Helping Book Summary - Helping Book explained in key points

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Helping summary

Name: Helping
Rating: 3.9 (47 reviews)
Author: Edgar H. Schein

Edgar H. Schein

How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

3.9 (47 ratings)

19 mins

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Helping
Summary of 8 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Help yourself be a better helper.

Helping others is one of the most fundamental human activities. Our whole civilization is built on it. We’re linked, as if by a long chain of hands, by the ways in which we offer help to one another. A mother feeds her child, a bricklayer passes a tool to his workmate, a therapist helps her patient.

But why does it so often go wrong? How is it possible that the man who tries to rescue a burning house is sued for damages? Why do patients get angry with their doctors? Why is workplace collaboration sometimes fraught with tension? We’re often called upon to help in our daily lives, and the experience can be unsatisfactory for both the helper and the person being helped.

Throughout the following blinks, we’ll explore how our social and psychological dynamics can be an obstacle to healthy helping relationships and the ways in which we can be better helpers.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how to respond when asked for directions;
that our closest relationships can be like economic transactions; and
why a humble inquiry is the best way to begin when helping someone.

Helping is intrinsic to human society, and we don’t always recognize it.

Imagine a soccer team in full flow, from its strikers to its central defenders. To win the match, everything depends on each team member successfully helping the other players. If help isn’t quickly provided, then the striker gets tackled before he can shoot, the attacking midfielder has nobody to pass to and the goalkeeper is left vulnerable.

Just like in a game of soccer, helping is intrinsic to many aspects of our lives. In fact, it’s so ingrained in our every-day lives that we tend to forget just how important it is. Just think of your workplace. If you couldn’t rely on getting help from your colleagues when you need it, or they from you, you probably wouldn’t be able to accomplish much.

So how do we help each other?

Let’s look at supervisors and subordinates in a work environment. To achieve an objective at work – to finish a project or improve sales, for instance – the boss and her subordinates are dependent on each other’s help. They enter into a kind of psychological contract. This is most clearly noticeable when one side fails to provide enough help and tensions flare. We’ve all been hollered at when we haven’t pulled our weight, and the group deadline is approaching.

The very glue of our society is based on helping each other. Just think of all the different situations in which people provide help. It might be the stranger offering directions to backpackers stumbling blindly around a foreign city, the good friend supplying a word that’s on the tip of your tongue or the suicide hotline operator advising someone in serious distress.

Our lives are defined by these vital reciprocal relationships, without which there is no family, no work, no games and no society or civilization to speak of.

Helping can be split into three basic categories.

What connects a doctor delivering a baby with a divorce lawyer? What links someone saving a life at the swimming pool with the grandson doing his elderly grandmother a favor? Let’s find out by looking at the three types of helping.

The first of these categories is informal help. This form of help is the most common and covers all of the routine cooperative, collaborative and alturistic behavior in our lives. It’s taken for granted as the basis for civilized society. The mother helping her child to tie his shoelaces, the shopper lifting a can of tomatoes off the top shelf for an elderly person or the first aid responder performing CPR at the scene of an accident – all are examples of informal help.

Human relationships are a lot like economics, even when we’re helping each other.

We don’t like to admit it to ourselves, but we know that many of our social relationships revolve around a simple mantra: “if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” The nature of give-and-take can sometimes feel transactional.

In fact, we can see how closely our social relationships mirror the logic of economics by looking at some common expressions in the English language. We “pay” our respects and “pay” attention. We speak of the “pay-off” when something goes well. And we are “owed” the courtesy of a reply. Likewise, you can be “sold up the river” if you’re tricked into something you didn’t want to do. You can “sell yourself short” if you don’t do yourself justice in an interview.

Human relationships are a lot like theater, including when we help each other.

“All the world’s a stage,” as Shakespeare put it. And half of the time, we all feel like actors, fools and jesters.

This too is revealed in the English language. For instance, even when we’re a long way from the theater, we still might remark that someone “gave quite the performance.” Also, we’re told to get our “act together,” or that we are not “acting like our usual selves.” Sometimes we even talk about our surroundings as if they were the stage. We long for a “change of scenery” or wonder what is “going on backstage.”

Helping – and receiving help – can be problematic.

You’d think that helping would be the easiest thing in the world, but just like with many other aspects of our lives, asking for help isn’t always as simple as it seems.

For a start, receiving help can feel like a loss of status. Consider the male stereotype that real men don’t ask for help – they figure it out for themselves. It reveals the deep anxiety that lots of people feel when asking for assistance, especially men in Western countries within a competitive work culture.

As receivers of help, there are different ways in which we complicate or hinder the helping process.

You might have heard the phrase “he doesn’t help himself” when referring to someone engaged in a self-defeating spiral. What does that mean in more detail, though?

Firstly, sometimes we don’t reveal the full extent of our problem. Consider the spouse who frequently stands before the bedroom mirror and asks his wife whether his clothes still suit him. Rather than his fashion sense, his real anxiety might be the weight he’s put on. Similarly, when the company manager asks for assistance with team-building, her real problem might be that she has lost faith in her subordinates, but can’t face that fact.

As helpers, we can sometimes be seriously unhelpful.

We’ve all heard the phrase “sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind.” It’s what we’re told when helping someone in the usual sense would be counterproductive. But there are other ways in which our willingness to help can set people back too.

When you’re too eager to help someone, you might fail to see the extent of their problem or even misidentify their problem entirely. This is because people who request help might really be testing the waters and hiding a more serious difficulty that they actually require help with. For instance, if your child asks for help with his homework, it could mean that you immediately jump in to help without a second thought. But if he is still emotionally distraught after you’ve helped him, it could be that the problem wasn’t the homework at all, but perhaps something bigger, like being bullied at school, that he’s disguising.

To find out how to help someone, it’s best to begin with a humble inquiry.

We’re sometimes reminded that we’ve got two ears and one mouth. Or in other words, that we’d be better off listening more and talking less. Helping people is all about listening. But before we listen, we first need to make a humble inquiry.

To avoid the misunderstandings intrinsic to helping, it is best first to inquire. As we’ve already seen, the problem that we’re presented with often isn’t the full story. By inquiring in an open-minded way we can tease out the rest.

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What is Helping about?

Helping (2009) explores a common phenomenon; when we offer help to other people, we’re often met with resistance, ungratefulness and even resentment. Drawing from a variety of real-life scenarios, author Edgar Schein describes the social and psychological dynamics that underlie this most fundamental human activity and, perhaps more importantly, how we can ensure that our help is both welcome and genuinely useful.

Best quote from Helping

In the daily drama of life we play our roles in such a way that our own face and the faces of others are preserved.

—Edgar H. Schein

Who should read Helping?

Educators, therapists and lawyers looking to provide more effective assistance
Team-players in the corporate world
Anyone looking to be a better helper in their day-to-day lives

About the Author

Edgar H. Schein is a world-renowned expert on organizational culture. He has lectured at the MIT Sloan School of Management and made important contributions in the areas of career development and group process consultation. His landmark work, Organizational Culture and Leadership (1985), is a classic reference book for managers and organizers everywhere.

Categories with Helping

Corporate Culture Psychology

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