Seeking Advice Makes You Look Smarter, Study

Even if employees are faced with myriad opportunities to ask for advice, they will not take it up, or ask for advice, according to nytimes.

"People are often hesitant to seek advice because they fear it will make them appear incompetent," said Alison Wood Brooks, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School.

However, the opposite is true. Those who ask for advice are seen as "more competent than those who do not", according to a recent paper  she wrote along with Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Maurice E. Schweitzer, a professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

"Information sharing is very important in organizations," Professor Brooks said. "If everyone sat in their separate silos and never interacted with each other, they wouldn't learn anything from each other. By not seeking advice, you're missing out on a huge opportunity to learn from your co-workers."

Scientists concluded this after taking the responses of college students and professional adults who were asked to record their impressions of people, such as computer-simulated partners, in this case, who asked for advice.

Still, in earlier studies, Professor Gino, Professor Brooks and Professor Schweitzer discovered that anxiety-ridden people should be careful about asking for advice, as the under-confident people are less able to find out whether advice was bad or "coming from someone with a clear conflict of interest".

However, those who are in a neutral emotional state do not give value to the advice they receive, according to another research by Professor Gino.

"Most people do not take advice from others, even if they don't mind hearing it," she said in an email. This is because of what psychologists call "egocentric bias," a trait that makes the person think that he knows everything. However, she has discovered that what we perceive our competence to be is mostly "inaccurate".

Such a trait is shared by those who feel "powerful", Professor Gino found in another study published in sciencedirect, which she wrote along with Leigh Tost, of the University of Michigan, and Richard Larrick, of Duke University.

"People who feel powerful tend to resist the advice of others, because they experience the advice as a threat to their own claim to power and feel competitive with their advisers," Professor Gino said.

Hence, unless you are feeling anxious, you gain much and lose little by seeking advice.

Being asked for advice is flattering. As Professor Gino said, "People commonly believe that asking for advice is inconsiderate - we don't want to bother others." But in fact, "by asking someone to share his or her personal wisdom, advice seekers stroke the adviser's ego and can gain valuable insights," she said.

Even if you don't use the advice given, "People do not think less of you - they actually think you're smarter."