When Being Helpful Isn't Helpful

One of our most basic instincts of people is to want to be helpful to others. It is a big part of living in a highly social society and a key to building relationships. In business, however, an attempt to be helpful can sometimes lead to unintended, and often poor, outcomes.

This is something that young professionals often discover early on. Colleagues will often ask for help with a problem they were working on. Many times, this results in a short interrupt and both parties go back to their assigned tasks. Sometimes, the ask is larger and more complicated, and a young professional gets sucked into a “rabbit hole”.  In these cases, many times the “rabbit hole” work isn’t important to the person’s manager, or the work is lower priority to the company than the work they were assigned (coachable moment). In an attempt to be helpful, the individual negatively affected their standing with their manager and negatively impacted the deliveries of the company. Obviously, while this is true, usually a young professional isn’t assigned work to make or break a company.

As a quick aside, it's interesting to see what different people learn from this experience. Some learn to say no to everything or refer every request for help to their manager.  Some believe relationship building is more valuable to themselves and to the company and continue their pattern of behavior. Some learn coping strategies, like time-boxing their help. While there are valid arguments for all approaches, my preference has always been to be helpful up to a point. This seems to be a compelling compromise between continuing to build and nurture relationships and recognizing the downstream consequences to my primary tasks.

As the scope of responsibility grows for an individual, the impact to the company of being overly helpful increases. For example, early in my career it was quite common for a program manager to accept a change request without any due diligence to foster congeniality between them and partners. Inevitably this led to scope creep, missed deadlines and inverted priorities. And since the size of the “help” was magnified by the size of the team they were responsible for, the impact to the company scaled with role. If these bad habits persist in an executive role, the impacts can translate to meaningful effects on the company’s bottom-line performance.

It is important that leaders of organizations be aware of this behavior and manage it. If they do not, it is likely the programs they manage with suffer from “a thousand cuts”. Addressing this problem starts with coaching your young managers on identifying the behavior and fostering meaningful coachable moments with their reports. Ideally, the organization will have an agreed to paradigm for coaching. It also means a strict policy for higher level managers as the consequences of their actions weigh more heavily on the company’s performance. In particular, it requires discipline in change management.

When partners ask for changes in requirements, process, relationship structure, or other impactful areas, managers need to accept the request but not immediately agree to it. In general, it should require the requestor to submit the request in writing and the request needs to be routed through a person in the partner that is a Decider. There are several important aspects to this.

1. Requiring the requester to provide a written request, eliminates any misunderstandings in conveying the need and intent of the change.

2. It provides a paper trail for who, when, and how the request came about.

3. It eliminates requests from people who do not have the authority to make decisions and eliminates the risk of the decision being reversed in short order.

4. It provides visibility to the potential needs of the partnership to the Decider.

5. It allows a partner’s Decider to assign relative priority to the request.

From your team’s perspective,

1. It documents a potential need.

2. Provides the ability to assess impacts to a program.

3. Provides the opportunity for subject matter experts to request more information.

4. Highlights the request to you or your organization’s Decider.

5. Allows Deciders on both sides of a partnership to align on priority (benefit).

6. Documents the cost (time, money, scope) of the request to the program.

One key point, the quality of a decision is based on the quality of information that a decision is made on. Make sure requests for new features come with fully defined requirements for the feature. If a partner cannot or will not provide them, then make sure to document the feature requirements as you understand them and give them to the partner for approval. Remember, once an agreement has been reached, your team is on the hook for it, it’s important to know in detail what you are signing your team up for. This will pay dividends in spades when changes are inevitably requested. It also pays dividends at the end of a project if there are questions about how something works. Hard to be surprised when it was all documented up-front.

Now, does that mean a manager should never field a request without a change management process? No, not at all. Managers have flexibility in fielding requests for their own time. When fielding requests that impact a team or organization, however, there must be a formal way of discussing and evaluating the request.

Importantly, if you are worried this process might impact your relationship with partners, rest assured there are no negative impacts on relationships since it is a reasonable request of partners. In fact, it enhances partnerships by reducing churn and allowing Deciders on both sides of a partnership to be on the same page, closing expectation gaps.

Tips and Techniques

• Coach managers on how to have coachable moments with their reports if and when they observe this behavior.

• Define a paradigm for how to handle this in your organization.

• Make sure requests that impact a team or the whole organization follow a defined change management process.

• A decision is only as good as the information it is based on. Ensure that the information a decision is based on is complete and there are no open questions.

• Where possible, have your team fill in blanks and have partners agree with the proposed solution.

[1] "Decider" is simply shorthand for a person with whom making a decision ultimately lies. For example, an executive with budget would be the decider for a purchasing decision.