If at first you don’t succeed, stop wasting time and ask for help, says Tory Burch Foundation president Tiffany Dufu.
You can solve problems and build relationships faster if you ask people with experience for advice. If you don’t, you risk getting stuck or making mistakes, says Dufu, whose organization aims to support women entrepreneurs with capital, resources and networking.
“Particularly in times of uncertainty, asking for help as a leader is a muscle,” Dufu says. “It’s not a weakness. The more chaos, the more we need to demonstrate vulnerability … At this point, there’s really nothing under the sun that I’m dealing with that somebody else hasn’t already dealt with.”
She says she’s personally found the lesson applicable to every stage of a career, from entry-level employee to running a company. The advice “take more initiative” doesn’t necessarily mean “get things done alone.” Instead, view taking initiative as an opportunity to tackle new roles or challenges with the help of other people’s expertise, says Dufu.
Dufu learned from experience. She started an online peer-coaching business for women called The Cru in 2018 and, two years in, decided to add a subscription model — so businesses could pay for a bundle of memberships for employees. Rather than creating a new plan from scratch, she asked her investors if they knew of anyone who had experience launching such a business model themselves, she says.
They introduced her to a mentor who, without caveats, handed over the step-by-step plan she’d used to build her own business-to-business subscription model, says Dufu. Ultimately, Dufu sold The Cru to New York-based networking platform Luminary for an undisclosed fee in 2018.
“It’s just so important for you not to have to invent the wheel,” she says.
Asking for help doesn’t make you helpless
Most people who avoid asking for help worry about feeling awkward, looking weak or inconveniencing someone, research shows.
But that’s “such a common misunderstanding,” leadership expert Simon Sinek said at the Brilliant Minds 2024 conference. Reaching out to someone when you’re facing a roadblock can help you build trust with them by showing that you value their input, he added.
Building workplace trust can help you become more influential among your colleagues, too. It shows that you care about your work and the company’s goals, and can make the other person person feel more comfortable asking you for advice in the future, workplace performance coach Henna Pryor told CNBC Make It in May 2024.
Asking for help isn’t the same as being helpless, Pryor noted. Make sure you aren’t missing an easy solution under your nose, and only reach out when you genuinely need assistance or perspective, she said.
Dufu says she likes to combine crowd-sourced opinions with her gut instinct before making decisions: After her then-boyfriend proposed to her, she asked her family and friends for their opinions before agreeing to get married.
“Even though we have a lot of people around us — our family, our friends, our co-workers — we largely perceive our journeys, both professional and personal, as solo endeavors and not as a team sport,” says Dufu.