Introverts Can Be Terrible at Asking for Help

I spent about 45 minutes trying to work something out the other day. I Googled it, asked both ChatGPT and Claude, tried a couple of different things, went back through something I’d done previously to see if I could figure out how I’d managed it last time, then Googled it again using slightly different words in the hope that the internet would finally understand what I was asking.

Eventually, I messaged somebody who I knew would probably know the answer. They replied about 30 seconds later and the solution took approximately 15 seconds.

This is an absolutely ridiculous way to work, and I do it all the time.

I don’t think I’m particularly unusual either. I’ve spoken to plenty of introverts over the years who’ll happily spend an hour trying to solve something themselves rather than send the five-second Teams message that would probably give them the answer.

On the surface, it can look like a good thing. You’re independent, you’re resourceful and you don’t need somebody holding your hand every five minutes. Those are all useful qualities at work.

Until you’ve spent half the morning trying to solve a problem that somebody sitting 20 feet away already knows the answer to.

I don’t want to bother you

I think this is a big part of it for me. If I can see somebody is busy, the last thing I want to do is interrupt them with something I might be able to work out myself.

Even on Teams, where I’m not physically walking up to their desk, there’s still a little calculation going on in my head. They’re probably busy. I should probably try this first. Maybe I can find the answer somewhere. I’ll give it another ten minutes.

Forty-five minutes later, I’m reading page three of a Google search result from 2019 because apparently that’s preferable to inconveniencing another human being for 30 seconds.

The slightly ridiculous thing is that I don’t mind when people ask me for help. If somebody sends me a message saying, “Lee, do you know how to do this?”, I’m not sitting there thinking, For fuck’s sake, how dare they interrupt me. If I know the answer, I’ll tell them. If I don’t, I’ll tell them I don’t.

Yet somehow I assume everybody else is going to be enormously inconvenienced by me doing exactly the same thing.

There’s a fine line between independent and inefficient

Being able to work independently is obviously a good thing. Nobody wants to work with somebody who immediately asks for help every time they encounter something they haven’t seen before. There is value in trying to solve problems yourself, doing some research and using your own judgement.

But there’s a point where independence stops being useful.

If I spend an hour finding an answer somebody else could have given me in a minute, I haven’t demonstrated how resourceful I am. I’ve just wasted 59 minutes. And the more senior you become, the more expensive that behaviour gets.

You’re not supposed to personally solve every problem that crosses your desk. You’re supposed to know when to investigate something yourself, when to make a judgement call and when somebody else already has the expertise you need.

Sometimes asking for help is simply the most efficient thing to do. That sounds incredibly obvious when I write it down. Apparently it’s less obvious when I’m 35 minutes into trying to work out why something isn’t working.

We can overthink the actual asking as well

There are people who can send a Teams message saying:

Do you know how to do X?

That’s it. Six words. Send.

I admire these people because I’m far more likely to write something like:

Hi, sorry to bother you. I’ve been trying to work out X. I’ve already tried A and B and had a look at C but I can’t seem to figure out whether…

I’ve now spent five minutes writing the question because apparently I need to submit supporting evidence that I’ve made a reasonable attempt to solve it myself before I’m allowed access to another person’s knowledge.

I think part of this is wanting the other person to know I’m not being lazy. I’m not asking because I couldn’t be bothered to look. I’m asking because I have exhausted all reasonable options, conducted extensive independent research and would now, if it’s not too much trouble, like to borrow approximately 45 seconds of your expertise.

Again, nobody asked for any of this. They probably just want to know what my question is.

The problem is when you wait too long

Most of this is fairly harmless. I lose half an hour, somebody eventually answers my question, I quietly wonder why I didn’t ask them in the first place and then almost certainly do exactly the same thing again three days later.

But there are situations where reluctance to ask for help becomes a genuine problem.

You can sit with a problem for too long, make assumptions because you’d rather figure something out yourself than ask somebody to clarify it, or spend hours working in the wrong direction because you didn’t want to ask what felt like a stupid question. Sometimes you don’t surface a problem until it has become much harder to solve.

That’s when “I don’t want to bother anyone” stops being considerate and starts becoming counterproductive.

If I’m your manager, I’d much rather know on Tuesday that you’re struggling with something than discover on Friday that a deadline is going to be missed because you’ve spent four days quietly trying to fix it yourself. Ironically, the question you were worried might make you look incapable can end up creating exactly the impression you were trying to avoid.

Managers can misread this completely

There’s another side to this that I think is worth talking about. If somebody rarely asks for help, it’s very easy for a manager to assume they don’t need any.

They get their work done, they don’t complain much, they aren’t constantly asking questions and they seem pretty self-sufficient. So you leave them alone.

Meanwhile, that person might be carrying far more than you realise because their default response to a problem is to quietly try to solve it themselves.

I’ve managed people like this, and I know I’ve probably been guilty of misreading it myself as a manager. The people who ask for help naturally create opportunities for you to help them. They tell you what they’re struggling with, where they’re stuck and what they need.

The people who don’t ask can become almost invisible.

And if you’re managing an introvert who is naturally quite independent, “they’ll tell me if they need anything” isn’t always a particularly good management strategy. Sometimes you need to ask.

Not constantly, and not in a way that makes somebody feel like you don’t trust them to do their job. Just enough that there is an obvious opportunity for them to say, “Actually, yes, there is one thing…”

Asking for help doesn’t mean handing over the problem

I think this distinction matters because there is a difference between asking somebody to solve something for you and asking somebody to help you solve it.

You can still do the thinking, take ownership and arrive with what you’ve already tried and what you think might be happening. In fact, that’s usually a much better question than simply dropping a problem in somebody else’s lap.

“I’ve tried X and Y. I think Z might be causing it, but you’ve dealt with this before. Am I missing something?”

That’s not incompetence. That’s using the people around you properly.

One of the benefits of working in a team is that you don’t personally need to know everything everybody else knows. If somebody has spent ten years developing expertise in something, there isn’t much glory in spending three hours independently rediscovering what they could tell you in five minutes.

Being independent doesn’t mean doing everything independently

I still think being resourceful matters. I’d still rather somebody tried to work something out before immediately deciding they couldn’t do it, and there are plenty of situations where sitting with a difficult problem for a while is exactly how you learn.

But I’ve had to get better at recognising the point where I’m no longer learning or problem-solving. I’m just avoiding asking.

One thing I’ve found useful is giving myself a limit. If I genuinely think somebody else knows the answer and I’ve made no meaningful progress after a reasonable amount of time, I’ll ask. I don’t need to exhaust Google, try every possible combination of settings and go back through six months of old emails before I’m allowed to involve somebody else.

Because asking for help is a skill too. Knowing who to ask, when to ask and how to ask without simply handing somebody else your problem is part of being effective at work.

And I think this is true of quite a few things introverts struggle with at work. The answer isn’t usually to become less introverted. It’s to understand how you work, recognise the things that unnecessarily drain you or get in your way, and find better ways of dealing with them.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, so I’ve put together a free guide covering some of the things I’ve learnt about navigating work as an introvert without pretending to be someone you’re not.

You can download it free here.