The abilities of offering and receiving help are like any other: they are skills that can be developed over time. This is the topic of personal communication,

The abilities of offering and receiving help are like any other: they are skills that can be developed over time. This is the topic of personal communication, and it is much more complicated then it is being given credit by the article. Furthermore, none of the experiences described match my own at Forestryio. For example: > Johnson explained that there are two basic kinds of help one can offer – proactive and reactive help. This is a pretty coarse simplification. Further, it does not describe how help is given at Forestry. First, if I have no work queued then I will offer help to the team. This may be a specific offer, but I will state "I have nothing to do right now" and then I will ask either: * Does anyone (needs help/want to pair/need some eyes, etc.) * What is the most important thing I could help with? I am _proactively offering_ help, but I'm not forcing my way into their problem space. In a sense, I am proactively making it known that you're not going to fuck up my flow by asking me a question now. Second, we really try to make it clear that if you're stuck on a problem for more than a couple hours. You should look for help–someone has problem been down this road before. Working in isolation increases the likelihood you're going to go down a rabbit hole and waste a bunch of time. > What we found was that on the helper side, when people engage in proactive help, they often don’t have a clear understanding of recipients’ problems and issues, thus they receive less gratitude for it, This just isn't the case at Forestryio. The team takes responsibility of the problems and issues, not the individual. If I offer to help and I don't understand the problem, then they will be explained to me. Having two people understand the problem is important. If they can't explain to me what the problem is (or admit that you're not sure) then why are they working on solving that problem? > On the recipient side, if people are constantly coming up to me at work and asking if I want their help, it could have an impact on my esteem and become frustrating. This is an ego problem. Grow the fuck up. Learning to _accept_ other people's help is a must if you want to work on a great team.