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Asking Is Hard, Giving Is Easier

Many are afraid to seek help. But those who ask get more help than they expected.

By Francis J. Flynn

Prof. Flynn - Photo by Jonathan Sprague.Imagine you're a manager who has put out a hearty welcome for supervisees to come by any time for help—yet few, if any, tend to take you up onyour offer. Do you conclude that people don’t need or want your assistance? Do you pull back and make less of an effort to be inviting?

If you answered yes, you’re probably missing an important insight about human behavior: People hate asking for help. It makes them embarrassed, guilty, and fearful that they will look incompetent. My research with Vanessa K.B. Lake, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Columbia University, shows that because potential helpers do not take this into account, they consistently overestimate the likelihood that others will solicit them for assistance.

Conversely, our work also shows that people grossly underestimate how likely others are to agree to requests for assistance. This means individuals are more willing to help than you think—and that can be important to know when you’re trying to obtain the resources you need to get a job done.

The same mechanism underlies both situations. People feel pressure to offer help as well as to refrain from requesting help. Yet neither side realizes these conflicting motivations exist. The result? Most managers and their direct reports are missing out on huge opportunities for efficient collaboration.

In one field study, we found that student peer advisors overestimated by a whopping 66 percent the number of students who would come to them for help by the end of the semester. Teaching assistants overestimated this figure by more than 20 percent. This is particularly significant given that peer advisors had been advisees a year before, and many teaching assistants had prior experience. Yet their experience did not lead them to make more accurate predictions of others’ help-seeking behavior.

A follow-up experimental study revealed that those randomly assigned to the role of teaching assistant in a hypothetical scenario tended to underestimate how uncomfortable students felt about asking for help. This pinpoints why help givers tend to miscalculate how many others will come to them for assistance—they simply don’t recognize the social awkwardness people feel about doing so.

The best way to encourage employees to seek help when they need it is to reassure them explicitly that soliciting help won’t put them in a bad light. We confirmed this using an experimental design in which participants were randomly assigned to the role of a new hire or a mentor in an organization. They were asked to read a memo encouraging new hires to seek help from their mentors. Those assigned to the new hire role were more likely to seek help from a mentor when they read a memo telling them not to feel embarrassed about seeking help. A memo simply emphasizing the positive benefits of getting help was not nearly as effective. However, those assigned to the role of a mentor predicted that the opposite would be true.

For those who need help or support, we have found that the old adage “Ask and you shall receive” works like a charm. In a series of field experiments in which people solicited favors in campus settings—borrowing strangers’ cell phones, requesting individuals to fill out questionnaires, even asking students to escort them to the campus gym—our participants consistently overestimated by 50 percent the number of people they’d have to ask to get a certain number to agree with a request. In other words, people were much more likely than expected to offer help.

The results were replicated even more dramatically in a real-world field study involving volunteer fundraisers for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Once again, participants predicted they would have to approach 50 percent more people than they actually needed to reach their fundraising goals—and they significantly underestimated the average donation they would receive. Just saying no is much harder for people than you think.

Our work also indicates that for any request, the direct approach works best—a point borne out in a final field study: Individuals were more likely to respond to requests to fill out questionnaires when asked directly, as opposed to being handed a questionnaire with a written invitation. This was the case whether the questionnaire was one page long or ten. However, help seekers predicted that the opposite would be true—people would be much more reluctant to fill out a longer questionnaire and wouldn’t care as much about how they were asked (flier vs. face-to-face). These results highlight a misunderstood fact about getting help—how you make your request is likely to be more significant than the magnitude of what you’re asking.

Taken together, these complementary effects are fascinating. Cooperation in organizations often doesn’t occur because people misconstrue each other’s motives. In short, employees don’t ask for help because they wrongly assume they won’t get it, and managers don’t encourage employees to ask for help because they wrongly assume that the employees will ask for it if they need it. The outcome of all this may be reduced levels of mentorship and resource sharing that are mistakenly attributed to a lack of concern rather than a lack of understanding.

Francis J. Flynn is associate professor of organizational behavior and codirector of the Center for Leadership Development and Research at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His courses focus on leadership issues; particularly, how young managers can learn to navigate complex political environments and build interpersonal influence.