I don't ask for help
Trying to prove I could do the work alone kept me from involving the managers who could have helped me understand it better.
Becoming a Leader · Self-awareness · Leadership Confidence · Mistakes & Course Correction
I have a confession to make. I'm not particularly good at asking for help. Not because I think I know everything. Quite the opposite, actually. I'm aware of the things I don't know, the experiences I haven't had, and the situations I haven't yet encountered.
This article is inspired by real workplace and leadership experiences. I do not use real names, company names or identifying details. Roles, teams, organisational structures, projects and business context may be removed, generalised or combined to protect the people and organisations involved while preserving the underlying leadership reflection. Where conversations are referenced, wording may be edited for clarity and anonymity.
Somewhere along the way, I've developed this strange belief that before I can ask someone for help, I need to prove to myself that I could have done it without them. Which, when I write it down, sounds ridiculous. I can see the value of someone else's knowledge and still feel the need to do the work myself first.
The strange thing is, I don't hold other people to that standard. When I look at the people I lead, I can see the development ahead of them. There are things they still need to learn, and I see that as part of their progression. Yet when I look at myself, the same gaps start to feel like something I need to justify.
The need to prove myself
I progressed into leadership relatively early in my career. I'm a young director, and part of me still feels I need to justify how I got here. Nobody has told me that I need to defend my progression. It's an expectation I've created for myself.
I look at leaders who have been doing this for twenty years or more, and I don't necessarily think they're better leaders than me. But I imagine that people would trust them more readily because they've had time to build that experience. They've been there before. They have the battle scars.
That is my perception, though, rather than something other people have said about me. I respect the experience those leaders have, and then turn that respect into an expectation that I should somehow already have it too. Instead of accepting that I'm still learning, I sometimes feel compelled to demonstrate that I already know.
When I arrived with the answer
When I first took over a new team, I felt I had to prove to the managers that I was suited to the job. There was a particular piece of work we needed to think through. Rather than working on it with them, I took on the whole thing myself.
I built an approach from the information and knowledge I had. When I presented it to the team, I set out what we were going to do and what I wanted to see from them. I wanted to demonstrate that I could do the work and bring direction.
Except my understanding wasn't as complete as I thought. I'd made assumptions based on old data and past knowledge. The managers' response was, in effect, that they understood what I was trying to do, but there were things I had missed.
I felt embarrassed, frustrated and exposed. Embarrassed because I'd missed something, frustrated because I'd put effort into the work, and exposed because I worried about what those gaps might say about my ability to lead. The proposal needed challenging, but I'd attached enough of my credibility to it that the challenge felt personal.
That doesn't tell me what the managers thought about my suitability for the role. It tells me how much I was trying to prove. I'd made the work into a test of whether I deserved to be there, when involving them earlier could have helped me understand it better.
The awkward part is that I respected their experience. My reluctance to involve them wasn't a belief that they had nothing to offer. I was so focused on demonstrating my own capability that I wasn't drawing on theirs.
From the outside, that could have looked quite different. A new leader arrives, develops an approach alone, and tells the managers what needs to happen. I don't know how they interpreted it, but my intention to look capable did not change the fact that I'd left them out of shaping the work.
What I would do differently
If I could go back, I'd start by understanding what was already on their plates. I'd ask about their vision for the team and give myself time to absorb it. I would want to understand what they saw as possible before deciding what I thought needed to happen.
Then I'd consider that alongside the needs of the business. Their vision would matter, and so would the demands and constraints we had to work within. The useful work would be understanding where those things met, where they pulled in different directions, and what opportunity that left us.
Perhaps a month later, I'd come back with an approach that showed I'd listened. It would connect what I'd heard with what the business needed and set out how we could execute it together.
I wouldn't turn that month into a rule. Some decisions need to happen sooner, and listening doesn't remove the responsibility to make them. What I would change is the assumption that I need to finish the thinking on my own before the people closest to the work can contribute.
I would still be responsible for bringing direction. But I could make that direction more informed by involving the managers in developing it. Asking for their help would be part of doing the job.
Progression doesn't mean completion
I keep coming back to the difference between what I allow other people to learn and what I expect myself to know already. I can see someone else's next stage of development quite clearly. At my own level, I start thinking about tenure, experience and what I ought to have encountered by now.
I think I've confused progression with completion. Reaching a particular level seems to have become evidence, in my own head, that I should already know how to handle everything that comes with it. But a title doesn't give me the experiences of everyone who has held it before me.
There are things someone with twenty years of experience will have encountered that I haven't. I don't need to dismiss the value of that experience to take my own progression seriously. I need to be willing to learn from it, including when it belongs to the people I'm responsible for leading.
That still leaves me accountable for the work. I need to deliver, make decisions and earn trust through what I do. Asking for help doesn't excuse me from any of that. It gives me a better chance of noticing where my understanding is incomplete before I build an entire approach around it.
I'm still learning to ask
I wish I could end this by saying I've figured it out. But I still feel the need to demonstrate that I can handle things independently. Recognising that instinct hasn't made it disappear.
There are times when working something out for myself is useful. It can help me learn, build confidence and develop my judgement. The question I'm trying to pay more attention to is why I'm doing it alone: because the work benefits from that, or because I want to prove something before anyone sees the gaps?
In the example with my managers, I could have brought them into the thinking much earlier. I would still have had to make decisions and take responsibility for what followed. I could also have developed a more current understanding of the work, rather than discovering the limits of my assumptions after presenting the answer.
I don't need to stop respecting the experience I haven't yet accumulated. I need to stop treating it as something I must compensate for before asking anyone else to contribute. The next time I feel the need to prove I can do the whole thing myself, I want to notice it early enough to have a different conversation.
