Asking for Help Isn’t Weakness. It’s a Collaboration Skill.

How to Ask for Help at Work more Often—and How to Do It Right

Getty Images/Unsplash+

Asking for help is one of the best ways to improve collaboration. Yet most teams avoid it. Not because they don’t need help. They avoid asking for it because asking feels scary, awkward, and risky. Teams don’t fail because members refuse to help. They fail because no one asks.

I was boarding my last flight after a long week of travel. A man kept staring at me. He wanted to say something, but looked uncomfortable. Finally, he leaned in and said, “Sorry to bother you. Can you put my backpack in the overhead bin? I just had spine surgery.” I lifted it right away. “Of course,” I said, “And remind me when we land so I can get it down for you.” As I sat back down, he apologized again—this time for asking.

This short moment mirrors what happens at work every day. People wait, soften the ask, apologize before asking, and feel weak for needing help. They assume they’ll be rejected, become a burden, or even look incompetent. So instead of asking for help, they stay quiet.

No one succeeds alone. Collaboration works when people ask for (and offer) help. When you don’t ask, you’re not being independent. You’re setting yourself up to fail.

Why We Struggle to Ask for Help

Most people avoid asking for help—not because they don’t need it, but because it feels risky. At work, needing help can harm your reputation. You might seem like you don’t know how to do your job or like you owe someone a favor. So people stay quiet, even when it hurts the team.

The numbers are clear. Half of us wait until we’re drowning before asking for help. Thirteen percent never ask at all, a study shows. Only 27 percent ask for help before starting a new project. Here’s the problem: 53 percent say that trying to do everything alone stops them from achieving their goals.

There are three main reasons I explain in my upcoming book, Forward Talk – The Bold New Method to Get Teams Unstuck:

1. We don’t realize we need help.

We think too highly of ourselves and too little of others. Drivers consistently rate themselves as better than average. Professors and parents do the same thing. But most people average; that’s just math. The superiority illusion leads us to see ourselves inaccurately. Admitting we need help makes us feel weak.

2. We don’t like to ask for help.

Even when we know we need help, we struggle to ask for it. At work, we’re supposed to have all the answers. That’s why leaders want final say or dismiss other people’s ideas. They don’t want to admit they don’t know something. Asking for help makes us feel incompetent.

3. We don’t trust people will help.

Once you admit you need help and find the courage to ask, you face a new barrier: Will people actually help me? You think they’ll say no. Or you worry they won’t deliver what you need when you need it. Trust means believing in someone’s competence, caring, and consistency (I explain it here). When we don’t trust others, asking for help makes us feel dependent.

People fear being told no. They worry about rejections more than they actually happen.

I’ve been helping many teams build a culture of helping. In most workshops, I see that people don’t want to bother their colleagues because everyone seems busy. But here’s the thing: not getting help when you need it creates more work later when you have to fix mistakes.

Many team members worry they’ll look selfish. They think asking for help makes them seem like a bad team player.

Whatever the reason, one thing is clear: People don’t ask for help as often as they should.

Here’s the surprising part:

People actually like helping others much more than we think. A global study found that someone asks for help (from passing a utensil to completing a task at work) once every two minutes. People say yes seven times more often than they say no.

On the rare occasions when people do decline, they explain why. “This human tendency to help others when needed—and to explain when such help can’t be given—transcends other cultural differences,” explains Professor Nick Enfield, of the University of Sydney.

Asking for help isn’t about easing your workload. It’s about letting others contribute and creating better outcomes together.

Asking for Help Improves Collaboration

Asking for help, just like asking for feedback, puts you in charge. Research shows it activates the reward center in your brain. When leaders ask for help, they model the courage they want to see in others. Best of all, you define the ask on your own terms: what help you need, who to ask, and when you need it.

In high-trust cultures, leaders regularly ask for help. This practice stimulates the production of the love hormone, increasing trust and collaboration. When you admit what you don’t know, it actually makes you a more credible leader.

But not all help is good help.

Good help makes the work better, not just reduces effort. Bad help is about fixing things for people in the short term, like dumping tasks on others instead of building collective ownership. “Help dumping” destroys trust faster than not asking at all.

In low-trust cultures, asking for help is punished. In high-trust cultures, asking for help shows you care.

Different workplace cultures handle help differently. In overly nice cultures, people offer help generously to keep everyone happy. But they often end by saying “yes” when they mean “no.” In aggressive cultures, asking for help signals weakness and comes with strings attached. In fearful cultures, people don’t really help each other—they hoard information to keep power. In Fearless Cultures, help focuses on making the work better, not just making people feel better.

Asking for help means more than just getting someone to do something for you. It includes asking for support, coaching, and just understanding. I recently ran an “ask for help” exercise, and the most frequent request was: I want to learn more about what your department does and how I can help you.

Here are different ways to ask for help:

• Help me understand the real problem

• Help me find a solution

• Can you just listen while I think out loud?

• Let’s brainstorm together

• Am I asking the right questions?

• Challenge my thinking

• Can I get your advice?

• I need more people to help me with a project

This list isn’t exhaustive, but it shows that we need to think of “help” more broadly.

How to Ask for Help Like a Pro

1. Don’t fear rejection. People love helping. It makes them feel important and valued. When you ask someone for help, you’re showing them that you trust them. Remember, we’re wired to help each other.

2. Be specific. Vague requests push the thinking onto others. Clear asks respect other people’s time, making it easier for them to help. Double-check they understood what you need.

3. Ask the right person. Not everyone can help you with everything. Who has the right expertise or influence you need? Don’t just reach out to those you have strong relationships with. Ask the right person, not the most convenient one.

4. Timing is everything. A good request at the wrong moment becomes a burden. Asking when people have the capacity to engage makes help feel collaborative rather than disruptive.

5. Trust people. Asking while double-checking or lining up backups signals mistrust. Either ask—or don’t. Many leaders ask multiple people for the same help, or ask someone, but then continue working on the project themselves. Half-asking undermines collaboration.

6. Write it down. Writing forces clarity. If you can’t explain what help you need in one or two sentences, how can you expect others to understand?

7. Request connections. If you don’t know who can help you, ask someone to identify the expert or influencer in your organization who actually can.

How to Respond When People Ask You for Help

1. Understand before you respond. Most people suck at asking for help. Don’t assume you understand what they need. Ask clarifying questions to make sure you grasp the request.

2. Answer concretely. You have three choices: Yes, No, or I’ll try. Yes means you’ll do it. No means you can’t or don’t want to. I’ll try is a commitment—you’ll do your very best (maybe you don’t have the bandwidth, or some requests don’t depend solely on you). Whatever you choose, stand by it.

3. Think before you reply. You’re probably jumping from meeting to meeting. Being forced to commit on the spot has a compounding effect. You can end up saying yes to ten new things in one day. If those new tasks require 30 minutes each, you’ve just added five hours to your workload. Take your time. Consider all the requests, and then reply.

4. You don’t need to explain your “nos.” I know this is tough. No one wants to look impolite or like the bad guy. However, most ‘reasons’ are made up. We try to justify our decisions to look good. People see through this, and trust suffers. If people accept a “yes” without an explanation, they should learn to take a “no” without one either.

5. Commit to a date. Don’t just agree to help. Let colleagues know when you’ll get back to them. If priorities shift, let the other person know you’re still willing to help and that it will take you more time.

6. Say “no” more often than “yes.” This sounds counterintuitive. I’m writing about the importance of asking for help, then telling you to say “no.” Here’s the point: every time you say “yes” to a new task, you’re saying “no” to what really matters. Say “no” strategically based on your team’s and individual priorities. When you say no more often, your “yeses” become more meaningful.

7. Deprioritize often. Every time you take on something new, ask what else you’ll deprioritize. Like it or not, your energy and time are limited. Being helpful doesn’t mean increasing burnout. If your boss asks you to help others, it’s okay to say, “Yes, but only if I can deprioritize this other project.”

---

Asking for help is key to successful collaboration. When people admit they can’t do everything on their own, everyone thinks more clearly. The work improves. Teams get things done faster.

The strongest cultures don’t reward those who do everything on their own. They reward helping each other when it’s needed. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s a collective strength.

Ready to help your team have the conversations people are avoiding? Let’s talk.