When was the last time you asked for help? Are you afraid to?
The Colonel said, “Being a strong leader doesn’t mean you never ask for help. Only a bloated ego believes they never need help. Ask for help so you can grow and be a better leader for your team.”
When I was in elementary school, my parents purchased 3.5 acres on a beautiful lake just north of Durango, Colorado. We spent every summer for five years building a cabin in the back meadow of that land. Now, having no degree or certification in construction, Dad somehow figured he could figure out and muscle through building an A-frame cabin that would be “good enough for government work.” And it was – just good enough. (Oh! It had so many things wrong with it! We’d laugh and patch it up and laugh and patch it up again.) It was wrong in so many ways, but it was ours, and we built it ourselves, so we loved it.
When I was in high school, The Colonel designed a house—his dream home. The one he’d been designing in his head for years. Remembering the lesson from the A-frame cabin, Dad took his design to an architect and asked for help completing the plans and getting the permits. When it came time to build, Dad hired a construction foreman. Every day, he and John would go over what Dad could do himself (so he could feel like he had built the house himself) and what was best left to “the professionals.” Dad gathered a team of young men he knew needed income, guidance, or something to focus on—he always had several young men around that he was mentoring—and they built the house, with the help of “the professionals.” When they experienced a challenge or got in over their heads, Dad would say, “Ya know what? Let’s check with John before we go any further.” I know each member of Dad’s hand-picked construction team would have been there to follow Dad and help him with whatever he asked them to do. And they respected him all the more for knowing what his limitations were.
Be strong enough to ask for help when you need to so you can grow and be a better leader for your team.
Read Lauren’s Whitepaper on The Nine Essentials of Significant Leadership.
