Workplace Wellbeing: Teamwork can turn effort into excellence
Henna Pryor: "Unless you’re a Polar explorer or an astronaut, very few people succeed at work alone. When people ask for help, they don’t just solve problems faster. They also built trust and deepen collaboration."
Many of us feel socially clumsy. That’s what the American workplace performance expert and former recruiter Henna Pryor discovered while researching her book . Published in 2023, this book explores ways we can boost our confidence to take the professional risks that might scare us but are necessary if we want to fulfil our potential.
Pryor wanted to find out why we were struggling with our social skills. So her Pryority Group commissioned a report called . This report involved 750 American employees aged between 18 and 65 taking part in an online study in October 2024.
The report unearthed what Pryor calls an eye-popping statistic” — some 30% of employees would prefer to clean a toilet than ask for help.
Having thought about it, Pryor reckons she understands their reasoning. “Cleaning a toilet is gross but predictable,” she says.
“Asking for help is unpredictable, sometimes vulnerable and often awkward. It doesn’t surprise me that many would rather face bleach fumes than risk looking incompetent in front of coworkers.”
Patricia Lynch is someone who would once have ranked herself among those who shy away from asking for help. The 40-year-old from Wicklow now runs the events management company senaneventmanagement.com but before she set it up last year, was a venue manager who often found herself carrying out menial tasks because she found it so difficult to request assistance.
She says it started when she was promoted to the role of manager: “That meant I’d have to work with a facilities management company that consisted of electricians, carpenters and plumbers, most of whom were male. I happened to overhear one of them saying they didn’t know why I’d been given the job. What would I know about anything as a woman?”
That comment had a lasting impact on Lynch, undermining her confidence and making her “afraid of being judged incompetent”. So she started to refrain from asking for help.
“I even went so far as to wipe down everyone’s desks myself during Covid as I didn’t want to ask others to do it,” she says. “I associated asking for help of any kind with giving people an excuse to think I wasn’t up to my job.”
Dr Jacob Eisenberg is an associate professor of organisational psychology at University College Dublin. While he warns of generalising the findings of the Pryority Group report because “there are cultural characteristics that make the American workplace especially susceptible to the fear of appearing incompetent and the consequent avoidance of asking for help”, he thinks Lynch is representative of a group that is more likely to struggle with admitting they require assistance.
“The US has an individualistic culture,” he says. “Rewards and promotions are based more on an individual’s performance than on teamwork. The US also has a highly competitive work ethic and work status plays a large role in one’s identity. This combination creates higher barriers to seeking colleagues’ help.”
Eisenberg identifies minority groups such as women in jobs that are traditionally considered male as having to overcome some of the most significant barriers. He argues that they experience 'stereotype threat', which is the fear of acting in a way that confirms a negative stereotype about their group. In Lynch’s case, this was the belief that women know next to nothing about electrics, plumbing or carpentry.
Eisenberg also notes that the Pryority report found that the reluctance to ask for help increased as employees’ ages decreased: “Gen Z, the youngest generation in the workforce, expressed the highest reluctance of all."
He suggests several possible reason for this. One is that this generation has more to lose if they admit they need help. “They are more likely to be in more junior and less secure positions than older employees,” he says. “So they are more likely to fear being judged incompetent and therefore be unwilling to ask for help.”
Another reason is that Gen Z might have “weaker social muscles” than previous generations. Eisenberg argues that they “may have been affected by the combination of fewer social interactions during the pandemic and the proliferation of digital resources that can substitute for human interaction”.
As proof, he cites a recent UCD study which found that one of the impacts of generative artificial intelligence was that students working on team projects now preferred to consult AI rather than ask teammates for advice.
Pryor agrees that modern technology and the replacement of in-person exchanges with screens is one of the factors that explain why people are slow to ask for help.
“This trend has been around for a while but the pandemic poured gasoline on it,” she says. “Remote and hybrid working cut off casual low-stakes interactions. Those watercooler ‘Hey, can you show me how you did that?’ moments disappeared and with them, our tolerance for the mild awkwardness of asking for help.”
Just as there is a range of potential reasons why people are hesitant to request help at work, there are also several potential repercussions.
“Employees can end up stressed, burned out and isolated,” says Pryor. “Instead of sharing the load, they carry the weight until they snap.”
This is what happened to Lynch, who ultimately had to take stress leave. “When I came back, I realised that it wasn’t the position that was the problem, it was me taking the workload upon myself,” she says.
After working with a coach to overcome this problem, she eventually decided to leave her job and set up her own business — a decision which, ironically, has required her to ask for more help than ever.
“There were so many things I didn’t know about setting up my business and I’ve had to reach out to my networks for support with it all,” she says.
“When I look back at the past 12 months and see how much the business has grown and how it’s all because I asked for help, I realise I could have progressed further in my corporate career if I hadn’t been so worried about appearing incompetent.”
We would all benefit from learning this lesson, says Pryor. “Unless you’re a Polar explorer or an astronaut, very few people succeed at work alone. When people ask for help, they don’t just solve problems faster. They also built trust and deepen collaboration. There’s even a psychological phenomenon called the Ben Franklin Effect which shows that asking for help makes people like you more. So learning to ask for help could be seen as a performance enhancement strategy for you, and for your organisation.”
She recommends starting small. “It’s like building muscle,” she says. “You don’t start by deadlifting 300 pounds. Ask a coworker for a quick review of a draft email or their opinion on a client pitch. The more you use your ‘help muscle’, the easier it will be to flex it next time.”
Eisenberg believes organisations can create an environment in which employees feel comfortable seeking help.
“A key element is fostering psychological safety,” he says.
“This is the employee’s belief their team is safe for taking interpersonal risks such as asking questions, sharing doubts and suggesting new ideas without fear of negative consequences such as mockery from peers or leaders. A psychologically safe environment happens gradually and involves a systematic cultural change that needs to be fostered and role-modelled by managers and leaders.”
What made the biggest difference to Lynch was joining business support groups like Network Ireland.
“For too long, I let my fear of asking for help hold me back in my career,” she says. “Now I know that nobody can know everything. We all have strengths and weaknesses. I focus on what I do best, which is organising events, and reach out to my network for help with the rest.”
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