CHAPTER 20

How to Respond When You’re Asked to Help

by Deborah M. Kolb and Jessica L. Porter

More often than not, women are the ones who help others when asked. They plan the meetings, take the notes, and assume other types of “office housework,” to use sociologist and business author Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s immortal phrase. These thankless-but-necessary tasks keep organizations humming. But as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Wharton professor Adam Grant note in their New York Times article “Madame CEO, Get Me Coffee,” while women are expected to do more of this work, they don’t get credit for it and suffer backlash when they refuse to do it. “When a woman declines to help a colleague, people like her less and her career suffers,” they write, citing different studies by professors Madeline Heilman, Joan C. Williams, and Joyce K. Fletcher. “But when a man says no, he faces no backlash. A man who doesn’t help is ‘busy’; a woman is ‘selfish.’”

Office “housework” is often invisible, and so its value to a team is underappreciated. That fact creates one of the hidden barriers that can keep women from ascending to more-senior leadership roles. In our decades studying this phenomenon, we’ve found four negotiation strategies that work.

• Turn a request for help into a negotiation. Alexandra, a project manager, was asked by her boss to support a leader who was having family issues and needed help doing his work. Her boss asked her to be an “acting director.” Alexandra negotiated this request into a promotion: She agreed to help, as long as she would be named to a true director role after the helping period ended and the leader returned to his job.
• Ascertain the cost of your contribution. Helping is not a free good. Not only does it take time away from your day job, but it can also exact a toll on your health and family. When Patria, a program leader in an NGO, was asked by her director to help a colleague whose team was having trouble managing its workload, she agreed. But when she factored in the additional time required to help her colleague, her prorated hourly pay dropped dramatically. When she pointed this out to the director in stark dollar terms, Patria was able to negotiate for more resources in order to continue to help without putting in more time.
• Demonstrate the value of your help. In our work, we have seen how women successfully incorporate their helping time into an expanded version of their jobs by showing the value of what they’re doing. That is what Isobel, a communications manager, did. After initially helping another division with a government client and saving an important relationship, the other division kept asking for her “fixing” help. Although she liked being seen as a fixer, she knew she could not continue doing it and still keep up with her job. By showing the value of her work to the other division, she negotiated the fixing work she was doing into a new expanded role, with a commensurate title and raise.
• If the ask is more personal than professional, build in reciprocity. In the examples above, helping benefited the organization. But getting the coffee and planning the office party are more personal. When negotiating around these types of requests, ask for reciprocity: If I do this, then what will you do? Allison, a senior leader, was always willing to take her turn getting the coffee—with the provision “I’ll do it today, and next time it will be your turn.” And she made sure the other person remembered.

Negotiating the conditions of your help is good for you as an individual and good for your organization. When you help without conditions, you train people to expect that you will continue to do so. But when you negotiate the conditions of your help, it can be a small win for you. And as we have found in our work, these small wins can start to accumulate into bigger gains. Sandberg and Grant note that it doesn’t have to be the case that “no good deed goes unpunished.” But reversing that behavior requires women to place value on their help and to negotiate to have that work acknowledged and rewarded.

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Deborah M. Kolb is the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Professor for Women in Leadership (emerita) and a cofounder of the Center for Gender in Organizations at Simmons College School of Management. An expert on negotiation and leadership, she is also a codirector of the Negotiations in the Workplace Project at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Jessica L. Porter advises organizations worldwide on gender and leadership. As a researcher, Porter has led influential investigations into effective work habits and creating change. Kolb and Porter are the coauthors of Negotiating at Work: Turn Small Wins into Big Gains.

Adapted from “‘Office Housework’ Gets in Women’s Way” on hbr.org, April 16, 2015 (product #H020J5)