You're doing your job. It's already hard enough.

Someone shares something with you and asks for your review (or worse, they just share it and expect your ✅). Within thirty seconds, something stinks: the artifact insults your domain, or assumes things you know to be wrong. You're supposed to be collaborative. But there's a power dynamic in the framing, and you can feel it.

Years ago, my friend Lynn Tejada, who runs Green Galactic PR in Los Angeles — taught me a small move that changed how I work. It maps to the philosophy in David Marquet's Leadership is Language: the difference between handing someone a finished decision and inviting them into the thinking that produces one.

The twist is simple. Everything is a work in progress. You're asking for advice.

The setup

Lynn has a lot of radioactive glass. It glows in the dark. It's amazing and weird. From years doing PR in entertainment and arts, she also has cool figurines, toys, and neat things to play with — or to deliberately not play with.

None of this goes well with kids. At the time, my son was three, and we were coming to visit.

Here's how this could have gone — and how it usually does, in the workplace:

"Ahead of you guys coming to visit, here are some rules for our house."

Or its passive-aggressive cousin:

"Ahead of you guys coming to visit, here are some rules for our house. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback."

Instead, I got this:

"Hey Justin! I'm working on a list of 'rules' for our house and wanted to get your feedback. You've been here a ton, you know the place really well, you know kids really well, and I could really use your input before I share it with other people."

What changed

The first version positions me as a recipient or a challenger. The process is done. The document is finished. My feedback is technically welcome but structurally optional. There's a power dynamic, and we both know who holds authority.

The second version positions me as a respected collaborator. It builds trust. It signals the document is in-progress. It asks for my advice. I know it's still her document and her rules, but I also know she's including me in the part where things can still change, and she's surfacing what she doesn't know she doesn't know. And she also signals that my help on unblocks her from including others, hinting at the value and priority of my contribution.

Here's the part that surprised me: the second version more effectively communicated her actual message. By framing it as a request for advice, Lynn got my guard down. Even when I had feedback; maybe even where I disagreed. I knew her position, and I respected / considered the message because it was still in conversation.

This is the Marquet point. When someone hands you a finished thing, you can only react to it. When someone invites you into the thinking, you become part of it. The output may end up identical, but the relationship doesn't.

The catch

This only works if you're being honest.

You cannot ask for feedback and then defend the document against what it receives. That's worse than not asking. It signals that the invitation was performance, that you wanted the appearance of collaboration without the substance of it. People notice. Once. And they don't forget.

There may be times where you genuinely don't want input, so don't ask for it. Send the rules. Own the authority only if it's yours to own, and acknowledges the downstream effects of it in advance. Show your thinking. Answer the questions before they're asked.

The mistake is dressing up a finished decision as an open question, because the trust cost is enormous and the recovery is slow.

Note: Why this matters more now

The pattern was already common before generative AI. Now it's everywhere. People send each other AI-drafted documents, decks, and plans and ask for "feedback" — and the receiver can feel the disrespect immediately. They know whether they're being asked to think, to play suggest-mode pickleball, or to rubber-stamp.

The reframe from tell to ask isn't a trick. It's how you build trust, move faster, and make better decisions with the people around you.

Coming soon, Part 2: Askers vs Tellers.