The Art of Asking for (and Getting) Help

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.

How often do you ask for help?  In my personal life, I do it all the time. I might ask another mom to pick up my kids, or my husband to cook dinner. Before Waze, I asked for directions. One time, when I showed up at a fancy event in my commuting shoes – with my heels back at the office – I walked into a dress shop and asked to borrow the ones they let customers use to gauge hem length.

In my professional life, I’m not so needy. If I’m struggling with a task, I usually just keep at it. I do request later, shorter, and fewer meetings. I’ve been known to call the IT Help Desk. But if I’m struggling with a task, I usually just keep at it.

Whether it’s a higher pay or a promotion, support on a tricky assignment or more resources for your team, it can be hard to ask bosses and colleagues for help at work.  But, unless your office is a magical place filled with genies and fairy godmothers, you rarely get what you need or want without asking for it.

Today we’re joined by Wayne Baker, a sociologist and professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He’s spent much of his career focused on the issue of how to effectively solicit help. His conclusion? It involves not only understanding your goals and tailoring your message but also embracing the reciprocity of both giving and receiving and spreading that ethos across your group.

Baker is the author of the book All You Have to Do Is Ask: How to Master the Most Important Skill for Success. And he joins me now. Wayne, welcome.

WAYNE BAKER: Thank you Alison. Glad to be here.

ALISON BEARD: So why do some of us shy away from asking for help at work?

WAYNE BAKER: Well, it is very common, and it occurs for a couple of reasons. One is that we are afraid that we’ll appear to be incompetent or weak or ignorant or that we can’t do our jobs. But you know, here we need to update our belief. There’s some new research that has been done by a team from Wharton and Harvard, where they found as long as you make a thoughtful, intelligent request, people will think you are more competent, not less.

Another reason is that we often underestimate other people’s willingness and ability to help. And here too, the research shows very clearly that most people are willing to help even strangers if they are asked. The problem is that most people don’t ask for what they need.

ALISON BEARD: There is this fine balance to walk though because we all want to be seen as self-starters – you know, able to work very hard independently, not bringing our boss problems, not overburdening our colleagues. So how do we navigate that? Keeping our reputation but still getting the help we need?

WAYNE BAKER: Well self-reliance is a good thing. It’s a strong value. But it’s possible to over rely on self-reliance. And many times, we can just do the task more effectively, more efficiently and quicker if we reach out and ask for help or input if we ask for help or input or resources of some sort.

Now, what we have found in the workplace and often in in various aspects of life as well, is that people will be very generous, but they’re afraid to ask for what they need. We call that the overly generous giver. And the cure for that is to ask more for what you need, but it also means that a way that you maintain your reputation, in fact improve your reputation is to be generous.

So I always advocate that people should do two things. You should be generous, you should help people. Don’t keep track of who helps you. It’s not about a tit for tat exchange and to freely ask for what you need when you need it. So that’s the best place to be for an individual, for a team or for an organization.

ALISON BEARD: You also in your book make a distinction between asking someone to do something for you and asking someone to teach you to do something, so the next time you can be self-reliant and do it yourself.

WAYNE BAKER: Yes. There’s two types of help seeking. There is autonomous and dependent. So autonomous help-seeking means that you want to learn and you ask someone for input or help so that you can learn to do it the next time yourself.

Dependent help seeking is that you just want the problem solved, you want the problem to go away and you don’t really learn anything in the process. A perfect example of that is, um, whenever I asked my teenage son for help with my iPhone. Now I’m from the analog generation. He is from the digital, uh, generation. He’s a digital native, so he knows how to do everything.

And so I’ll get stuck on something. I’ll say, “Hey, could you help me with this?” And he just takes my phone and his hands is a blur. I mean he just does it really, really fast. And I say, no, no, we slow down. I want to, you know, I want to know how to do it, so I’m going to have to ask you again. But he just wants to get it done. Hands it back to me. I have the answer when I own my iPhone now works but I don’t know how to do it myself.

ALISON BEARD: Every office does have people who do advocate for themselves, you know, they get more resources when they’re working on projects, get more people put on their teams, get more time to finish their tasks. They have this sort of ask and you shall receive attitude, which is you’re saying is great, but that does create resentment, right? Is that the right model?

WAYNE BAKER: Well, I mentioned the overly generous giver, which is the most common type that we see. We have an assessment that we use and that’s the result time and time again, that most people are overly generous givers at work. The opposite is what you just described. It’s the selfish taker. The person who was always making requests and not really helping other people in return. I have a friend of mine who works at IBM consulting and he says, Oh, they had, those are, those are sponges. We call them sponges. Those are the people who kind of suck in everything and don’t give anything back. So over time what we find is that the selfish taker is productivity and performance decline. The reason is, is that people stop helping them because they see that they’re not participating, they’re not giving any help back.

ALISON BEARD: In your research, did you find any differences between people’s willingness to ask for help depending on their career stage? You know, you could see a young person being too shy to ask for help, but you can also see a very senior person not wanting to because then people might think they don’t know what they’re doing and shouldn’t be in the position that they are.

WAYNE BAKER: Yeah, we call that the sage syndrome as that leaders feel that they have to be the font of all wisdom to know everything and never have any needs or never ask for help. But what we’ve really found over time is that that’s really self-limiting; leaders need to ask as well. In fact, I’ve proposed a new role for the leader, which is the chief help seeker – that they should ask for help. And by doing so, they’re a role model for the kind of behavior that they want in other people. In fact, if a, if a leader is not willing to ask, it’s hard to get anyone else to do it as well.

ALISON BEARD: So have you found that these sages are less likely to ask for help?

WAYNE BAKER. Oh, absolutely. And almost the higher up you go in an organization, the less, you know, the more people feel that they have to have all the answers. But that is just really, I mean, that’s totally unrealistic as that, you know, they have great needs. In fact, you know, the CEO or someone in the C-suite, you know, they encounter a lot of problems that they need to talk to other executives about, maybe outside of their company. Maybe they need what I called a brain trust. You know, a group of trusted people who are at a similar executive level but across different companies that you can go to and, and consult.

ALISON BEARD: And did you find any differences between genders or ethnic backgrounds?

WAYNE BAKER: With our assessment, we have not found any gender differences that the propensity to be an overly generous giver is equally likely for men and for women. Now we don’t have enough data to answer your other question is how might it differ by ethnicity or age.

ALISON BEARD: And what about across cultures?

WAYNE BAKER: It’s very interesting. We have a, an activity called the reciprocity ring that we created about 20 years ago. It’s, you can kind of think of it as a group level, pay it forward activity where everyone makes a request, but you spend most of your time helping other people meet their requests. Either you have the answer or the resource or you can tap your network and get it for that person.

And way back then we thought that getting people to give to help was going to be, that was going to be the real problem, the real obstacle. But it turns out that the biggest barrier to generosity is people’s reluctance to ask for what they need. So in the reciprocity ring, the request is the ticket of admission. So you have to do that. And because everyone’s doing it, everyone’s in the same boat and it’s feels psychologically safe.

ALISON BEARD: And so this works everywhere in the world?

WAYNE BAKER:  Yes. That’s why I mentioned it, is that a, it’s now been done by about 150,000 people, 20 different countries, 12 different languages. And it always works. It seems to tap into some human universal. We’ve used it in Saudi Arabia. It’s worked in Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, you name it. It’s worked in South America. It’s worked all over the place, you know, it really taps into that human universal, that people want to help. And if you give them permission to ask, all kinds of things are possible.

ALISON BEARD: A lot of the hesitation in asking for help is not knowing exactly what you need or who to ask for it, you know, especially in large organizations. So how do you get past that?

WAYNE BAKER: You know I mentioned before that you want to make a thoughtful, intelligent request and part of that is knowing the goal that you’re trying to achieve and then the requests you need to make in order to get a resource to, to move you towards that goal.

So I offer a couple of different ways of doing it. One of my favorite is the quick start method and it’s a number of sentence completers and I’ll read just two of them to you to get a sense of it. And I found when people do this, when executives do this, that it really gets them thinking about what they’re trying to accomplish and what they need to accomplish it.

So here’s two I am currently working on and I could use help to, you know, they fill in those two blanks. Another one is one of my biggest challenges in my life is to, and I need advice on if you took just those two and I have several of them, if you take those to answer those, fill in the blanks, you’ll go a long way to figure out what you’re trying to do. It helps you to prioritize and what kind of resource that you need.

ALISON BEARD:  And then how do you go about finding the people who can get those things for you?

WAYNE BAKER: Well, there’s a couple of proven methods. One principle is that you really need to go outside of your inner circle of friends and acquaintances and family. Now of course they may have the resource of the answer you need, so you would want to ask them. But often we find the resource outside of that network. Outside of that inner circle.

One method I call the two-step method. So I might not know who to ask in terms of who has the resource, but I might know someone who would likely know someone. It’s that two step or two degree method. So I have a colleague of mine, Jeff DeGraff, who is an innovation expert.

He used a two-step method 180 times in one year to find the expert and as he would say is that he goes, you know, we often don’t know who the expert is, but we know who to ask to get to the expert. It’s that two step method.

Another is the use of your dormant ties. Now a dormant tie is a connection or a relationship that you had with someone in the past, but you haven’t kept up and your lives have gone in different directions. Now many people feel reluctant, you know, re reconnecting with someone from the past and making a request.

But what the research shows is that people are really, they’re thrilled. They’re delighted to hear from you and very willing to help you. And because they’re what they know, and their networks are really quite different now because they’ve gone at a different direction from you, because of that, they offer a world of resources that are available to help you solve a problem or get the advice that you need or whatever resource it might be.

ALISON BEARD: Right. So how do I approach this initial outreach to my network? And then once I’ve identified a person who I really think could help me on this specific problem I’m dealing with, make the request to them?

WAYNE BAKER: I have five criteria called SMART criteria. The S is for specific and the more specific you can make your request, the more likely it will be fulfilled. And that’s because when you ask a very specific request, it triggers people’s memories about what they know and who they know.

The M, and this is how it differs from traditional, the traditional “M” in smart, which often means measurable and measurability is nice, but what I mean is meaningful. You need to explain why the request is meaningful and important to you, to your organization, to your customers or what have you.

The A is for action. You have to ask for something to be done. Sometimes people will state a goal instead of a request, but a goal is a destination. A request is something that helps you move toward that particular goal.

The R is for real or realistic. Now, I encourage people to never prejudge the capabilities of a group or a network, but you know, you want to make a realistic request. It has to be strategically sound. If your request is to colonize Mars next year, that’s not going to happen.

ALISON BEARD: If your request is to meet Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to maybe start working on their getting to Mars programs, you might be able to achieve that?

WAYNE BAKER: Yup. In fact, I ran the reciprocity ring for a medical students at the Mayo Clinic and one of the medical students had a very similar request is that she wanted to be the flight physician on a space flight.

And it was amazing, Alison, she got so much help, so many great connections, connections to someone at NASA to some engineer, some scientists. It was truly astounding. And for her it was a stretch request, but still feasible because you know, she was probably about 25 years old getting her MD at the Mayo Clinic, you know, within 20 years or so she would be about the right stage in her career to be the flight physician. And so, for her it was a stretch, but it was realistic.

ALISON BEARD: And let’s get to that T in smart.

WAYNE BAKER: Oh the T is for time-bound, is that there has to be a deadline. And I found that the more specific you can be, the more likely you’ll get a response. Now sometimes people say, “Oh, you know, next year, sometime or maybe next quarter.”

That doesn’t motivate people to respond. It’s like, I need this by the end of December, or I need this by tomorrow. That urgency will really motivate people to respond. And then if someone can’t help you, graciously accept that. And you know a “no” is an opinion, a “no” is information. Sometimes if you say, well, “why” to the no, you might learn something that will help you to refine the request.

In fact, you’re telling that person that you know, that you see them as an important person, someone who, who can be helpful. In fact, when, when you ask for help, people infer what we call an affiliative motive, which is that they feel that you’re asking for help in part because you want a closer relationship with them and they react positively that that’s what we’ve seen time and time again.

ALISON BEARD: And then even when you have that smart pitch put together, you also need to understand the person that you’re approaching. You know, a friend of your dad’s is very different than Elon Musk. So how do you figure out how to pitch different people in different ways?

WAYNE BAKER: Yes. So that’s you have to be sensitive to the person. Um, and so you can ask yourself some very basic questions, you know, does this person prefer to meet in, in person? Would they prefer an email or a text? How about a phone call? When would be a good time for them?

Years ago I used to work at a consulting firm and when I needed to ask the senior partners for something they were never available. But then I found or I learned that if I timed it just right, I could get in the elevator right when one of the senior partners was going down to leave for the day.

ALISON BEARD: That’s crafty.

WAYNE BAKER: Yeah. So I would just jump in the elevator with him and I had his undivided attention for that period of time. He was actually very receptive, you know, his day was done. U He was going home and we would have a conversation. I would even walk with him to his car and he would occasionally drive me back and drop me off at the front entrance to the office. You know? So it’s, you have to think about those things as well as that what is the best time and the best way for the person that you’re asking.

ALSION BEARD: A lot of this seems to be about confidence too. You know, you obviously had the confidence to jump in that elevator, but a lot of junior people wouldn’t. So does this just require a lot of practice to get comfortable with it?

WAYNE BAKER: It is a habit. It is a habit that one needs to learn and you get better at it over time by doing it more and more. So I always recommend that people start small. You want it to be a thoughtful request. Use the five smart criteria, but perhaps, you know, ask something in your community or in your family network or in some association or something at work or find a safe place at work, maybe among peers or whatever. But it is something that you learn to get better at over time.

ALISON BEARD: So we focused a lot on individuals here, but how might a leader spread this type of thinking on a team and get more of their people asking each other for help?

WAYNE BAKER: What I’ve found is that people need to know how they might do something to instill these kinds of practices, but they need the how. I can give you a couple of quick examples. Well, we mentioned the reciprocity to ring already. Uh, that’s one. Another is the standup.

The standup is a very common practice in IT and software development firms. And I think it has widespread applicability just about everywhere. So, here’s how it would work. You’d have a group of people stand up, they stand in a circle and very quickly they go around and each person has to say three things. Here’s what I worked on yesterday, here’s what I’m working on today and here’s the help I need. And when, and when you do that, it makes asking a routine expected behavior. In fact, not asking, is letting the group down.

Other groups, I know we’ll use what we call huddles and there’s two forums, a formal huddle and an informal huddle. IDEO is a great example of the use of informal huddles. When a designer is stuck on a problem, they’re expected to stop, bring together a group of other designers and have a quick huddle or brainstorming session, ask for advice, input, whatever. Everyone’s willing to do that because they know at some point they’re going to be stuck and they’re going to need to tap into the collective knowledge and networks of the group itself.

ALISON BEARD: Are there some organizations where this works more easily than others because the work is collaborative and particularly challenging versus places where it requires a lot of heads down, independent, toil and to be tapped on the shoulder and asked for a colleagues help might be very disruptive?

WAYNE BAKER: Well, I can give you a good example. I know this economics consulting firm, they’re all PhD economists who work there. So these super smart, well-educated people and the principals, the leaders of this firm tell every new hire if you work on a problem for more than 20 minutes and you can’t solve it, we want you to stop. And we want you to bring together a group of people and consult them, ask them for help, ask them for advice.

ALISON BEARD: If you survey your current team and find that someone’s very good at saying yes to requests, but then they’re not always asking for or receiving help, what do you say to them to coach them into better behavior?

WAYNE BAKER: Well, that’s a very common problem. One you mention, is that you can take them aside and actually coach them and to say that it’s expected that you want them to ask for what they need.

I always subscribe to what we call the behavior first principle. So if you want to change beliefs and their attitudes, it’s very hard to do that. But if you change people’s behaviors, what they do, then they will update their beliefs in their attitudes. more than occasionally I’ve had people say, Oh, this is never going to work.

And I say, you know, will you just do it? And what they discover is that when they would just go through and do the steps that amazing things happen and afterwards they say, Oh, now I get it. Now I believe.

ALISON BEARD: So let’s pull this out one more step. Across an organization, how can we get groups to start interacting more and helping each other more?

WAYNE BAKER: Every organization is divided into silos. And so, the trick is to have people ask across those cycles. And here again, there’s a number of proven tools and practices that are really, really quite effective.

One that is used that a GM is called the cross-collaboration workshop. And in this one example, the senior person was in charge of two different groups. One was um, advanced engineering, the other was racing. Advanced engineering is working on these complex problems. Um, you know, that won’t see the light of day for years.

Racing is just trying to fix a car from race to race. But what he found is that he said, you know, I’m going to have one of these cross-collaboration workshops where engineers from both groups, we’ll spend a couple of hours together, update each other on what they’re working on and get a help from one another.

He even had the engineers what topic that they wanted to focus on. He didn’t impose that or mandate that. So there was a practice and that could be used anywhere. We have people from the two different silos get together, learn about one another, connect with one another, and engage in some of these giving and getting activities.

ALISON BEARD: As a manager, how do you start this conversation with your team?

WAYNE BAKER: I think the best way to start is to bring the topping up in the next group or staff meeting and say, I would like us to create a culture here where people help one another. And in order to make that happen, we need people to ask and to explain a little bit about what I write about in the book this to you know that the benefit of doing this, how will help everyone individually, how it’ll help the organization and then say, okay, and we’re going to practice it right now and we’re going to continue this every week and then choose one of the tools or the practices and start it right then.

And I always encourage a manager to not give up too soon to commit to at least 30 to 45 days. Because in the beginning people are going to be a little skeptical and wonder what’s going on. But as they start doing it and they start experiencing the benefits of it, and they developed a habit and get better at it, it’ll work better and better over time.

ALSION BEARD: Well, you have emboldened me to ask for more help in my life, especially at work, so thank you so much.

WAYNE BAKER: Oh, you’re welcome. I’m glad to hear that and it’s been a real pleasure talking with you.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Wayne Baker, professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and author of the book “All You Have to Do Is Ask: How to Master the Most Important Skill for Success.”

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.