CHAPTER 3 Ask for Help—or Become Part of the Problem

“He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.”

—Chinese proverb

It’s not only okay to ask for help, but you must do so if needed. Moreover, you must communicate this message to your team members. Does this scenario sound familiar?

You are a member of a project. You might be the project manager or another project member. You have made commitments to completing project tasks. The overall success of the project is, in part, tied to you meeting your commitments. Your commitments are in jeopardy. What do you do? Do you continue on your current path, where you know you are not likely to meet your commitments of time, cost, or quality? Or do you ask for help?

If you are like the vast majority of project members, either you don’t ask for help or you wait too long to ask for help. You allow your missed commitments to damage the overall integrity of the project plan and the project itself.

You say you would never do that intentionally? Most of us have, by our past behavior and record, brought harm to one or more projects and not asked for help. Instead, we waited for help to descend upon us—and often resented the attention and direction of that help.

We are all guilty of not asking for help at some time or another. To learn from our mistakes and mature professionally, we must understand the importance of asking for help as articulately and as early as possible.

It’s not easy to ask for help. Remnants of what I call the “John Wayne mentality”—asking for help is a sign of weakness, while going it alone is a sign of strength and virtue—remain strong in many cultures. Perhaps this mentality was sometimes required for survival. But today, as people come together as a team to pool their talents and skills to create achievements far more complex and remarkable than any one person could hope to accomplish, asking for help is a sign of strength. Not asking for help is a sign of weakness and can undermine the success of the project.

Projects and organizations need to create a work environment where asking for help is encouraged rather than frowned upon. The best leaders and organizations do not create an environment of punishment and discomfort for those seeking needed help—such behavior only discourages project members from seeking the help they need and can add to the attrition many organizations experience. Instead, today’s best leaders and organizations encourage teaming and teamwork, and they recognize that a project’s success correlates directly with the success of each of its contributors. A great benefit of teams is that they are made up of people with a wide range of skills and experiences, all of which enhance the potential for sharing and helping one another on a project.

When you find yourself in trouble and at risk of not meeting your commitments, seek help. However, there is a preferred approach to seeking help, especially if you need to go up the corporate hierarchy to ask for it:

1.Clearly define the problem you need help on A problem that is incompletely or vaguely defined wastes valuable time, energy, and funds. Don’t expect someone else to read your mind and do your job.

2.Describe the proposed solution If more than one plausible solution exists, you can list them, but be accountable and take a position on the solution you favor. Don’t deflect decisions to someone else unless you truly are at an impasse.

3.Be specific about what you are asking forPart Seven: Promoting the Advancement of Project Management beyond Your Projects. A vague request may get a vague response. Telling an executive, for example, exactly what you need, as clearly and precisely as possible, increases the likelihood that the executive will satisfy that request. Being specific has the added benefit of helping the executive feel that he or she is really helping.

If you question whether or not asking for help is the right thing to do, ask yourself this: If this were your own business and one of your employees was faced with the same situation as you are today, would you want your employee to ask for help or to continue on a destructive project path? This becomes easy to answer when you think of it in terms of owning the business.

When you ask for help, you show your human side and also send the signal that you take pride in your work and care about the success of the project. This creates an interesting side effect: The respect others have for you typically increases. Asking for help has the additional benefit of building rapport with the person you are asking for help.

Of course, not asking for help and endangering the success of a portion or the entire project is a sure way to lose the respect and trust of others.

Don’t risk becoming part of the problem because of misplaced pride and an out-of-date “John Wayne mentality.” Do what you know is right, not what you might observe happening around you or what you might be accustomed to. We all need help from time to time. And in today’s highly competitive, fast-changing climate it is more essential than ever for project members to be honest and to ask for help when it is needed.

Let’s Talk: Questions & Answers

Q3.1　　　　Aren’t you concerned that project members may abuse asking others for help?

A3.1　　　　Almost all people want to do the right thing and will use good judgment in asking for help. In the infrequent cases where someone has performance issues, is in the wrong job, or is a slacker looking for others to carry them, those are issues that need to be addressed with his or her resource manager.

Q3.2　　　　A project member can ask for help from a peer, team leader, project manager, or resource manager, but who should a project manager ask for help?

A3.2　　　　A project manager should ask help from whoever can help. That may be a peer, project member, program manager, project sponsor, resource manager, or perhaps a mentor. It doesn’t matter so much where the help comes from; it matters that help is sought—and sought reasonably early.

Q3.3　　　　Why are people often reluctant to ask for help?

A3.3　　　　There are many reasons, of course. It could be pride. It could be the assumption that they will look bad, perhaps incompetent. It could be that a person must ask for help from someone younger in age or lower in job level. It could be bashfulness. It could be a cultural thing. None is an acceptable excuse for not asking for help! A mature professional will ask for help rather than harm the team or project.

Q3.4　　　　Don’t you believe that a project member will ask for help if she says she will?

A3.4　　　　Not necessarily. Picture this:

During the hiring process, a candidate is asked what she would do if she is a member of a project and she is falling behind in her work commitments; would she ask for help? “Yes,” she replies. She’s then hired and immediately placed on a project. A few months later, she is having problems meeting her commitments, but she’s not asking for help.

What happened? This scenario is not as unusual as it may seem. Many people think and behave differently when in a group setting than when they are working alone or with only one other person. Even though they know the correct behavior when singled out and asked, they are reluctant to demonstrate that behavior in a group unless they feel reasonably certain that it will be viewed as acceptable behavior. The professionally mature response is to always exhibit integrity and do the right thing—to think for yourself—regardless of what’s happening around you.

Q3.5　　　　In Chapter 1, Mind Your Own Business, you caution project members about performing outside their domain of responsibility— “extra credit” as you call it. Who will help a project member when that help may be viewed as “extra credit”?

A3.5　　　　I typically don’t view providing help to others as “extra credit.” If a coworker needs a few minutes of our time, we need to make the time to help out. If a coworker requests help that would consume a significant amount of our time and the request will result in us missing our commitments, then we must say “no” professionally. Helping coworkers—up to a point—is what we all do when we function as a team. Being accountable for managing our own commitments is a duty that falls on each and every one of us; no one can manage those commitments for us.