The biggest mistake people make when trying to help

Helping is one of the most common human social behaviours. We hardly ever have a conversation that doesn't involve helping in some way or other, even if it's just passing on a piece of information. But few of us set out to analyse why it sometimes doesn't work.

Help always appears in four forms: resources, information, expertise and support. When helping goes wrong, one reason is that the wrong form of help has been offered. A commonplace example would be offering advice (information help) to someone who just wanted a listening ear (supportive help). Taking a closer look at the four forms reveals a lot about what can go wrong.

Resources help

Are you constantly doing things for other people? If so, you are like many of those we interviewed when gathering qualitative data on helping. Those people had described themselves as helpers in a pre-screening questionnaire.

There were seven categories of resources (labour, status, space, tools, materials, data and finances). Offering material resources points to some of the pitfalls of helping: do you want the resource returned and, if so, in what condition? Here, the key to a successful outcome from the point of view of the helper is to clarify your expectations by 'contracting': agreeing in advance that you do want this back, when you want it back and in what condition you want it back.

Information help

With information help you don't run the risk of your resources being depleted. That's one advantage of this form of help. Another is that you can pass on information to a group of people simultaneously. Information help is how we learn just about everything important; it's the currency of schools and colleges. But there is always the risk of miscommunication.

Another risk is our tendency to give advice when what's wanted is support – that mismatch in the forms of help we mentioned. Helping by psychologist Edgar Schein provides 26 examples of what he calls the 'Many Forms of Help'. But going through his list, 15 of them fall into the category of information help. Specifically, nine of them are examples of advice.

Expert help

Obvious examples are a surgeon repairing a hernia or an engineer servicing an alarm system. Qualifications or authorisation come to mind when we think about expert help, but they are not always necessary. When you block a spam number from a colleague's mobile phone that's expert help. A lot of what we do for young children, such as tying up their shoelaces, is expert help.

Expert help can be essential and even lifesaving, but it comes with the risk of creating dependency. Unlike with information help, experts don't pass on their knowledge. That's fine in many situations – I don't need to know how to repair my own hernia. But if a parent keeps on tying their shoelaces, that child never learns.

Usually, expert help works better when it is blended with the other forms. A healthcare professional might talk through a procedure to reassure the patient (supportive help). In their urgency, professional experts sometimes overlook this; the engineer could tell the customer how to reset the intruder alarm.

Another risk is the responsibility: the expert is to blame if it all goes wrong. That's why the global professional indemnity insurance industry is worth nearly 40 billion dollars.

Giving expert help can put the helper in a position of power, leaving the helpee feeling inadequate or vulnerable; equally, the expert might abuse their power.

Supportive help

Supportive help is a different species from the other three forms. It's the odd one out because it doesn't necessarily solve the problem; it makes the problem easier to cope with. When it's the principal form of help, supportive help can be about showing the helpee that they already have the resources, information or expertise to help themselves. Commonly, it's required in addition to the other forms of help. Support is the steel joist that underpins the other forms. You can't always see it, but it reinforces them.

For some of us, especially those who are therapists or coaches, supportive help is the most rewarding form of help to give. But while it is highly skilled, it can be undervalued. Management trainers call it a soft skill. In Schein's list there are only two examples of supportive help.

Penner and colleagues studied children with acute lymphocytic leukaemia attending outpatient clinics. They found that children whose parents showed greater empathic concern experienced less suffering during treatments such as lumbar punctures. Those parents tended to comfort their children more. They also engaged in 'normalising' behaviours such as playing with or reading to their children during the procedures. This kind of research shows the value of supportive help.

Supportive help demands a different mix of skills. The most critical of those is listening. Stillness and patience play a part too: giving the helpee time to talk and allowing space for silence.

Three dynamics of the helping relationship

One distinction to consider is whether the helpee is equipped to solve their own problems in future versus having to repeatedly come back for assistance. Psychologists who study prosocial behaviour have labelled this 'autonomy-oriented' versus 'dependency-oriented' help. Whenever we set out to help it's worth considering whether we are aiming to create independence or dependency.

A second dynamic is status. When you ask for help you are admitting you have a need that the other person might be able to remedy. Loss of status can make people reluctant to accept help. But sometimes it is the other way around and the helper is in a lower-status position. It depends on the context of the help being requested, the role of the helper and the personalities involved.

A third dynamic is the distinction between what social psychologists call assumptive and responsive help. All helping falls into one or other of these categories. Assumptive help wasn't asked for; responsive help was. Assumptive help always risks not being wanted. Information help is characteristic of this – we love giving advice, even when it's not asked for, but we hate taking advice. Even when someone does ask for your help, you don't always know exactly what they need.

The biggest mistake we make when trying to help is when the solution doesn't properly match the problem. It's the classic script played out between customers and suppliers, turning the relationship sour. The customer says, 'You haven't done what I wanted'. The supplier replies, 'You didn't tell me what you wanted'. In all but the simplest circumstances, it's crucial to ask questions. In more open-ended helping relationships it is essential to thoroughly explore the request for help before responding. It's by asking questions that, together with the helpee, you can pinpoint what they really need and involve them in defining a solution.

Helpful questions

There are various categories of questions that can be used to discern how best to help:

Fact gathering

What's the history of this situation? How did they get here? What's really going on? Who else is involved? What have they tried so far?

Exploring their viewpoint

How are they feeling about the situation? What do they want to happen? What do they need to achieve it? What form of help would they like? How can you help?

Identifying alternatives

What are their options? Would they like you to suggest more options? Who else needs to be involved?

Discussing practicalities

What resources do they already have (e.g. time, money, contacts)? Who's going to do what? When will they start? When does it need to be done by? What involvement is required from you?

- Jess Baker and Rod Vincent are Chartered Psychologists and the authors of The Super-Helper Syndrome: A Survival Guide for Compassionate People (Flint Books, available in hardback £18.99 and ebook)  

References

L.A. Penner, R.J.W. Cline et al., 'Parents' Empathic Responses and Pain and Distress in Pediatric Patients', Basic Applied Social Psychology 30(2) (2008), pp.102–13.

Schein, E., Helping (Berrett-Koehler, 2009)

Stürmer, S., and Snyder, M. (eds), The Psychology of Prosocial Behaviour (Wiley, 2010).