Not an expert on this but I've both seen it and done it: fear of punishment for asking for help/admitting weakness was why I did it.
I've had a boss that used our team as his scapegoat to cover his ass whenever he fucked up. When I was fresh out of college at my first real job said boss fucked up his budgeting and blamed us for being unproductive. I offered to work extra to get us back on track and while I was successful... The fact that the project went way over budget and that only 3 people on a 16 person team was at 100% utilization made it to senior management (who was responsible for assigning out work? The boss). Guess who got thrown under the bus for it? It was eventually sorted out but that was the most miserable week of my career at the time wondering if I was seriously about to be fired for sacrificing my time to help on a project that wasn't even mine. Ever since that I made it a point to get between "bosses" and my teammates to try and prevent anyone else from going through the hell I went through until I finally left that job.
Flash forward some years, a colleague missed a key deadline and I wasn't as aggressive about offering assistance as I really should have been. When leadership came knocking I had to fight the urge to defend myself and openly admitted my mistake, because although it wasn't my task to do the work it WAS my responsibility to see it through and I was the one accountable for it. My logic was "just as it felt shitty to get blamed for something I didn't do, I refuse to let someone else take the fall in my place. Give me liberty or give me death." It stung and it stung hard. I got absolutely no reward for the honesty and got reprimanded anyway- lost half my bonus, skipped over for senior even though I had the same responsibilities as the seniors, and didn't get a merit raise that year or the year after- but I felt good for sticking to my beliefs even when the only outcome was punishment. It was even more amplified when that same coworker went on to become an analyst and later a product owner years after the incident, showing growth and confidence that may not have been realized had I thrown them under the bus like my boss did to me all those years ago.
I think this is 100% a leadership problem. If the guys at the top are too afraid to take their whooping like a man how can they expect the grunts to do it? If leadership won't formally implement a "no stupid questions" policy what do they think their staff is going to do when they NEED to ask a "stupid question?"
Nobody needs to lie to cover their asses if their asses aren't at risk just for being human, but (on the US, at least) many walk on eggshells to avoid being the goose/gray duck in a sea of ducks/not-gray ducks.
That does make sense but try to look at it this way: if YOU got burned for asking for help before would YOU individually forget that experience and ask for help again?
It's really easy to think about it from one perspective- even if that perspective makes logical sense to is- but how you perceive it and how another does are going to be different. Absent formal policy explicitly stating that "being wrong is okay" someone that's been slapped once for this is likely not going to put themselves in position to get slapped that way again.
I don't know the guy so you very well could be right about him, but from my experience people that do stuff like this tend to do it for fear of punishment, much like how a child will lie to their parents face about something the parent clearly saw them do
Yes, I agree, but he's bringing that from prior experience, not our company.
We do have explicit policy of "no stupid questions" and asking for help is ok.
He's getting things wrong from not asking help when he needs it. He explained that he doesn't want to look dumb, but I pointed out that everyone, even the big brains of the company,.ask simple questions. He doesn't want to be like that
>Yes, I agree, but he's bringing that from prior experience, not our company...
That's exactly what I'm saying! I don't think he's guarded because of you guys but I do think he's guarded. It's gonna take effort to get that guard down- especially if he's been formally punished for asking for help before (again not saying you guys have done this to him- just that it's possible it happened to him at some prior point in his life, like childhood or a previous job). I see this less as a "hey man, not asking for help is hurting us" and more of "what can I do to support you better?"
Especially if he spent 2 weeks on an urgent issue- was everyone else so swamped that they couldn't coach homeboy? Was this not actually an urgent issue? I would ask the team "how did we even get here? How did we let this task slip so far without progress? What can we change today to prevent this from happening again?" Note that I'm explicitly calling out the entire team, because at the end of the day a teammate struggling and not getting help is a whole team issue even if said teammate never asked for help.
Personally I think this can be solved with coaching for the whole team ideally but at the very least, have homeboy job shadow/pair program with a mentor for a while. If you guys aren't Agile I'd see about adopting those principles- 2 weeks of silent churn on a 2-day issue feels like a much bigger problem to me than someone not asking for help when they need it- either that wasn't a 2-day issue (just because YOU could do it in 2 days doesn't mean EVERYONE could) or it was a classic case of "calling something urgent to get people to act on it but not treating it like it's actually urgent." Not a knock to you guys at all- "storming" is a healthy part of team-building! As you all develop more as a team problems like these will be a thing of the past.
EDIT: the first job was a hellhole. The second job I delegated something I probably shouldn't have- that was my mistake 100%. The second job was very well led for the most part
I've had a boss that used our team as his scapegoat to cover his ass whenever he fucked up. When I was fresh out of college at my first real job said boss fucked up his budgeting and blamed us for being unproductive. I offered to work extra to get us back on track and while I was successful... The fact that the project went way over budget and that only 3 people on a 16 person team was at 100% utilization made it to senior management (who was responsible for assigning out work? The boss). Guess who got thrown under the bus for it? It was eventually sorted out but that was the most miserable week of my career at the time wondering if I was seriously about to be fired for sacrificing my time to help on a project that wasn't even mine. Ever since that I made it a point to get between "bosses" and my teammates to try and prevent anyone else from going through the hell I went through until I finally left that job.
Flash forward some years, a colleague missed a key deadline and I wasn't as aggressive about offering assistance as I really should have been. When leadership came knocking I had to fight the urge to defend myself and openly admitted my mistake, because although it wasn't my task to do the work it WAS my responsibility to see it through and I was the one accountable for it. My logic was "just as it felt shitty to get blamed for something I didn't do, I refuse to let someone else take the fall in my place. Give me liberty or give me death." It stung and it stung hard. I got absolutely no reward for the honesty and got reprimanded anyway- lost half my bonus, skipped over for senior even though I had the same responsibilities as the seniors, and didn't get a merit raise that year or the year after- but I felt good for sticking to my beliefs even when the only outcome was punishment. It was even more amplified when that same coworker went on to become an analyst and later a product owner years after the incident, showing growth and confidence that may not have been realized had I thrown them under the bus like my boss did to me all those years ago.
I think this is 100% a leadership problem. If the guys at the top are too afraid to take their whooping like a man how can they expect the grunts to do it? If leadership won't formally implement a "no stupid questions" policy what do they think their staff is going to do when they NEED to ask a "stupid question?"
Nobody needs to lie to cover their asses if their asses aren't at risk just for being human, but (on the US, at least) many walk on eggshells to avoid being the goose/gray duck in a sea of ducks/not-gray ducks.