Tweet

Business Works Best When You Accept the Help You Need

Written by: Martin Haworth

Article Overview: When you're where the buck stops, it's easy to regard help as something you can't accept. Especially when offered. Let me share a story. A famous radio presenter in the UK, Roger Royle, once told this anecdote about 'saying no'...

Business Works Best When You Accept the Help You Need

When you're where the buck stops, it's easy to regard help as something you can't accept.

Especially when offered.

Let me share a story. A famous radio presenter in the UK, Roger Royle, once told this anecdote about 'saying no'.

During the war, as with many English children living in London, he was evacuated into the country.

There, for the first time he was introduced to the luxuries that escape the attention of city-dwellers, yet are common-place to those who live 'in the sticks'.

At the very first evening meal, he was amazed by the variety of home produced food and seriously tucked into his dinner. At the end, everyone was provided with a substantial piece of apple pie and offered thick dollops of cream from a jug.

Roger declined the cream. Being from the city, he had never seen it before and 'said no', because it was something he didn't know about.

His story goes on to tell us that he was never offered cream in the three years he stayed there.

Back in the business, it's really important to understand that a manager is not an island. Accepting help from others is not just a valid way to make life much easier for you, it binds you into a 'community' of workers, which is your team.

And one of the key things you can do to enhance that is to say 'yes' where appropriate, to those who offer you help.

If you have already said 'No, I'm OK' or 'That's fine, leave it to me', too often, your people will need gentle encouragement to ask you now.

A precedent has been set and you will need to work to overcome what you have already, probably unwittingly, set as your 'style'.

The easy way is to ask for help, using the phrase, 'I need your help' as part of the request.

Asking, in this way, really digs into their emotions and, like most people, a request for help stimulates a trigger where we hear the appeal and provide the help needed.

Your people realize much more that you are a real human - you are not that amazing individual that not only gets everything right, but needs no help on earth and is perfect in every way - in fact you are almost normal!

You become one of then; one of the team.Then they start to open up to you, asking not only for help in specific tasks, but also about what they need, what their hopes and aspirations are and, of course, how you can help them.

The business world is chock full of millions of individuals who have different needs.

Ensuring that you are open enough to ask them when you need help, will bind you to them, them to you and them to each other, making the sum equal far more than the parts.

Then you truly can have the cream in your business relationships - and it will, I promise you, taste really good!

Related Articles
  What is Enlightenment?
  Leadership = Accepting Failures
  Take the Hit
  You Must Accept To Improve Your Personal Life
  Change, accept or walk away?

Article Tags:



Related Forum Posts
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
Exclusive: Interview with Results - Hi Forum Members, I'm helping start up a Business Coaching and Consulting company here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada (a Subsidiary of RSC Business in Los Angeles). As a Research and Development Intern I am required to practice my listening and interview skills by surveying Small and Medium Businesses on thier Business. This Survey is designed by RSC Business to also assist the Business being interviewed more insight into their own business. I am looking to interview about 30 businesses across North America over the span of 3 months. At the end of these interviews I will be publishing a report of the results and they will be made available for free to the Interviewees. The Report data will include responses from a minimum of 100 interviews. I would like to extend this opportunity to members of the Forum. If you would like to have this short 20-30 minute interview conducted on your Business and you reside in North America please send me an email or PM. Please contact me at andy[at]jvprosperity[dot]com to arrange our interview and to get free access to the results when they are published.
Re: HOw to market a B2B consulting company - [quote="zohahunt77":428owzbi]Hi, I was wondering if anyone can tell me the difference between B2B and B2C. I don’t know about b2b marketing but I have done marketing so know things about it. I will suggest you to take online services which will spread your business all over web network. Online marketing is the best way to market any business.[/quote:428owzbi] B2B = Business to Business - You are marketing to other businesses. B2C = Business to Consumer - You are marketing to consumers.
English teachers learn Japanese as Interns - Yasunori, what about the many students that leave N. America to teach English in Japan. They may want to learn Japanese (maybe Business Japanese is a bit different) and the Japanese Business Culture.
Re: DropBox.com - Hey Evan, I just started using their service very recently. I'm currently using their free 2GB storage option. I mainly got it to send large-sized files to other people, as sometimes uploading to my web host server can become problematic and not work. I searched around for online storage options and landed on their site. Works great and very easy to share files with others. I currently have a 1TB external drive I backup all of my computer data on. Maybe someday I'll consider online backup, just for added protection of my files.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Coaching Tip: Identify Your Core Values

Sales Training – Top Salespeople Are Not Dunces

How to Improve Your Time Management

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.