Asking for help
I spoke to a manager recently who said, ‘Why don’t employees ask for help when they need it?’ In my experience there are two reasons:
1 - We’re afraid to ask - that is, the culture doesn’t feel ‘safe’ enough to do so. In her research on psychological safety, Amy Edmondson found that teams took the time to build relationships with each other and were intentional about their culture developed ‘a shared belief…that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.’ This leads to an increase in the ability to ask for help and the development of a learning culture.
There’s also an issue where hierarchy makes employees worry about perception - which leads me to the second point.
2 - We worry how we’ll look - In her work, Edmondson also references the work of Fiona Lee whose research reinforces the second reason we are bad at asking for help. Lee’s research found that proactively seeking help involves social costs because the help seeker appears incompetent, dependent, and inferior. In my experience, this is often the more prevalent reason that we don’t ask for help. Instead we soldier on in the hope of being able to resolve an issue ourselves when we could shortcut the process by seeking assistance
Of course, telling someone to simply ‘ask for help if they need it’ is no guarantee that they will! Instead managers can go out of their way to ensure that safety and approachability is built into the team culture and they demonstrate vulnerability to demonstrate how it’s done.
This can be as simple as saying, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t fully understand, can you explain that again for me?’, elevating the expertise of others ‘[person name] understands this far better than me’ or by simply asking for help themselves!
The irony is that the managers who want employees to ask for help are the same ones that would never dream of doing it themselves!
Everybody needs help sometimes, we just need to be better at creating cultures where it’s safe to ask for it.
