The Lie of Infallible, Lonely Leadership

You’ve probably felt the pressure in your leadership career: Everyone is depending on you. You can make no mistakes. Not even a tiny misstep.

And in the face of the pressure to be perfect, guess what? You also have to do it alone!

As absurd as those concepts are when you read them, many leaders put enormous pressure on themselves to meet impossible (and often self-imposed) standards, and to do so without help from anyone else.

But the reality is that great leaders typically surround themselves with great people. And great people can give invaluable advice.

As a recent blog post by the Eblin Group points out, there are three important reasons why effective leaders should ask for help:

First, they point out that you only know what you have up in that head of yours, so asking for help from others can provide new perspectives, ideas, and help quickly bring you up to speed on specific topic areas.

Second, they note that reaching out to others helps form connections to others. Connection builds trust, and that trust creates a kind of comfort. The more comfortable others are with you, the more likely they are to communicate important information, whether it is good news or bad.

Finally, they say that asking for help can role model the right behavior you want people to enact when they’re stuck, need more information, or need some kind of motivation to get going. And once people get accustomed to asking for help, it can actually result in faster problem-solving, more efficiency, and more knowledge-sharing in your organization.

If you’re not entirely bought-in to the idea of asking for help, you can experiment with asking for ideas and opinions from others and see how forthcoming they are. Once you develop it more as a practice, you’ll likely see it not only gets easier, but others start doing it more, as well.

Question: How much does your company culture encourage people to ask for help?