How to Avoid the ‘Help’ Trap: Part 1/2

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Proverb

Consider how you respond when you hear a colleague say things like:
“I’m so overloaded.”
“I really need your help here.”
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“You can do it better than me.”
“You’re so good at this.”
“We need your excellent expertise here.”
“We can’t do this without you.”

Do you ‘help’ your colleagues by doing the work for them? Or, rather, do you help your colleagues to be able to do the work themselves?

Case in Point – Maria

Maria is known for delivering top quality on-time work. She is proud to have the reputation where – when she agrees to do something – others consider the task as-good-as-done. Her colleagues often mention the high level of trust they have in her. No need to nudge Maria or check to see whether she is ‘on it’.

This has led to the following frequent scenarios:

• Maria has a hard time saying ‘no’ to requests, deriving great pleasure from ‘helping’ others by doing things for them. There is a component of wanting to please people.
• Maria often sees team members as overloaded and offers to pick up some of their work in order to lighten their load.
• Maria struggles to find sufficient time to do her own work because of the significant time spent on ‘helping’ others by doing things for them.
• Contrarily, when others offer to do something for Maria, she refuses, not wanting to be a burden to them.

You can imagine what has evolved over time at Maria’s workplace as a result:

• Maria gets more requests than others do because she is the first person colleagues think of when they would like to get something done. Her plate is over-full, and she struggles to carve out enough time for her private life.
• Maria’s direct reports know that when they get into a tight spot, Maria will step in to ‘save the day’. Some take excessive advantage of this. And several have not developed their ability to prioritize. Instead, their way of prioritizing is to leave things they do not enjoy doing or find more difficult to do … undone, knowing that Maria will pick these up if necessary.
• While Maria derives great pleasure from ‘helping’ others, she is depriving others of that same pleasure by not giving them a chance to do something for her.
• Maria is noticing that she is harboring a growing sense of anger and resentment toward others who don’t do ‘their fair share’ of the work – and it is starting to negatively impact how she interacts at work.

Maria has defined ‘helping others’ as doing things for them. Yet if you look at the above list of potential consequences, there are negative side effects for all parties!

What can Maria do instead?

• Develop the skill of saying ‘no’: this link contains a robust list of practical tips and tools on how to say ‘no’ that have been assembled from scores of coaching sessions on this very topic.
• Develop certain skills on her team: (1) workload prioritization and planning, (2) the ability to find sources of assistance other than Maria, (3) targeted learning around how to do the more difficult tasks, (4) acceptance that the less attractive tasks still need to be done – by them.
• Ask for help from others: generate a short list of tasks to ask for assistance on or to delegate to others. Then, (1) remember that this will give many pleasure (just as it gives Maria pleasure to do things for others), (2) ask herself whether she should be doing the task (what is the opportunity cost?), (3) leverage that ‘helping’ can often be a two-way street.
• Rethink her feelings of resentment: realize that her current situation could be in large part self-imposed – by saying ‘yes’ to everything and delivering top quality and on time – others often render themselves lazy and/or dependent

In conclusion, if any of your coachees find themselves ‘helping’ others to a fault, by doing things for them and therefore taking on more work, get them to reconsider their definition of helping, shifting from ‘doing the fishing for others’ to ‘helping others catch their own fish’.