Time management: when should you ask for help to move forward?
When a piece of work stalls, managers often ask people to organise their individual work better. The more precise management question is: how can asking for help become accessible enough to unblock a priority without turning experienced colleagues into a permanent support service?
What the literature establishes
Amy Edmondson (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly) identifies an association between team psychological safety and learning behaviours, including seeking feedback and discussing difficulties. Psychological safety refers to a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. For time management, these findings encourage scrutiny of the conditions that allow people to voice a difficulty; they do not directly demonstrate time savings.
The social risk associated with seeking advice
Alison Wood Brooks, Francesca Gino and Maurice E. Schweitzer (2015, Management Science) show through experiments that seeking advice can increase, rather than diminish, the advice seeker's perceived competence. This effect depends in particular on task difficulty and the expertise attributed to the person being consulted. Fear of appearing incompetent is therefore not always a sound reason to continue alone, but these findings guarantee neither a colleague's availability nor the quality of their advice.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that people should ask for help whenever a task proves difficult. That would confuse the opportunity to seek advice with its usefulness: a premature request can transfer work to a colleague without improving the requester's understanding. The challenge is instead to distinguish a difficulty that still supports productive effort from a blockage that cannot be resolved with the information and skills currently available. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot determine
These studies provide no universal threshold beyond which working something out alone becomes a waste of time. A field study of teams and experiments on perceived competence are not enough to establish shorter processing times in a bank or an SME. Yet a common practice receives little scrutiny: praising independence while leaving implicit the circumstances in which consulting someone is legitimate.
A practical check in Lugano
Within SHR's “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, an exercise applicable in Lugano involves working with an Italian-speaking team in banking, fashion, trading or a family-owned SME to define what constitutes a blockage and who may be consulted, while respecting access rights and confidentiality. Over two successive two-week periods—before and after introducing a rule for seeking help—the team records when each blockage is recognised, when a feasible next action is identified and how much time colleagues spend providing help. It then compares the median interval between recognising the blockage and identifying that action, alongside the total time spent helping. A decrease in the first measure without an increase in the second would be a favourable signal to investigate, not causal proof of effectiveness. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Lugano, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Lugano
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