Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1)

by Edgar H. Schein

How is it possible that the person jumping in to save the drowning man ends up getting sued for dislocating the man’s shoulder in the rescue attempt?

“symbolic interactionism,”

The process focus combined with symbolic interactionism helped me to develop my own consulting style, labeled “process consultation” (1969, 1999), and

We do not typically think of an effective team as being a group of people who really know how to help each other in the performance of a task, yet that is precisely what good teamwork is—successful reciprocal help.

Informal help is so often taken for granted that we hardly notice it and rarely identify it as such. It is only when it is expected and not forthcoming that we identify its absence and react negatively to the person who failed to provide it.

Emotionally and socially, when you ask for help you are putting yourself “one down.” It is a temporary loss of status and self-esteem not to know what to do next or to be unable to do it. It is a loss of independence to have someone else advise you, heal you, minister to you, help you up, support you, even serve you. It never ceases to amaze me when I observe someone stumbling or falling down on the street how the first thing out of his or her mouth is invariably “I’m OK.” Even when we are clearly hurt we are reluctant to accept the suddenly imposed state of dependency.

Needing help often feels demeaning. In U.S. culture the quip is often heard, “Real men don’t ask for directions, they figure it out for themselves.”

If the existence of that anxiety is not recognized at the time, both parties are vulnerable to dysfunctional, defensive behavior. It is the immediate need to reduce that tension that leads to several possible emotional reactions that are normal but can easily bias the evolving relationship, which makes helping more difficult. These emotional reactions are potential traps into which either the helper or client can fall.

The trap for the helper is to move too rapidly to solutions, to provide advice or guidance on the hypothetical problem and, thereby, cut off the opportunity to learn what the real problem might be. Working the hypothetical problem does little to equilibrate the relationship.

Even if the immediate problem could be solved without the client’s involvement, eventually the client will have to take charge of the situation. If the helper reinforces the dependency, it may be harder to get the client to become proactive later. Permanent dependency may be appropriate in some cases of caregiving, as when we push a relative in a wheelchair or pick things up for someone who cannot bend down. But in most helping situations, one of the goals is to enable the client to solve the problem if it recurs. In all those instances the relationship must allow and stimulate a gradual reduction of the client’s dependency.

Resentment and defensiveness. The client may look for opportunities to make the helper look inept. This reaction is most likely if the helper has already fallen into the trap of giving premature or irrelevant guidance, which may lead the client to belittle the advice, point out how immaterial it is, note that it has already been tried and did not work, or in other ways pull the helper down to regain a sense of parity.

In formal and semi-formal helping situations we are usually aware that we should take some time to find out what is truly going on if we want to be helpful. It is in the informal situation with friends, spouses, and strangers that we are most likely to fall into this trap by leaping in with advice before we know what is really being asked for.

“I hear you and I can indeed help you. Let’s get to work . . .” “I understand your problem and I think we can do this together . . .” “I can help you, if you can do the following things . . .”

“You poor guy; I really feel sorry for you. That’s a tough situation.”

Automatic support can be a trap because it 1) puts the helper into the power role of expert diagnostician, 2) reinforces the client’s subordinate status, and 3) could in fact be inappropriate since at that stage in the relationship the client may not be entirely forthcoming.

And, in fact, this willingness to be influenced—to listen to what the client is really saying and give up preconceptions of what the problem might be—is one of the most effective ways of equilibrating the relationship.

If help is considered to be some form of influence, then the principle that you can only influence someone else if you are willing to be influenced yourself is quite appropriate.

the earliest interactions between the client and helper must be managed by the helper toward building up the client’s status and identifying appropriate roles.

The first interventions of the helper must therefore be geared not only to ensure that the client gains status, but also to get crucial information about the client.

The pure inquiry process has several purposes: to build up the client’s status and confidence; to create a situation for the client in which it is safe to reveal anxiety, information, and feelings; to gather as much information as possible about the situation; and to involve the client in the process of diagnosis and action planning.

in more formal consulting, counseling, or therapy, it becomes a central feature of the helping relationship from the beginning.

pure inquiry starts with silence.

“Go on . . .” “Tell me more . . .” “Tell me what is going on . . .” “How can I help?” “So . . . ?” (accompanied by an expectant look) “What brings you here?” “Can you give me some examples of that?” “Can you give me some of the details of what went on?” “When did this last happen?” “Have you told me everything . . . ?” “Does anything else occur to you in relation to what you have told me?”

If the helper feels that the client is not ready to hear advice or suggestions, there are several options that keep the client on the hook to reveal more information. One option is to steer the conversation into the next category—diagnostic inquiry.

“Why are you going there?” “How have you tried to get there so far?” or “How does it feel to be lost in Boston?”

Four different versions of this redirection are available:

Once the helper feels that the relationship is on an even keel, the conversation can evolve into much deeper areas without risking defensiveness because the client is now an active learner and welcomes input.

The signals that this is happening are subtle. Clients become more active in diagnosing their own stories. The tone of voice changes and the content becomes more assertive. Self-blame or blame of others declines and objective analysis increases. A sense of teamwork begins to emerge when the client and helper together figure out what went wrong and what might have been the causes. In my conversation with Jim he began to sound less worried and began to explore more objectively what might have been going on with his four clients. This in turn empowered me to become much more confrontational.

The cultural requirements of protecting each member’s face continue to apply.

As in code reviews in software engineering

The operating-room nurse who sees a problem developing in the open incision does not ask what the surgeon wants, but reacts by handing over the right equipment. Such high-level coordination in an effective team does not occur without long periods of training.

The lower the interdependence, the less important mutual helping becomes.

Is interdependence then a variable to maximize?

In order for this kind of communication to occur safely, there needs to be a time and place defined as “off line,” which permits the group to suspend the usual norms of face and create an atmosphere allowing things to be said that would ordinarily be threatening.

The previously mentioned example of Japanese managers drinking with their boss so that things can be said while drunk is one way of doing this.

One angry colleague saying to another “LET ME GIVE YOU SOME FEEDBACK!” is clearly doing something other than helping.

Even the manager telling his subordinate as part of the annual review and salary discussion, “Here are your weaknesses to be worked on, and here are the reasons why I cannot give you an increase this year . . .” is probably not being helpful. What is wrong?

Feedback is generally not helpful if it is...

When a colleague, boss, friend, or spouse unilaterally decides to give advice or feedback, it is likely that not only will the message be misunderstood, but the other person will be offended and insulted.

second principle. Feedback not only needs to be solicited, but it needs to be specific and concrete.

To summarize thus far, for team members to learn how to become helpers requires situations in which social norms can be temporarily suspended so that they can communicate with each other openly. Such feedback works best if it is solicited rather than imposed, if it is concrete and specific, if it fits into a shared goal context, and if it is descriptive rather than evaluative.

Unless there is a severe time constraint, a network of strangers can clearly establish helping relationships by engaging in suitable inquiry.

Helping Leaders and Organizational Clients Helping in relation to leadership has three aspects. As pointed out in the previous chapter, one of the key roles of leader-ship is to create the conditions for teamwork where individual members of a group or several groups are interdependent in the performance of organizational tasks. How do leaders create such conditions and how does helping come into play? Secondly, in relation to subordinates, does organizational leadership imply that sometimes subordinates must be helped in performing their tasks? Can and should leaders be helpers? And, thirdly, how does one help leaders? What makes all of these questions complex is that we are now dealing with organizations where not all the people involved are in the room or even in communication with each other. That raises the whole question of who is the client.

The boss would not only provide resources, guidance, feedback, and advice, but other forms of help that subordinates might ask for. The trap for the boss, of course, is that if the subordinate comes to the boss and says, “Can you help me?” all of the problems inherent to giving help apply. The boss needs to be able, at that moment, to be a humble inquirer and process consultant, not an impulsive expert or doctor. What makes all of this more complicated is that the helping is occurring in an organizational context that has cultural norms above and beyond the societal ones about equity and face work. How subordinates ask for help and how leaders provide it have to fit both the broader cultural norms of society and the particular norms of deference and demeanor that operate in the organization.

Sometimes those norms and ways of working will also refl ect the local realities of how best to get the work done, leading to deviations from how the work is supposed to be done. This phenomenon has been called practical drift (Snook, 2000) and explains how some disasters occur.

The point is that new leaders cannot initiate any change until they understand the norms, traditions, and practical drifts of the group or department that is being taken over. To learn what is actually going on, the leader must become an inquirer to establish helping relationships with the employees and build trust.

Groups are notorious in their ability to hide actual practices from visiting bosses; so leaders who really want to change things must involve themselves in the culture of the group, gain enough trust to be told what is going on, and then build mutual helping relationships.

What makes leadership so complex is that it involves both learning to accept help, by becoming genuinely involved in the culture of the group, and how to give help to the group and to individual subordinates as areas of improvement are identified. Helpful leaders must take into account all of the issues of status equilibration and role negotiation. Walking in as the boss and expert will not work.

In order to implement these new rules, the company first had to teach employees how to identify, how to report, and how to clean up environmental violations. Employees could not follow the new rules if they did not have the relevant knowledge and skill. Initially the motivation to follow the new rules was entirely extrinsic—you were punished if you did not do it correctly. But, as employees got more help and became more competent, they gradually internalized the requirements and increasingly asked for help in this area.

As Antanas Mockus speech on how you intwriorize a new rule from punishment avoidance to embarrassment avoidance to a value

In theories of managed change there is a coercive process often called “unfreezing,” which creates the motivation to change (Schein, 1999).

The employee now becomes the client, and the agent of change becomes the helper. Framing it in this way is crucial because it then makes the agent of change aware that the most effective way to get the new behavior is to help the client achieve it. That means one must recognize from the outset that the employee will feel one down in not being able to engage in the new behavior without some guidance and training.

The helper must first equilibrate the relationship by inquiring what is inhibiting the new behavior, why the old behavior is being clung to, and what first steps the client could take.