Asking for Help Is Part of Professional Competence

Dr Mark Bellamy PhD, CPsychol, AFBPsS
Chartered Psychologist | Founder, LegalPsych

One of the more interesting contradictions in high-performance environments is that the more competent people become, the harder they can sometimes find it to ask for help. Early in a career, not knowing is expected. As experience, responsibility and reputation develop, however, people can begin to feel that they should be able to manage increasingly difficult situations themselves.

I think this has particular relevance in law. Lawyers are trained to exercise judgement, take responsibility and provide answers to other people. Clients arrive because they need expertise, junior colleagues look to senior lawyers for guidance, and progression through the profession brings an understandable expectation of greater independence. Against that background, asking for help can sometimes feel psychologically inconsistent with the professional identity somebody has worked hard to establish.

Yet professional competence has never meant knowing everything. Law is too complex, clients are too varied and human situations are too unpredictable for any individual to possess every answer they might need throughout a career. Indeed, one of the things that often distinguishes experienced professionals is not simply the amount they know, but their ability to recognise the boundaries of that knowledge and identify when another perspective would improve their judgement.

From a performance psychology perspective, this distinction matters. When somebody believes they should be able to deal with something alone, part of their psychological capacity can become occupied by managing the fact that they are finding it difficult. They may spend longer trying to solve the problem independently, become increasingly frustrated or delay seeking another perspective because asking now feels like admitting that they should have asked earlier. The original problem remains, but an additional layer of psychological load has been created around it.

There is also an important distinction between needing help and being incapable. All high performers periodically require expertise, perspective, challenge or support that they cannot provide for themselves. A barrister may need another view on an argument, a partner may need help thinking through a leadership problem, and somebody carrying a particularly demanding case may need a confidential space in which to examine what the work is doing to their thinking. None of these necessarily indicates weakness; they may simply reflect the complexity of the task.

The timing of help matters as well. Problems are often easier to resolve when they are still relatively small. Asking somebody to look at something early can preserve options, whereas waiting until capacity has been substantially depleted may leave fewer choices available. There is therefore a performance argument for seeking assistance before we reach the point at which we can no longer manage without it.

Of course, asking does not guarantee that the first person will be able to help. They may lack the relevant expertise, have insufficient time or simply not understand what is needed. This is where I think people can sometimes interpret the response too personally. One unsuccessful attempt to obtain help is evidence that that particular route did not work, rather than evidence that help is unavailable or that asking was a mistake.

The practical response is surprisingly straightforward. If the first person cannot help, consider who else might. If that person is not right, ask another. Sometimes what is needed is legal expertise; at other times it may be perspective from a colleague, practical assistance, mentoring, psychological input or simply a conversation with somebody who knows us well enough to notice what we are no longer seeing clearly ourselves.

Organisations have a responsibility here too. It is easy to tell people that they should ask for help, but whether they actually do so will be influenced by what they have observed happening to others who asked. If uncertainty is treated as incompetence, mistakes are punished indiscriminately or senior people consistently present themselves as entirely self-sufficient, the informal message may be considerably stronger than any formal encouragement to speak up.

Some of the most capable lawyers I have met appear comfortable with a different understanding of expertise. Their experience has not convinced them that they should know everything; it has given them a better appreciation of what they know, what they do not know and where to go when they need something else. That seems to me a more robust form of professional confidence than needing to demonstrate complete self-sufficiency.

Over a long career, there will inevitably be situations that exceed our current knowledge, experience or available capacity. The important thing is not to interpret their existence as evidence that we are somehow inadequate. Recognise what you need, find the appropriate source of help and, if the first attempt does not provide it, keep looking. Knowing when not to manage alone may be one of the quieter forms of judgement on which sustainable professional performance depends.