Never Ask “How Can I Help?”

Helping Your Non-Finance Colleagues

Looking to help your non-finance colleagues is one of the cornerstones and pillars of great finance business partnering.

Just don’t ask them if you can help.

Why You Should Avoid the Question

Why?

Because often non-finance will appease you with some insignificant involvement or task to do, like develop a spreadsheet or put something into a spreadsheet that predicts the unpredictable.

Or they will point blank say “all good thanks, we’ve got this.”

Which puts you straight back where you were: not being of help and them not knowing your capability to help.

The Flawed Advice

The amount of advice I read on LinkedIn about positioning yourself as someone who can help is huge. And the same flawed advice appears closely behind it.

Take your business partner out for a coffee/beer/lunch, ask them about their issues, and then ask them “How can I help?”

Which sounds like great advice until you try it and it doesn’t work.

Instead, you get the “we are ok” or a trivial task to appease you, and you look like a condescending know-it-all… not helpful.

Understanding the Reality

The reality of the world is if the other person knows your capabilities, you have a good relationship, and they trust you, you would have been asked to help already.

The fact they didn’t ask you means none of that exists.

So you have to create the environment where it does exist.

Building Trust and Understanding

For this, I am going to take the assumption your relationship is ok and they trust you enough to work with you.

It then comes down to them knowing your capability, which they often won’t. So you have to tell them, in a persuasive subtle way.

A New Approach to the Conversation

And the way you do that is by tweaking the “How can I help?” into a different process.

Firstly, ask them about their issues. Get them talking about those issues. Understand it from their perspective.

Once they open up and disclose it, then slide in a different version of the “How Can I help?” question.

The Key Question

Instead, ask: “If I said I could help you with that, would you be interested?”

It’s a subtle tweak that moves the conversation from asking to help to positioning you as someone who can, and they would be mad not to take up the offer.

It implies to them you are capable of helping.

Conclusion

Try it out next time you are working with your business partner. Instead of asking how to get involved, position yourself as someone who should not NOT be involved by asking them a question nobody would say no to… “If I said I could help you with that, would you be interested?”