Sometimes, helping isn't helping

I don’t like admitting it, and, actually, I try to avoid it, but sometimes, okay, too many times, I’m impatient. Yeah, I know. It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. I get frustrated especially when I ask someone to do something that I know how to do and even have experience doing, and do it very well. I know that I’m probably the only one who has this issue, so, please, bear with me and let me vent a little bit.

 

I asked one of my followers to accomplish a task that I expected every one of my followers to know how to do. I mean, they got the training. Or at least I believed that they had. They went to the school, okay. There’s an assumption of gaining a certain knowledge when someone goes to a particular school, right? Well, although my follower tried to do what I’d ask, she couldn’t do it. WHAT?! You’re trained! You should be able to do it! My first inclination was to do it myself. Okay, that was my SECOND inclination. Give me that! Let me do it for you! It’ll be quicker and it’ll be done correctly. I’ve done it for twenty years. I know what I’m doing. Stand back! Well, that may get the job done, but is it effective?

 

Effectiveness has to do with continuously getting what you want to get. It’s pretty simple, really. The key word there is continuously. In the situation I just described, what I was creating, if I did do the job for my follower, was expediency, maybe efficiency, but it, surely, wasn’t effectiveness. Effectiveness would require that I teach that follower how to do the job so that it can get done without me being there. I can’t, after all, be there all of the time. If I were, I wouldn’t need that follower, now, would I? Sometimes helping isn’t helping. Sometimes, we, as leaders, have to let our follower fail, at least to the degree that they can learn from the failure, or let them suffer through the process a little.

 

Dr Ken Blanchard created a model, the Situational Leadership II Model, that I’ve always subscribed to and commend to your consideration when you’re leading. You can Google it to learn more about it. Basically, though, Dr Blanchard proposes that, depending on the maturity of the follower, you use different methods to help them empower themselves to get to the next level and to create effectiveness.

 

Sometimes, helping your followers, but not teaching or training them to do it themselves is not helpful, and it’s not effective. Sometimes, according to the model, you have to be more directive, sometimes less, depending on where the followers are in their maturity for accomplishing the job.

 

I’m an Opa. It’s what my grandkids call me. There have been so many times that my heart has broken because I can’t help my grands do something that I know how to do. I convince myself that if I do it for them, they won’t learn how to do it themselves. But I could save them the trouble! Yeah, but that could lead to bigger trouble.

 

Help your followers when you SHOULD. Not just when you CAN. And know HOW to help them. An Effective Leader helps her followers empower themselves to be their best. Don’t do it for them. Help them do it better.  

 

Until next time,

 

Be GREAT!

 

You ARE!

 

        ¡HEIRPOWER!

 

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