Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help Paperback – February 7, 2011

I can highly recommend Helping if you are interested in ways to become a more helpful consultant, manager, person - one who is able to actually help people/organizations rather than just dispense advice/suggestions. I'm not doing a full review of the book here but there are a couple of points I found very interesting in the relation between the Helping approach and the Kanban Method, which I wanted to put out there.The key theme in the book is that in order to provide helpful help you need to be build the helping relationship - not jumping to the expert/doctor role of dispensing advise/diagnosing but first listening, understanding, working through what Schein calls Humble Inquiry which starts with Pure inquiry - understanding what is happening without trying to influence the client in any way. Only then moving to Diagnostic Inquiry which directs attention to other aspects in the story and Confrontational Inquiry which asks what-if questions thereby hinting at suggestions (which is close to the Doctor/Expert role).If we look at what we are trying to do with Kanban - it is quite similar. We start with understanding the system by visualizing it. Not trying to diagnose/probe too deeply before we understand - actually before the client/clients understand. Accessing our ignorance - we don't know HOW the system is working, we don't know how it SHOULD be working. Which is exactly what Schein is trying to do with process consulting - to build the understanding together, not be in a position to understand FOR the client but WITH the client. In Schein's perspective this not only minimizes the chance we will dispense generic advise based on our experience of similar events but will help to equilibarate the relationship between helper and helped - listening and respecting the situation helps the client/helped gain back "face" that he lost by asking for help. If we don't "bring the helped up" by doing this there is a chance he will "bring us down" by trying to be very critic and unaccepting of our suggestions by the way.So bottom line the Helping book was quite helpful.

This book on helping is very very very helpful.As Dr. Schein clearly points out, helping is at the heart of every social relationship. That includes friendship, marriage, teamwork, etc.For me the book has been eye opening, because the process of offering and giving help has always been exciting for me. Exciting and often very frustrating.As a management and strategy consultant, the advice and insights offered in the book are simply great and you can come up with a personalized framework to offer and give help, based on the short, yet vast and complete information provided in book.This little book will sure transform the way you approach your clients or anyone in a helping setting, be it a simple request for help from a stranger in the street, to a request for help in homework from your children, or advice requested in a leadership or organizational development coaching.The broad reach of the subject of this book makes me recommend it to everybody who just happens to want to be a better person. And be perceived by others as such. A+.

What should I say? I know what I will get when I pick up yet another book from Ed Schein. That is, a well-research, well-thought-over, easy-to-read book. "Helping" is not an exception. It is a relatively small book (150 pages) on just the subject of helping. We help people every day, but how well do we understand it and how can we improve it?The book consists of nine chapters. It starts with definitions and setting the context for further understanding helping. It then gradually changes towards actions and choices you have as a helper by using the frame that was created in the earlier chapters. The book ends with a summary in the form of principles and tips. These make the book very concrete.Roughly the first four chapters create the frame for the rest of the book. They define the meaning of helping, explore the language and assumptions around helping, give insights into the power differences in helping relationships, and explore different helper roles that we can take up. To me, these chapters set up the stage of the rest of the book where it applies these concepts to explore situations, which result in concrete advice for you as a helper.The next four chapters are more concrete where the author explores what you can do in a helping relationship and how you can improve your helping. This is done through the inquiry process (which is also the topic of several other books of Ed Schein). He shows different types of inquiry, how they might be perceived, what result they might lead to, and when you might use which one. This is immensely helpful for improving your own helping relationships.The book concludes with a principles and tips chapter. This chapter summarizes some of the key concepts covered in the book and also translates them into concrete tips.I do not think I have ever been disappointed by picking up an Ed Schein book. "Helping" was wonderful and insightful. Such a depth to a seemingly simple topic. I really enjoyed it and would especially recommend it for people in coaching (including Scrum Master) roles. The only reason for 4 (over 5) stars is that a lot of the content is also covered in Ed Schein's other work and some of that is more thorough than this little book. Excellent read!