Don't Hesitate to Ask

“Confidence, like art, never comes from having all the answers;
it comes from being open to all the questions.”
—Earl Gray Stevens

In a competitive environment, you can be sure that at some point someone will hold back on the facts or details you need to know. It’s a power play and an effective one. Or, on the other hand, you may get wrong information. That’s just as bad. If you’re alert, you know when either one of those situations may occur. In that case, verify your information with a more reliable source.

It may not always seem nice to ask—it may appear imprudent. It may make you feel stupid but not doing so is a sure career holdup. The three most mentioned skills by the successful women I’ve interviewed are: asking, not being afraid to make mistakes, and persevering. How they learned these skills was often as serendipitous as how they found angels or great jobs.

The women who’ve succeeded are self-confident. They’re easy about their confidence—there’s no arrogance, no self-congratulation. If you don’t have it, get it. If it was not instilled at home, then find it outside. I mean it! Do whatever it takes: meditation, therapy, counseling. From time immemorial boys got more confidence training at school and at home. For some reason, girls weren’t encouraged to have that kind of confidence. So we lost out in later years. If you have confidence, then you can go with your gut. Women have good instincts. All of us who reached any level of success have often looked back and realized that many of our most important decisions were made by gut intuition.

Typically, it was either a mother or father who instilled that confidence in their daughters. It still is. Almost every single successful woman was brought up believing that she could do whatever she wanted to do. So I always asked the women I interviewed who helped, who showed them the light?

If your parents didn’t instill that confidence—the belief that you were invincible—it doesn’t mean that you can’t be successful. But it is one more thing to be aware of while you are making your way through the muddle. There’s a lot to assess but if you have all the tools, all the arms, all the knowledge about yourself, it will make your journey that much easier.

The first step we take towards developing a healthy confidence is to ask. Karen Elliott House, publisher of the Wall St. Journal, learned to ask:
“I went to Washington in October of 1971 and Sarah McClendon from Texas used to cover the White House, Helen Thomas was there for UPI, and another woman named Fran Lewin had just been promoted for AP. I thought it was wonderful, I’m never going to be the first woman to do anything. All the stories in Ms. Magazine perhaps were just history. I’ll just follow it along. But I realized a few years later that people see women as having jobs and men as having careers. So then you started to realize how lucky [you are] to have these opportunities and if anyone needs anything more, they’ll ask me. Yes, they’ll ask you to do another reporting assignment and then another. But no one is looking at you and thinking you can be more than a reporter. So then I adopted the philosophy if you want something, ask—the worst that can happen is that the answer is no. I just kind of figured that out.”

Although we can ask, for some reason we are often afraid to and that fear leaves us vulnerable. If we don’t know the answer, we are at a disadvantage in making decisions or taking strategies to a next level. Men ask—or they get someone to ask for them.

The women who made it to the top are exceptional. They share certain traits that are attributes or perhaps gifts that they have, either instinctively or by selection. They take risks and ask for what they want. On their way up they asked for better assignments, they asked about money and perks, they asked for help when they were not sure. There was no concern about making decisions just to please others. “If more women are going to be in senior positions, they’re going to fail the way men fail. We just have to have a natural acceptance of that,” says Shelly Lazarus, Chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

It helps to understand the big picture to ensure that your decisions really fit in the world around you. It doesn’t matter whether that immediate world is a division, a department or the entire company. We don’t exist in a vacuum even though we often feel that we are out there by ourselves. There are people in a position to help, no matter what the issue. There are experts. All the women advised that we seek out people with the expertise. Making decisions in isolation is usually not the best way, although for some people it may be the most comfortable.

It is not only asking for help but also for jobs or better positions or for a better salary. Few of us ever imagined that we would make a lot of money. That wasn’t our prime motivator. Most of the women I spoke with simply wanted temporary financial independence and an interesting life.

Sometimes you have to ask for everything. That is hard enough to do. It is also hard to know the questions to ask when it comes to what you want beyond the scope of work, the perks. I marvel how some guys can come into a position and immediately set up their club memberships, board memberships, reimbursable expenses. I have very rarely seen a woman do that easily, although I suspect it is more frequent now.

We had already been warned by our parents not to ask about salary or vacation until we were offered the job. Good girls didn’t ask—it was impolite. Today the subject often comes up during the first meeting, along with vacation, bonus, and any other perks relevant to the job. The highest ranking female officer at a major company believes we absolutely have to ask if we seek equality. Perhaps not for the entry-level job, but surely for a more senior position or once you have been offered a job:

When you sit down with your boss, you should be discussing money. Women hate discussing money, they hate discussing compensation. Don’t be uncomfortable when you talk to people about that. I have found across the board that women don’t ask. In the performance evaluation process, the first thing men come in and talk about is what their compensation going to be. Women always have a tendency to say ‘money is not that big issue with me, I’ll just get paid what I deserve and that’s good.’ They are trusting.

If you have the confidence, you can go with your gut, and you can ask the questions you need to in order to have the information. “Knowledge is power.” But you only get it by asking, seeking, researching. As Shelly Lazarus says, “I think you have to be willing to seize opportunity. I don’t mean that in a negative or political sense, but when someone asks if you can step up to a challenge, the answer should be, yes, I may not know how, but I am going to try.’ I was never afraid to ask anybody for help. You ask because you want to do a good job. In my experience, if you are being asked to do things you don’t know how to do most people will spend a lot of time trying to help you.”

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Diane Smallen-Grob is the author of Making It in Corporate America.

Diane has more than 20 years of business experience. She was Managing Director at Burson-Marsteller, heading the Latin America technology practice. In addition, she ran a small PR firm and held financial marketing positions with top Wall Street firms. You may contact Diane at her website.