My problem / your problem

I was away at a conference earlier this week and needed to do an important online meeting in the lunchbreak. I crept out of the pre-lunch session a little early and made my way to the lobby to work out where I could do the call from. I was hoping that there might be a quiet spot somewhere in the building, but had also done a thorough trawl of Google Maps to work out where the nearby cafes were should I need to find somewhere offsite.

I looked around the lobby to assess my options. It was a cafe bar which contained various booths (mostly occupied) and a number of tables with people chatting around them - nowhere that really worked for this call. I was about to walk out of the venue to head towards one of the aforementioned cafes, but as I walked towards the exit, I caught the eye of a member of the front of house team, who smiled at me. I may as well ask, I thought to myself, and proceeded to explain my situation and what I needed. She quickly whisked me up a set of stairs, took me behind a partition to a semi-closed off part of the first floor foyer and presented me with a space that contained, amongst other things, a chair, a table and - praise be! - a plug socket.

Asking people for help in this way is a fairly recent development for me. I have, somehow, internalised the idea that it is essential to be able to navigate the world entirely by yourself. You should be able to find your way around new places without asking for directions; if in a foreign country, your language skills should be good enough to never need a local to help you translate; if you’re trying to catch a train in a large and complicated train station, God forbid you ask a member of the station staff which platform your train is leaving from. I’ll occasionally accept help if offered (e.g. when hoisting a buggy with a two year old in it down a lengthy flight of stairs at an underground station) but, in my strange brain, I have to know that I could have done it by myself if I’d needed to.

This is a ridiculous way to live your life because people love to help. The aforementioned buggy situation is a regular occurrence for me and I’d estimate that I’m offered help the majority of times. And I love helping people in return - if I’m out and about and I see someone struggling with some luggage, or hovering forlornly with their pram at the bottom of a set of steps, I’m there in a flash. When I think back to my time doing customer service focused jobs - including a fair bit of front of house at various theatres - I liked finding solutions to people’s problems: popping a phone on charge in a safe place backstage, or explaining the story to someone who’d arrived late before taking them in at the latecomers point. Slowly, I’ve realised that if you’ve got a problem that someone else might be able to help you solve, it’s OK to ask them - yes, you might technically be able to sort it by yourself, but perhaps the reason those staff members have been stationed by the ticket barriers at Birmingham New Street is to advise hapless Londoners on how to navigate its mysterious zoning system so they have half a chance at finding the platform that they need.

There is, however, a line. Let’s go back to my situation at the conference. If I’d asked the front of house team house team member whether she had a space I could use and she’d said no, the correct response is to thank them and move on to plan B. I had made the choice to attend a conference on a day when I also had an important Zoom meeting. This is, ultimately, my problem to solve, no one else’s, and whilst asking for help is clearly sensible, having an expectation that someone at the conference owes me a quiet, private space to take my call in is an obnoxious way to move through the world.

I’ve written before about how accepting help can be a powerful act of connection - both in life and at work. We want to support our teams to ask for support when they need it, rather than soldiering on and struggling alone. But what’s also important to convey is that this sits alongside taking ownership of your own problems. There is a well known and now fairly old fashioned article on management that describes this issue using the metaphor of a monkey (representing a work related problem) that rests on the back of either a team member or their manager. The writers, Bill Oncken and Donald Wass, write about how common it is for the monkey to be transferred from the back of the team member to the back of the manager in these moments of interaction where help or advice is asked for or suggested. This is profoundly unhelpful for all involved - the team member is disempowered, the manager ends up doing work that isn’t theirs to do and then has less space and time to accomplish their own tasks. Oncken & Wass talk about the idea that, whilst advice can be sought, initiative should never be transferred. Discussion is fine, conversation is fine, but the initiative must always stay with the person whose problem it is.

This sounds kind of obvious when you write it down, but think about how many times someone’s chatted to you about a problem and, before you know it, you’re uttering the phrase “leave that with me” or “let me think about that” and, suddenly, it’s an item for your to-do list not theirs. This can, in the moment, feel supportive, but, in the long term, it leads to team members who become less and less skilled at solving their own problems and thus gives you less and less time to do the bits of your job that only you can do. So let’s try and strike the balance between offering thoughts, ideas and suggestions when asked as opposed to taking full ownership of the monkey - otherwise a powerful act of connection and support is transformed into an exchange that ultimately helps nobody.