (see Business Digest no 239).
She spent 12 years in industry, working for Bolloré Technologies, among others. She co-founded Business Digest in 1992 and has been running the company since 1998. And she took the Internet plunge in 1996, even before coming on board as part of the BD team.
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