#8 The Good, Bad & Ugly of Being Helpful at Work

THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU WONDER

• “Why doesn’t anyone here bother to (XXXXX)? It can’t just be me all the time right?”
• “Why don’t people help me? I help them…it’ll be nice if they just offered or noticed.”
• “I really don’t want to….but can I say no? Ok fine, just this once.”

…you’re in the Good, Bad & Ugly of being the helpful person at work.

THINK // 3 insights from the field

😇 THE GOOD THING about being the helpful person at work is that it is an admirable thing to go out on a limb for someone else.

Buying an extra coffee on the way to work for an exhausted colleague? Offering to finish up a last bit of work so that a harried working parent can pick up their kids on time? Taking on the farewell planning party efforts on top of your busy work projects?

We could all grow from learning to set aside our own stuff for a while so that we can show some practical support for the needs, wants and wellbeing of someone else.

Exhibiting generosity of spirit and practicing daily acts of kindness can make workplace culture feel less transactional and more humane.

So what’s the issue with being helpful?

Nothing - as long as it is in moderation, and that’s the catch.

🤬 THE BAD THING about being the helpful person at work is that you might not be aware of how there is such a thing as being over-helpful - and it usually comes at the expense of your own productivity, creativity and well-being.

Your empathy is a beautiful thing but only if it is served with a healthy side of boundaries.

Empathy without boundaries is not empathy, it’s actually enmeshment.

And if you’re enmeshed, you’re likely not helping yourself or helping others. If you’re enmeshed, you’re likely going to be creating:

1. Excuses for people’s bad behaviour. Your over-helpfulness and over-rescuing could be enabling, coddling or infantalising people so that they don’t learn or grow better behaviour.
2. Expectations of “why don’t you care (like me)?”. You could be secretly sad and angry as you judge others for not being as helpful as you are. You could also be resentful that people aren’t helping you like you help them and wondering why nobody is reciprocating - why aren’t they rearranging their lives to help me like I rearrange my life to help them?
3. Exhaustion from working harder on other people’s problems. You could be physically burnt out from carrying other people’s burdens as well as emotionally burnt out from caring for other people’s burdens.

Sometimes leaders are shocked to discover that their most burnt out, resentful people they have to handle at work are the ones perceived as the most “caring” person on team.

To discern if your “caring” team member is burnt out from doing healthy empathy, ask what clear boundaries they can set to take better care of themselves and others. If they want to do that, make sure you support them well and back them up in their boundary establishing.

However, if your “caring” team member is unable, unwilling or even defensive about the idea of setting boundaries, you’re dealing with an unhealthy version of empathy. In fact, it is likely not empathy they are doing but enmeshment.

😈 THE UGLY THING to consider is whether you are someone who is healthily helpful or someone who is unhealthily helpful because they are too heavily invested in seeing themselves as helpful.

• A healthily helpful and considerate colleague can bring a lot of warmth and encouragement to a workplace with their appreciation, attention and selflessness. They help people feel seen, heard, understood - and worthy of support.
• Helpful authority figures may even be seen as the embodiment of the healthy parental figure that everyone wishes they had. A powerful person can take us as we are, understand our need, offer help without making us feel smaller, needier, weaker or helpless. Importantly, they know how to help by drawing boundaries and letting go.
• However, an unhealthily over-helpful and over-considerate colleague can bring a lot of low-key discomfort and irritation to a workplace with their excessive appreciation, attention and selfless behaviours. Their constant desire to be helpful all the time may make some people feel grateful at the beginning but start to grate on others over time. The grating feeling is always a sign of some boundaries being crossed.
• Over-helpful authority figuresmay even be the embodiment of the unhealthy smothering, resentful parental figure that everyone wishes they could escape. A powerful person can infantalise, micro-manage and rescue those they imagine as needy and helpless. Importantly, they cannot seem to sense when to draw boundaries and let go.

When helping is your life habit and helpfulness is your life identity, you may grate on more people than you know. What you think as being helpful could be experienced as disempowering, rescuing, smothering or just being too involved in other people’s problems.

What you think as being unhelpful could be desired by others because it gives them space to grow, learn, decide for themselves.

Remember: Helping others can be a major distraction or deflection from helping yourself and fixing your own problems. Drawing boundaries of how much help you give could actually be helpful for you too because it also gives you space to breathe, to share your authentic thoughts and work on your own stuff. You might even find more capacity to enjoy your relationships vs. working on everyone and everything like that is your job.

What are the hallmarks of healthy helpfulness and unhealthy helpfulness?

If you are familiar with Enneagram, the phenomenon of how helpfulness can present itself in healthy to unhealthy ways is famously captured in the development levels of an Enneagram 2 (sometimes known as The Helper/Giver).

You don’t have to be an Enneagram 2 (or a believer in the Enneagram for that matter) to consider this list as one possible way of sensing what healthy to unhealthy levels of helpful behaviour can look like.

Healthy Levels For The Helper

• Level 1 (At Their Best): Become deeply unselfish, humble, and altruistic: giving unconditional love to self and others. Feel it is a privilege to be in the lives of others.
• Level 2: Empathetic, compassionate, feeling for others. Caring and concerned about their needs. Thoughtful, warm-hearted, forgiving and sincere.
• Level 3: Encouraging and appreciative, able to see the good in others. Service is important, but takes care of self too: they are nurturing, generous, and giving—a truly loving person.

Average Levels For The Helper

• Level 4: Want to be closer to others, so start "people pleasing," becoming overly friendly, emotionally demonstrative, and full of "good intentions" about everything. Give seductive attention: approval, "strokes," flattery. Love is their supreme value, and they talk about it constantly.
• Level 5: Become overly intimate and intrusive: they need to be needed, so they hover, meddle, and control in the name of love. Want others to depend on them: give, but expect a return: send double messages. Enveloping and possessive: the codependent, self-sacrificial person who cannot do enough for others—wearing themselves out for everyone, creating needs for themselves to fulfill.
• Level 6: Increasingly self-important and self-satisfied, feel they are indispensable, although they overrate their efforts in others' behalf. Hypochondria, becoming a "martyr" for others. Overbearing, patronizing, presumptuous.

Unhealthy Levels For The Helper

• Level 7: Can be manipulative and self-serving, instilling guilt by telling others how much they owe them and make them suffer. Abuse food and medication to "stuff feelings" and get sympathy. Undermine people, making belittling, disparaging remarks. Extremely self-deceptive about their motives and how aggressive and/or selfish their behavior is.
• Level 8: Domineering and coercive: feel entitled to get anything they want from others: the repayment of old debts, money, sexual favors.
• Level 9 (At Their Worst): Able to excuse and rationalize what they do since they feel abused and victimized by others and are bitterly resentful and angry. Somatization of their aggressions results in chronic health problems as they vindicate themselves by "falling apart" and burdening others.

If you are a Helpful Person at work who sees yourself in any of the less healthy levels 4-9, it may be a hard list to look at.

Don’t be harsh on yourself. Be kind to yourself.

You might have learnt to be helpful as a survival mechanism. It’s possible you grew up in conditions where being hyper-vigilant about spotting who needed to be served immediately and served well so that you could survive another day happy and intact.

For you, being helpful and people-pleasing might have served you well as an early way of controlling a difficult, chaotic or unpredictable environment.

As author Annie Lamott puts it, “Help is the Sunny Side of control”.

What can you do about it?

You can choose to have a new openness to setting boundaries and saying no to requests for help.

It won’t be an easy or short process.

So I want to close with this profound sharing from author Julianne Harvey about her own journey of accepting her helpfulness was not always coming from a good place and forgiving herself for how long it would take:

“…I feel like I’m finally ready to accept this bold truth: when help is mostly about me and what I want the other person to do in return, it is not actually help. It’s manipulation, expectation, control.

…If you grew up like I did, help was not free. It was a transaction. For a people pleaser, this meant confusion and anger a lot of the time, because there were no words around this. The system was built on glances, silences, tense body language, raised voices, narrowed eyes and other not-so-subtle clues. You picked your way through this minefield, hoping not to be blown up while trying to earn love and gold stars from others by being so good and helpful that you ached from it.

I learned to control by offering help, while refusing it from others so I wouldn’t owe anyone and they would all owe me. Perhaps not so sunny, but true nonetheless…

…Now I practice offering help with no strings attached. It’s new and radical. It’s also hard. I push myself to receive help, support and care from others without feeling that I must repay a silent debt. Unspooling these complex, dysfunctional behaviours is a lengthy job. I must remember that it’s okay to go slow..

…True help is freely given, not bartered for something else or held over another’s head as a ransom demand. That is control. Just because I grew up with that doesn’t mean I can’t change these patterns for my children and for the last half of my life.

…Love does not demand to be noticed. It is offered with no guarantee it will be returned. I’m going to lean in to this truth, to wear it like a coat and see where it will take me.”

FEEL // 2 links to help you feel less alone

READ Coach Ben Brearly on what happens when teams become way too helpful for their own good:

READ Scribe CEO Jennifer Smith’s Fast Company article on how being the most helpful and collaborative one at work may affect your productivity and creativity.

DO // 1 strategy to try this week

NOTICE the next time you are being helpful - and feeling somewhat resentful about it.

FIRST, GET CURIOUS

Is your helpfulness coming from a healthy or unhealthy space?

Is my helpfulness creating….

1. Excuses for people’s bad behaviour? Is my help enabling, coddling or infantalising people so that they don’t learn or grow better behaviour?
2. Expectations of “why don’t you care (like me)?”. Am I feeling secretly sad and angry because I judge others for not being as helpful as I am? Am I resentful that people aren’t reciprocating and helping me like I help them?
3. Exhaustion from working harder on other people’s problems. Am I feeling a bit physically burnt out from carrying other people’s burdens? Am I feeling a bit emotionally burnt out from caring for other people’s burdens?

THEN, PRACTICE SAYING NO + SETTING CLEARER BOUNDARIES THAT GUARD YOUR PRODUCTIVITY, CREATIVITY OR WELL-BEING

❌ Unhealthy, unboundaried offer of “Yes I’ll help”

• "Suuuuure. I can lead the committee for the year-end office party again. No problem.” 😬 (Whuuuut, is there nobody else who can do this….)

✅ Healthy, boundaried offer of “No, I can’t help” or “Not yet”

• BE CLEAR IT’S A NO/NOT YET: “I won’t be able to lead the committee again”
• ACKNOWLEDGE THEIR VALUE-BASED WHY + SHARE YOUR VALUE-BASED WHY: “I do value ensuring everyone has a good time but I also value having time to focus on my team and my projects during peak Q3 and Q4.”
• BOUNDARY WHAT’S OK + NOT OK (especially from a productivity, creativity or well-being perspective): “I’m OK with supplying some ideas to the committee from my experience last year. But it’s not OK for me to take on non-project related roles this year again - it leaves my team in a lurch. I hope that works for you.

❌ Unhealthy, unboundaried offer of “Yes I’ll help”

• "Yes, I can help you review your presentation again.” 😬 (All 50 slides?! Are you joking. Haven’t you learnt anything from the past few times I did this with you…)

✅ Healthy, boundaried offer of “No, I can’t help” or “Not yet”

• BE CLEAR IT’S A NO/NOT YET:
• “I can’t promise to get to your presentation yet.”
• ACKNOWLEDGE THEIR VALUE-BASED WHY + SHARE YOUR VALUE-BASED WHY:
• “While I do value supporting you to get better at presentations, I also value you starting to learn how to critique your own work as well”
• BOUNDARY WHAT’S OK + NOT OK (especially from a productivity, creativity or well-being perspective):
• It’s not OK for me to take over your learning process. We’ve talked through some presentation mistakes you tend to repeat from before so it’s good for you to develop your own checklist by now. I’m OK with looking over your checklist to make sure you’ve covered all bases and then looking over your work after you’ve reviewed your own presentation based on it. Would that work for you?

How can I get better at facilitating conversations?

If you want to shift the personal dynamics, professional situations or organisational cultures around you, I would love to help you.

I help my organisational clients strategise how to change what's working/not working in their culture. I design interventions, train leaders & their people in necessary skills and facilitate necessary conversations on their behalf. You can also look up our public training offerings at Common Ground Civic Centre such as this one:

Have a worthy weekend, workplace warriors.

Leading organisational cultural change is a good and meaningful thing. But it can be a battlefield through some bad things and ugly things. I'm here for you in the trenches.

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Meanwhile, get some rest this weekend. I'll see you next Friday,

❤️ 👊 🙌

Wishing you love, power & meaning,

Shiao