If you’ve been keeping your trap shut in fear of looking stupid at the office, you might have good reason to open your mouth. Asking for advice can actually make you seem more competent, research from Harvard Business School found.
In the study, participants first completed a brainteaser and then received a message from their anonymous partner, who was set to start on the same exercise. The people who read a message that asked for advice on the task rated their partner as more competent than those who just received a greeting.
Credit the undeniable effect of flattery, the researchers believe. Being asked for guidance made the people feel more self-confident, which helped them view the advice-seeker more favorably.
“Asking for advice strokes the advisor’s ego,” says study author Alison Wood Brooks, Ph.D. “Seeking advice is an ingratiation tactic as well as a way to learn useful information and exchange ideas.”
Just make sure you’re choosing the person wisely: You don’t want to ask the office’s self-professed technophobe how to set up your new gadget. Asking for advice on a topic the person considers himself clueless about can make you seem less proficient.
So go ahead and ask some questions, but don’t blather on just for the hell of it. Seeking advice on easy tasks didn’t harm competence ratings in the experiment, but the researchers believe that some queries may be so super-simple that they are a turnoff for the advisor. Plus, asking the same thing over and over is likely to make him think you’re incapable of learning, Brooks says.
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