Steward’s Corner: Rethink the Scripted ‘Ask’
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You’re having a conversation with a co-worker, but inside you’re feeling icy dread. You’re talking through a script that ends with asking them to do a specific thing: sign a union card, wear a button, come to a meeting, vote for a strike. And sure enough, when you ask, a wall comes down.
The co-worker looks away, makes an excuse, and pins you as someone who is after something. You’re disappointed, confused about why it didn’t work, and afraid you’re not going to meet your goal.
Many of us feel nervous or awkward about asking a co-worker to do something. Sometimes we just need to push ourselves to do it. But if you’re being pressured to follow the script and get to a particular “ask” without finding out who this person is and moving at their pace, that’s a problem.
A co-worker you don’t yet have much of a relationship with may be turned off that you’re pressuring them to take an action that has already been decided on by others.
What can you do instead? Replace the “ask” (to take some predetermined action) with an invitation: “Hey, some of us are getting together to talk about this. You want to join us?” “Can we figure out how you can be part of the solution to this problem that you’re posing?”
People are happy to be asked to do something they want to do, or that they’re good at, or that they’re confident about. People like to be asked to do things when it reflects your respect for them: “You’re asking me to do this because you’re confident in my ability. You know I like this task, or that I’m good at it.” Think how different that is from simply complying with what the organizer wants them to do.
A NEW APPROACH
A young worker in a chemical factory in Massachusetts was trying to interest his co-workers in a union. After many frustrating weeks of trying to approach people with an ask—to come to a meeting with a union organizer—he was about to give up.
But then he opened his eyes to other possibilities and changed his approach: “What I’m really trying to do is build real relationships,” he said. “I decided to see what happened if I gave up the ask.”
With this new approach, in a matter of just two or three weeks, he met his goal to connect with co-workers in a dozen departments where he had not previously had any contact. He found that it was so much easier to make contact when that was the only goal.
What had been holding him back from contacting these people before? “I didn’t know what the ask was. And what do they owe me? They’re going to feel bad if they don’t do what I ask. They might avoid me.”
TRUST TAKES TIME
Instead, his co-workers started to approach him with questions, concerns, and ideas about workplace problems. It emerged that the boss was providing very different retirement packages to different employees. Pretty soon a group came together to document the problem, propose a fix, and bring it to the boss.
Of course organizers are asking people to do things all the time—our organizing is about action, not just talk.
And there are times when making a specific ask, even pushing hard, makes sense—asking people to commit to a strike, for instance, or to vote yes to join the union.
But such urgency should be grounded in strong relationships and discussions that have built trust over time, helping people overcome fear.
Any hard “ask” should stem from inclusive discussion and collective decisions. People should be coming up to you to say, “Is that petition what I think it is? Give me that, I want to sign it.”
[Do you have a different take on "the ask" or the organizing conversation? Write to editors[at]labornotes[dot]org]
Excerpted from Keep Going: A Guide to Organizing When It’s Hard by Ellen David Friedman, a retired organizer for Vermont NEA and a member of the Labor Notes board.
