Kind helpfulness

A short muse ... what does kind helpfulness look like? I've been pondering this question as I've been thinking about how to help people develop. When someone is struggling, there is a natural tendency to help shoulder the burden. Sometimes that is the right thing to do, but is often a tactical solution and in the context of work is that helping the individual or myself? It's the shortest route to making the problem go away, and has the highest likelihood of getting the result I want. But there is the cost of the individual losing a learning opportunity, or worse feeling disempowered.

I started consciously thinking about this some time ago when playing some Dark Souls 3 coop with a friend. The Dark Souls games are famously difficult, and are pretty much defined by learning and overcoming challenge. However, someone dropped into our game and ran around killing enemies, pointing out secrets, and generally paving the way to a very easy experience where we were tourists in our own game. He was certainly helpful, but he completely robbed us of challenge, accomplishment and learning our own way through the game.

This comes up all the time in leadership. Someone asks for help with something complex like recruitment, so I step in and then they don't learn for next time. There is a learned helplessness in teaching someone to reach out for the solution instead of working through it and for technologists there is a longer term rot from not letting individuals own (and solve) non-technical problems, as this is where we struggle to get experience in the day to day job which then blocks moving into more senior roles. Very much "teach a man to fish" territory, although of course it needs balancing with not leaving people helpless and floundering.

That said, maybe we should lean into the Ron Swanson method for mentoring? "Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man and fishing is not that hard".

Of course not directly, but there is a point in there about being kind along with helpful. Kind helpfulness assists someone overcoming a challenge, but doesn't remove the challenge entirely. And the kind helpful leader makes sure where possible there is space for this process to happen - it takes time and safety for people to learn, after all.

Short post this month. It has been a difficult one.