Helping Behaviour: few dangers

By L. Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge  

Note: This article has been published previously. This is an updated version.

I belonged to a consultants’ action learning group for over 5 years.   In one of the meetings we discussed the statement, “the OD practitioner’s key role is one of a helper,” along the lines that Warner Burke (1982) and Ed Schein (1969) expounded:  

• “the primary though not exclusive function of OD consultants is to help clients learn how to help themselves more effectively.”    Burke (1982, p. 345)
• “it is of prime importance that the process consultant expert in how to diagnose and how to establish effective helping relationships with clients.   Effective (process consultation) involves the passing on both of these skills.”    Schein (1969, p. 8)

Upon hearing the statement, one of the members said, “Helper – what a ridiculous role!!  A role trapped with danger.” At the time, I was both annoyed and puzzled – annoyed because I thought he was irreverent to one of the key role of OD practitioners and puzzled because I wonder what I have missed by not reflecting on the danger of the helper role.

Through the years, I have observed and paid attention to any red alerts about the danger of the helper role (with the help of supervisors).  In this short article, I want to share 5 specific dangers that I have gathered so far. They are not exhaustive, but sufficient to get us thinking about our personalized “danger” as we differ in our psychological construct as well as in how we approach the helping relationship.  

First, many of us enter the field because we want to make an impact, to be of value to others, to support people and organizations to be all they can be.  This helper role is an important vehicle to deliver genuine services as well as to satisfy our own needs – a sense of “significance” and “worthiness,” or as an object to be valued and appreciated by clients etc. While there is nothing wrong with these motivations (as these needs are an inherent part of our own humanity) they, without awareness and tactics to manage them, will play an overly powerful role in shaping our actions (consciously or unconsciously).  As Bob Tanenbaum warned us that we would render our clients very pitiful and vulnerable when we “work out our own needs through the clients’ work.”

The second danger is about how we manage the clients’ expectation which often can be transmitted overtly or covertly “we are paying you for advice, why are we not getting to the bottom of this issue yet?” By instinct, we pick up such expectation and automatically move towards fulfilling them – by offering advice and help – often prematurely.   This is because the seduction of having the clients look up to us as an expert, or our instinct is to be useful in solving their problems is both a necessity wanted by clients as well as by us to enact our value and to preserve our self-esteem.   When we swing into the mode of dispensing wisdom prematurely, without taking time to engage them to investigate their own situation, we create a loss-loss situation. This danger, in turn, propels us into the third danger – the “up and down” power dynamics.

The third danger is in the imbalance and precarious dynamics that Schein pointed out (2009:31), “…helping situations are intrinsically unbalanced and role-ambiguous.”  By nature, people who ask for help are in a “one down” position.   By dispensing help, people are in a “one-up” position. The reality is that those who pay for our service are often not willing to stay in the “down” position for long (conscious or not), hence to prevent the client from slipping into defensive mode - some sort of “levelling” processes must be put in place by us to equalize the one-up and one-down dynamics.

What helps us not to go down this slippery road more often is our core belief that the clients do have the wisdom to solve their own problems and, therefore, our role is more about setting up processes to support them to achieve just that.   By designing action research types of self-organized processes, clients will not only own their diagnosis but will also support the implementation, thus making the solution much more sustainable.

Fourth, the helping relationship is a fertile ground for projection and transference of perception (positive and negative) especially in the case of gender and racial dynamics.    The danger, as Schein indicated, is that the client may then calibrate everything the helper does against their expectations around their projection. The dramatic triangle of the oppressor, the victim, and the rescuer is such an example.    If the helper is not aware, we can also reinforce this by countertransference – locking the relationship into some sort of quasi-dependence state. Having clear boundary contact, knowing how to deflect the powerful transference, taking a differentiated stance, and knowing when to exit are all important tactics for us to learn.

Fifth, the helping and supporting style and role often make us unwilling to challenge a client or give healthy conflict a rightful place to make deeper contact.  Many of us are quite reluctant to venture to places that the client system may need to but be not willing to go. In the early phase of my practice, I was unwilling to say anything that may cause offence (due to the injunction of saving the FACES of others), until an unforgettable feedback from one of the OD Gurus who after seeing how I worked said: “One of your greatest liabilities is your empathy!”   I was stunned - how could that be true? He explained, “By being indiscriminately empathetic, you rob the chance of your client group to hang in a tough situation and to work things out for themselves – mainly because you are afraid to take the heat.” In Schein’s terms, I lock myself out of deep “confrontational inquiry.” Also, our excessive care and support often lead to the client developing over-dependence on us, the helper, even without conscious intention from us.   

There are other traps in the helping relationship that you want to add to this list.   By paying attention to these dangers, we help to keep the helping relationship purer and LESS “contaminated.”

So, what can we do to avoid such dangers?   Here are some suggestions for your consideration:  

1. Aim to stay clear about why we want to help and how we go about helping that will genuinely benefit the client community rather than meeting our personal and ego needs.   Stop for a moment and ask, “Will what I want to do benefit the client system or just make me feel better or demonstrate my sense of mastery?” Sometimes the answers are not clear, but nonetheless stay alert and develop our heighten awareness of our internal and external sensation; increase our sense of “knowing” through observation of self, others, system; and allow such sense of knowing to inform our choices and decisions on what to intervene for impact as required by the client system.  

1. Stay aware of our own motives and our own emotional makeup, especially when our dominant mode of helping is to dispense solutions and offer expert advice.   Remember a client focus way of helping must take precedence over our pet love for certain tools and techniques, and our own pre-determined design. Able to work jointly with our clients, focusing on the “here and now” and to allow what emerged to guide the right choice of intervention will scale up our helping behaviour.  If there is a gap between our espoused theory and theory in us, then it is time to call in a supervisor (shadow consultant or coach). Having someone to help us to reflect how we deliver help is not just a wise move but a necessary one in our continuous work in sharpening our instrumentality.

1. Remain a “humble inquirer” (Schein, 2009) – instead of covering up our ignorance, we need to, through inquiry, to support the client to take a key role in inquiring into their own situation.  While it is genuinely difficult to operate from a state of “nothingness” (meaning there are no pre-determined ideas) but leveraging our ignorance of the client situation will put us in a much better position to practice what Nevis (1987) outlined – allow our own sensations, feelings, and our sense of “knowing” to inform and support richer and potentially more insightful intervention into a client’s system.   By not falling into the trap of being an expert diagnostician stereotyping every situation prematurely, we are freer to support the client to tap into their wisdom, especially when there is diverse wisdom within the whole system.

1. Finally, like the point above, we need to develop our dialogical mindset and inquiry skills to help the clients to identify the real reasons for .   This brings us back to Schein’s concept of “pure inquiry” – if we want to be an effective inquirer we will need to engage in a type of inquiry, which gives space for the client to tell the story in a full disclosure way from their perspective.   The necessity of dialogical stance is firmly grounded in the fact that we do our “help” within a relational context (a complex mix of interdependence and relational webs). Any way to bring out the diversity of perspective and access what emerges to achieve more sustainable change should motivate us to pursue being an excellent dialogical practitioner.

Final point

I firmly believe that the OD practitioner’s role is that of a helper and many of us have had wonderful experiences in providing genuine, effective, and high-quality help to build up client systems ability to self-organize.   May we continue to do that. By paying attention to some of the potential dangers, we will move towards becoming masterful practitioners.

Finally, I have been reminded not to dismiss any comments that are annoying.  The fact it annoys is probably because the comment had touched an important matter that is worth exploring.