Ask for Help—Or Become Part of the Problem

Asking for and obtaining help is a sign of professional maturity, not weakness.

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR? You are a member of a project—project manager, team leader, team member, or manager. 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 and/or quality? Or do you ask for help? If you are like 90+ percent of project members (my estimate), you don’t ask for help. Instead you allow your missed commitments to damage the overall integrity of the project plan and project.
What? You say you would never do that intentionally? I disagree! Most of you have, by your past behavior and record, brought harm to one or more projects and did not ask for help. Instead, you waited for help to descend upon you—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, but going it alone is a sign of strength and virtue—remains strong in our culture. Perhaps this mentality was required for survival in the Wild West. But today, as people come together as a team to pool their talents and skills to create achievements far more complex and superior 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.
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, which increases 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, particularly as you go up the corporate hierarchy to ask:

  • Clearly define the problem that you need help on. A problem that is incompletely or vaguely defined wastes valuable time, energy and funds.
  • Describe the proposed solution. If more than one plausible solution exists, list them, but be accountable and take a position on the solution you favor.
  • Be specific about what you are asking for. A vague request may get a vague response. Telling an executive exactly what you need, as clearly and precisely as possible, increases the likelihood of the executive satisfying that request. Being specific has the added benefit of helping the executive to 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 (see Behave As If You Own the Business, PM Network, September 1997) and an employee of your business was faced with the same situation as you are today, would you want your employee to ask for help? Or 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 in you typically increases over the level of respect you experienced at the outset of the project. Of course, not asking for help and endangering the success of a portion or all of the project is a quick method for losing 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." 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 ask for help when it is needed. Everyone helping helps everyone win!

Neal Whitten, PMP, president of The Neal Whitten Group (www.nealwhittengroup.com), is a speaker, trainer, consultant, mentor, and author in project management and employee development. His books include The EnterPrize Organization: Organizing Software Projects for Accountability and Success and Managing Software Development Projects: Formula for Success.

This material is reprinted from PM Network magazine (March 1998) with permission of the Project Management Institute Headquarters, Four Campus Boulevard, Newtown Square, PA 19073-2399 USA. Phone: (610) 356-4600. Fax: (610) 356-4647. Project Management Institute (PMI) is the world’s leading project management association with over 50,000 members worldwide. For further information, contact PMI Headquarters at (610) 356-4600 or visit the web site at www.pmi.org. "PMI" and "PM Network" are trademarks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
© 2000 Project Management Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.

 

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