Helpers

There is a saying that, “It is hard to find good help.” That means, coming from an employer, that it is hard to find good employees. But I’ve also come to realize that it is “hard to find help” when you need help, whether within or without an organization. One result of this is that helpful people, whether within or without an organization, tend to seek each other out and form helping relationships of trust and mutual assistance.

When one helping person encounters another helping person there is often an instant recognition that “this other person is a helper.” This is because, in part, help has become hard to find.

Now lest you misunderstand me, cultivating and honoring helping relationships is not selfish, even though it has personal benefits. It is fulfilling both because it is mutual and because it helps us help others – we can help more people when we have help than when we don’t have help.

Helping relationships are not convenient relationships – that is we don’t just help people when it is convenient, we help people when it isn’t convenient, we help people when it hurts both us and our teams and organizations – unless there is pain from time to time we don’t know whether our relationship is one that will go the distance.

Great leaders teach their people to help when it hurts, and by doing so they teach their people to live outside themselves, thus giving their people a wider perspective and helping their people to grow broader and deeper. People who primarily think about themselves will implode and grow smaller and smaller – people who think about others will have no end of growth.

The short-term pain of helping can be translated into the long-term gain of deep relationships and growth.

I have stopped asking some people to help me because I know it won’t happen, it is beyond their current capacity. I don’t think they are aware of this, I think they are so frenzied that it is all they can to do half-complete one task and then half-complete another; they are so overwhelmed that they can’t think about doing anything but “the next thing” and any request for help that intrudes upon their task list is an enemy. This is unfortunate for many reasons, for them, for people that I am trying to help, for organizations.

When others ask me for help, if responding to their requests “hurts”, if it would cause me inconvenience and pain – then maybe I’d better do the best I can to helpfully respond to their requests – maybe it matters.