The best leaders ask for help: why it works

The best leaders ask for help. There’s no way around the simple truth, even at the highest levels of business, where it may always seem essential to show no weakness. 

Whether it’s through experience or pure respect for the rules from the start, good leaders know that asking for help when necessary is an essential part of tough-decision-making environments like the C-suite and boardrooms. That’s why these kinds of leaders leave their pride at the door and recognise how smart collaboration makes more of an impact than trying to accomplish everything, mistake-free, while working alone. 

Yet, there’s a stubborn cultural myth that gets in the way: ask for help, and you must lack competence. It extends from the biggest boardrooms to the smallest corner shops across the world. The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth. Seeking help isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s a sign that the person is truly embracing strategy.

This first point strikes at one of the strongest pitfalls in leadership: no matter how good you are, or how long your experience, everyone develops blind spots. Let them grow, and you’re inviting dangers like increased risk, which could threaten the entire company. 

Leaders asking for help introduce new ways of seeing. They give themselves, and their colleagues, new perspectives that can easily shine a light on the right way forward after weeks, months, even years of back-and-forth.

Typical go-tos for dealing with these blind spots include industry peers, independent advisors, and cross-functional teams assembled to provide a voice on a key issue.

It might not look obvious to read that asking for help builds psychological safety, but think about how that plays out in practice:

If a leader faces a crisis and does not ask for help, the crisis deepens. The leader appears out of their depth, their colleagues lose faith, communication breaks down, and strategic risk dramatically increases. 

If the leader does ask for help, the crisis is shared. More brains contribute to a solution, colleagues feel involved, some even feel emboldened because their insights were key to solving the problem, communication increases, and risk goes down. 

Not every scenario is as black-and-white as the two polar opposites above, but the underlying message is that when problems are shared, the teamwork that follows builds a psychological safety that can’t hope to exist if a leader fails to solve a crisis alone. 

Leaders who ask for help under pressure often emerge stronger. That’s because collaboration in crisis gives you tough tests in speed, accuracy and confidence in response. It’s a rollercoaster, but it’s character-building, and it’s something you can take with you once a crisis has passed and others look to you for advice.

This goes for both yourself and your colleagues. Asking for help might prompt responses that let you use skills you had never touched before, making you more aware and confident in future crises. 

Similarly, as others try to lend help in a crisis, you may spot skills in them that they hadn’t realised. It’s a cyclical benefit.

Asking for help, especially in panic situations, encourages collaboration with others, and this is the very environment that can produce some of your company’s most innovative solutions. 

Minds that are forced by urgency to think and plan can produce some excellent solutions that calmness simply wouldn’t have allowed. But this collaboration can only happen when the person in charge holds their hands up and says, “I can’t do this alone. I want help with X, Y, Z.”

The larger fact at play is that very little of the above matters if you’re still part of the culture that penalises help-seeking. 

We’ve all seen it, we’ve all felt it: that sense of disapproval just because a leader says they can’t do something alone, or doesn’t know something off-hand that could be useful. Culture re-enforces this constantly, sidelining help-seekers and championing people who only show strength, even if their ill-informed actions pose a risk. 

For that reason, it’s vital that you call out such behaviour, not just to change cultures, but to ensure the organisation doesn’t get exposed to unnecessary dangers.

Help-seeking is not, and should never be, a reason to rate someone down in their job performance. True red flags lie in ignoring key metrics, refusing advice, or lacking the will to act when opportunity or risk presents itself.

Leaders shape culture more than any other force. When senior leaders make a habit of asking for help—whether in strategy, wellbeing, or innovation—it gives everyone below permission to do the same. But it takes intention. Boards and executives must:

• Explicitly reject the “help equals weakness” myth
• Publicly model asking for support or insight
• Build feedback and collaboration into leadership reviews
• Reward team members who speak up and step in

In the end, the best leaders aren’t the ones with all the answers—they’re the ones who know where to look. They ask. They listen. They act.

They gain perspective, model humility, navigate crisis with clarity, delegate strategically, and unlock innovation through collaboration.

If your leadership culture isn’t built on a foundation of smart help-seeking, it’s not just missing an opportunity—it’s absorbing a risk.

So next time you hit a wall, don’t hesitate. Ask.