Sunday, June 12, 2011

Ask the questions

Sometimes in a new job (or even an old one) we might not want to ask questions either due to social anxiety or because of fear of looking ignorant. This can lead to a lot of trouble as we get stonewalled without needed information and appear to be 'not working'. Find a way to ask the question.

One thing I will do is ask "Can I see how you perform task X? I want to compare my own process to see if I can improve." Often this covers the fact that I am unclear on how to use a piece of software or cannot remember a particular intranet address I need to go to in order to access information.

And if you are worried about asking the same thing over and over keep cheat sheets on tasks so you can write notes down. Asking to clarify something someone said before is much better than asking them the same question over again.

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