[drekipus]

My issue is that our place isn't like that at all.

Everybody misses something. Everyone makes mistakes, we even have a weekly update where we say what we failed and what our learnings are.

I think everyone on our team can admit to some mistake, but more importantly, asks for help.

It's just one person that doesn't ask for help.

[hqsolomo]

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

[drekipus]

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

[hqsolomo]

>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.