A few years ago I spoke at a software company that had just gotten through a rough product launch.

Afterward, one of their engineering managers, I'll call her Dana, told me how close it came to going worse.

Six weeks out, her team was behind.

Dana was new in the role and had been promoted over two people with more years at the company.

She figured a manager should have the answers, so she showed up to every standup with a plan.

One part of the system kept breaking and she couldn't figure out why.

She worked on it alone at night.

She didn't want her team to see the new boss stuck.

On day eight, running on four hours of sleep, she stopped in the middle of standup and said:

Marcus, one of the guys she'd been promoted over, said he thought he'd seen it before on an old project.

They fixed it that afternoon.

Over the next few weeks, people started bringing their own problems to standup.

A junior developer admitted she was behind.

Someone flagged a testing gap nobody had caught.

They had time to fix all of it before launch.

Dana told me she'd spent two months trying to earn respect by never looking stuck.

She got more of it from one honest sentence.

Why We Avoid It

Most of us learned early that needing help means you're behind.

So we grind on our own and hope nobody notices.

Pay attention to who asks questions in a meeting, though.

It's usually the people who feel secure in their spot.

The ones who never ask are often the ones most worried about being found out.

It takes confidence to say "I don't know."

You have to trust that your value holds up even when you're stuck.

People respect that, and they start doing it too.

On Dana's team, one question from her made it normal for everyone else to speak up.

Steve Jobs and the Phone Book

When Steve Jobs was twelve, he wanted parts to build a frequency counter.

He found Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, in the phone book and called his house.

Hewlett talked with him for twenty minutes, sent him the parts, and offered him a summer job.

Jobs told that story for years.

He said most people never pick up the phone and ask, and that's often the difference between people who get things done and people who only think about it.

Michael Phelps

Asking for help when you're struggling as a person is harder still.

Michael Phelps has 28 Olympic medals.

After the 2012 Games he hit a low point, and he's talked openly about what got him through: he finally reached out and asked for help.

He's said it was harder than any race he swam.

This is a guy who trained through pain every day for two decades.

This Week

Pick the thing you've been trying to handle alone for too long.

Then go find the person who could help you with it in ten minutes, and ask.

Dana lost eight days to pride. Don't lose yours.

Aaron