Helping
Edgar Schein
Edgar Schein’s expertise is organizational development and communication. The thesis of this book is that helping each other is a central part of social interaction, and that many large and small social issues arise when somebody requests or offers help. Socialization insures that the majority of these interactions are useful and painless, but this is not always the outcome. Schein’s observations are summarized in seven principles.
- Effective help occurs when both giver and receiver are ready.
- Effective help occurs when the helping relationship is perceived to be equitable.
- Effective help occurs when the helper is in the proper helping role.
- Everything that you say and do is an intervention that determines the future of the relationship.
- Effective helping starts with pure inquiry.
- It is the client that owns the problem.
- You never have all the answers.*
There are different types of helping. A stranger opening a door when your hands are full creates little tension, and we balance the situation by saying thanks. We balance help from a plumber by paying them, but we might struggle to balance the situation if a friend helped with the plumbing. One of the reasons that doctors with no “bedside manner” aggravate us is that this does nothing to decrease the one-upedness present due to the doctor’s socially-established up position. When their manner reminds us of this differential, we resent it and may discount their suggestions. Or we may choose to become dependent on the helper. For professional helpers (consultants, doctors, teachers, etc,), diminishing the status differential is a critical prerequisite to a successful relationship – and a successful relationship may be critical to delivering helpful help. Helpful help does not induce status differences or dependence. There is unhelpful help. Examples include: excessive help, the wrong help, and condescending help. Unhelpful help is often delivered by a helper who has not invested in a good understanding of the other party and their situation.
Schein identifies three roles for helpers. Expert helpers apply the helper’s expertise to solve a problem. In effect, they simply answer a question. Diagnostic helpers examine the situation, determine the root causes of a problem and recommend a solution. The process consultation role focuses on communication with the person requesting help. People requesting help often ask for something other than what they really want - out of anxiety about the relationship. If the helper does not detect this situation, they can recommend a course of action irrelevant to the actual problem. By focusing on the relationship first, the real problem can be brought to light based on enhanced trust between the parties.
Helpers can easily fall into the first two roles, which are highly effective when a relationship is in place. Executives hire consultants with the expectation that the consultant will fill one of these roles. The third role becomes very important in this case, if the consultant comes back with recommendations that differ from the executive’s expectations.
Because of the risk of solving the wrong problem or having a sound recommendation ignored because of displaced expectations, every formal helping effort should begin with the process consultant role. Undertaking this role through “humble inquiry” uncovers the necessary information, restores some balance to the relationship and identifies what other role(s) might be most effective. Often the solution to the problem seems obvious, perhaps because of previous experience. The urge to jump into problem solving must be resisted. Humble inquiry is a process of asking questions and creating the opening for the recipient to become more involved in resolving the situation. In more formal helping situations, especially in business settings, it is critical that the helper avoids taking ownership of the problem.
There are four basic kinds of inquiry. (1) Pure inquiry is the simplest and most general form. Basically, you just ask the person to ‘tell me about the problem’, then prompt them with ‘tell me more’ until you think you understand the situation completely. This is a stage where you ignore what you already know (or thin you know) and listen to what you are told. (2) Diagnostic inquiry explores the how and why things are the way they are. The questions in this case can be more specific; probing the opinions and attitudes of the requestor and past attempts to solve the problem are all suitable. (3) Confrontational inquiry asks questions that contain an element of suggestion. An example might take the form of ‘Why didn’t you…?’ or “When…happened, did you…?’ As the name indicates, this challenges the other party and depends on a degree of trust between the parties. The style is not necessarily aggressive, but it is assertive and direct. (4) Process-oriented inquiry tends to focus on the relationship and communication between the parties. A typical question might be “Are these questions helping you?’ or “Are we making progress?”. Some questions (or perhaps some answers) can fall into more than one category, but the helper should be aware of the intent of their question and how the dialog allows them to assess the problem and their approach to helping.
In a real discussion, the helper may jump between kinds of inquiry to uncover different kinds of information. There is no general rule to describe when to shift, except to say that mistakes will happen. These mistakes may disturb both parties, but also reveal important information related to the situation. Overall, a major purpose of this dialog is to equalize the status of the two parties. Questions like ‘Based on our discussion, what options are you now considering?’ give the other party ownership of the solution. This raises their status and decreases dependence on the helper. In fact, one of the most powerful ways for a helper to give ownership of a problem back is to offer options, but no single recommendation.
Teams provide a specific context for mutual reciprocal helping. Every member of a team should be helping the team achieve its goals, and every person uses inquiry to calibrate their contributions. At the team formation stage, people ask four questions.
- Who am I to be? What is my role in this group?
- How much control/influence will I have in this group?
- Will my goals/needs be met in this group?
- What will be the level of intimacy in this group?
When people entering this sort of team recognize that they will have practical parity in the team, it is much easier for them to give their full effort. Schein cites a study of 16 surgical teams learning a new procedure. Seven of the teams adopted the procedure, while 9 abandoned it. In all of the teams that adopted the procedure, the lead surgeon asked for help from his team, who were recruited to the team based on their skills and attitudes. These teams went through training together and practiced together to develop the communication required to execute the surgery. The teams that did not adopt the procedure were assembled based on their skills alone – because the most important person was the lead surgeon. These teams did not take training together or practice together. Without practice, the roles and communication had to be sorted out during operations, which was very stressful. Groups that fail usually attempt to do their jobs before role relations have been worked out to some degree. Formally assigning roles does not work because members are still preoccupied with the above questions and don’t have enough information as to how the others will react to them. Because most teams involve some amount of unscripted reaction and anticipation related to helping each other complete their work, it is important to work out the answers to these questions before they are required to perform as a team.
A final context for helping is organizational change. In this case, a leader in the organization is acting as the helper. Consultants are hired to help the leaders help the organization. Consultants almost never are able to actually change an organization, but they can help people in the organization help the organization change. This is an application of the principle that the client owns the problem. …the greatest irony here is that in order to manage others through the change effectively, leaders must learn to accept help themselves. They must conceptualize the helping process…and must become helpers to the organization they are trying to influence. One of the most counterintuitive principles of managed change is that you can’t change anyone until you can turn them into a client who is seeking help from you. This process interacts with organizational and social norms, and may run counter to the normal interactions between people in different roles. For example, it might not be the norm for more senior people to help junior people – and that could create issues in managing change. What’s more, senior leaders may not really know how work is accomplished. Groups are notorious in their ability to hide actual work 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…Those at the top…are drawn to the expert and doctor [diagnostic] role, whereas effective change management really requires the process consultant role. The dilemma of the organizational consultant is how to get across to clients that they need to learn how to be process consultants and accept the role as a legitimate and necessary part of being an effective leader….One of the truisms is that people don’t mind change; they just don’t want others to change them.
In organizational change; the actions taken, and not taken, send signals to the organization. For the leader, critical signals indicate that the leader is in the process consultation mode and will offer help in making the change. A big part of that help is allowing, if not requiring, that the people find their own solutions to making the change. This way they change, but are not changed.
The book takes a common activity, helping, and shows how the personal and group dynamics of this seemingly simple activity can have significant effects on people’s ability to solve problems effectively. Sometimes, people really understand their problems and need the helpers expertise exactly as asked. Sometimes, they know that there is a problem and need some expert help to diagnose and fix the problem – but the problem is overt. But for most social or interpersonal issues, the situation is not overt. Application of expert knowledge or diagnosis will fail to engage with the people – and thus with their problem. Solutions offered in this case, even if technically appropriate, typically fail because they do not address the human aspects of the problem. A focus on the process consultant role will allow the human issues to surface and set the stage for application of the technical solution. Even Schein admits that he struggles to apply this understanding in his own work. On regular occasions, he jumps right into problem solving – only to be reminded later that he did not ask the right questions and establish the balanced relationship before making his recommendation. His failures remind him to start with inquiry, even when you think you know the answer.
My interpretations and comments:
- Thinking about teamwork as mutual reciprocal helping is interesting. Schein contrasts American football with its highly structured roles to soccer with its looser roles. In football, teammates practice their roles, but don’t really need to anticipate their teammates’ actions. Soccer requires a large degree of anticipation for a team to perform. As such, the nature of trust between teammates is somewhat different. In football, the question is, will they do what they are supposed to? In soccer, the question is, will they know what I intend to do? In business, it often seems that people plan to play football (highly structured action and roles) – but actually play soccer (fluid action and role adaptation). With the wrong mental model in place, it would be hard to build trust. Broadening the concept of a team to an entire business unit begins to challenge the idea of having enough interaction to practice interpersonal relationships and build trust.
- Adapting the concept of one-down to change initiatives helps explain why so many change initiatives are dead on arrival. Imagine how many one-downs occur when a senior executive launches a top down change. By the time it reaches people at the base of the organization, it is abundantly clearly that they are unimportant. In contrast, changes initiated low in an organization are easily, if locally, adopted. How can large organizations effectively engage their employees in discovering and solving problems – and how can senior managers accept that the changes might be different from what they originally expected – but just as functional.
- Schein does not discuss control issues very much, but I think that (from the helped person’s perspective) retaining control is important. Schein does discuss how good medical care gives patients as many choices (control) as possible, while poor care just treats the patient. By giving the patient more control, the experience is less negative. In business, control is mostly exercised from the top down, but this robs people lower in the organization of control over their work. When I lack control over my work, how much help can I give or receive. Both giving and receiving help require a degree of autonomy (control), and the more collaboration that we want in an organization, the more control we need to give people to enable that mutual recipricol helping.
*text in italics is directly quoted from the book
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