Bridging the Ask vs Culture Gap at Work

By creating more shared context, aligning around when to ask for help, and helping guess-culture coworkers get clarity on what they want in their careers

In my previous post, I shared the idea of ask vs guess culture, as well as some quick tips for navigating an ask culture workplace as a guess culture person.

If you haven’t already, I recommend reading that post first before continuing with this post that continues the exploration of ask vs guess culture at work.

Ask vs guess culture

Despite my efforts to be increasingly ask culture, it’s a bit simplistic to say ask culture is good, and guess culture is bad. The extremes are both exhausting:

• Extreme ask culture looks like people just asking for more and more, with no regard to how they are perceived, or whether it is appropriate to ask for more. It can be viewed as highly inconsiderate, like asking to order the most expensive item on the menu when you know the person who’s paying is struggling to stay afloat financially.
• Extreme guess culture is rife with passive hints and people not saying what they want. It requires expert-level context-reading, analyzing, and guessing at what people mean when they say what they want, knowing it’s not actually what they want.

Extreme ask culture and guess culture at work

In a Western corporate workplace, ask culture is more dominant, but it’s overly simplistic to just say, everyone should be more ask culture.

Extreme ask culture in the workplace might look like someone asking for raises every month, despite not meeting expectations of their current role, and frustrating their manager by their seeming entitled cluelessness. Or someone who constantly asks for time from coworkers to think through ideas live on calls, and takes up an annoying amount of time that people don’t want to give.

Extreme guess culture in the workplace might look like never asking for what you want, never getting clarity on what you want, yet hoping that opportunities that move you forward will…