Ask for stories not advice: How to ask for help, pt. 2
Amelia's Newsletter #3
A year ago, I was planning a team offsite and needed help. I’d gotten feedback that our offsites needed improvement, but I didn’t know how—I didn’t know what made a good offsite. But I knew my friend Alec Lee would have good advice. So I compiled a big fat planning doc, shared it with Alec like a proud student turning in a final exam, and proclaimed that I’d love his advice on my offsite plan.
“Well, how about I share a story first?” Alec said. “I used to try and schedule in all these work meetings into our offsites…”
Alec went on, sharing with me how the team had reacted and how things had changed as the company grew. At the end, he wrapped up, “Now, I just focus on bonding time. A cookout, something like that, people can bring their families and kids. The only thing that matters to me is that we get to spend time together as a team and get to know each other.”
“I see,” I said, thinking about his story. “So you learned over time that for your team, the thing that you couldn’t get in the office day-to-day grind was that level of getting to know each other as people, and that was the biggest impact offsite time together could have.”
“Right. In fact, we schedule our offsites on weekends because we wanted people’s spouses and kids to be able to join. If we did it during weekday hours, they wouldn’t be able to attend.”
Ask for stories, not advice
Stories are better because you get the context to understand if the advice applies to you.
Alec could have said, “My advice is to plan a cookout on the weekend,” and I could have blindly followed that advice. But maybe I need to make a critical business decision during our offsite, so I might need a different approach. With the story, I have a better understanding of the context: who his team is and what his goal was. I can decide for myself whether his takeaway applies to me or not.
One challenge I have found is that unlike Alec, most people will eagerly jump straight to advice as soon as the conversation starts—“you should do this, you should do that.” I had to learn how to get people to tell me stories instead. Here’s what works for me.
2 Steps To Get Stories
Ask for the story. “I heard you had to solve [problem X] when you were at [company Y]. Can you take a few minutes to share with me the story of what happened?”
Repeat your synthesis of the takeaways back to them, in your own words. “So it sounds like your takeaway was X. Does that sound right to you? Am I getting it right?” Repeat until they say, “Right.”
Now you have the advice you came for—in fact, you came up with it yourself and understand it even more deeply.
Parting thoughts
As a founder, you constantly ask for help. Each call is a single 30 minute window to learn as much as you can, and you get one shot only.
30 minutes is very little time. Every second that doesn’t teach you something is time wasted, a lost opportunity for something else you could have asked or learned. It’s worth learning how to maximize what you get.
Ask for stories instead of advice, and you’ll get more every time.
Thank you to Keir Mierle, Yana Welinder, Nicole Wee, Alec Lee for reading drafts of this post.