When Help Becomes Unhelpful: How Providing Support Develops People

[00:00:00] Are you helping someone or are you supporting them? And does the distinction even matter? It does. Today I’m breaking down the difference between providing help and providing support, how to tell them apart, and why it matters. Welcome to Chain of Learning, where the links of leadership and learning unite.

This is your connection for actionable strategies and practices to empower you to build a people-centered learning culture, get results, and expand your impact so that you and your team can leave a lasting legacy. I’m your host and fellow learning enthusiast, Katie Anderson Think of a time you jumped in to help someone, and it felt genuinely helpful in the moment.

What was it like, and what happened? You got the project done on time. You saved them from the struggle of figuring out what next step to take, or you’d seen this exact problem before, and you could see the solution clearly, so you gave your solution or your suggestion of what [00:01:00] to do next. But weeks or even months later, you realize they still can’t do it without you, or the improvements are backsiding, or people weren’t as bought in as you thought.

You had the best intentions to be helpful, and yet somehow it turned out not to be. Today, I wanna pull apart two words that I’ve been using a lot for years, sometimes separately and often interchangeably, and the nuanced distinction between them has changed how I think about our work, and I think it might change how you show up in your next conversation.

It’s the difference between providing help and providing support. If you’ve been listening to this podcast or following me for a while, you know that I’m in the messy middle of working on my next book. And as part of that process, I’ve been talking with coaches and mentors and key clients in my life and in my work to help me clarify and hone my thinking as it evolves, [00:02:00] including my developmental editor, Maxine, my past and upcoming podcast guests and clients, and my longtime mentor and coach, Margie Hagene.

I’ve also been testing these ideas in leadership retreats and coaching sessions and at conferences with clients. In a recent conversation, I was talking with Margie, and I had an aha in the middle of a sentence I said. I realized I was using the words help and support as if they were the same concept, yet they aren’t.

That moment crystallized something that’s been core to my practice for years, that I’ve been using these words help and support distinctly, and I see them as having different purposes. But I sometimes use them at the same time. And part of what I love about writing a book or the process of writing a book is that it’s not just documenting insights you’ve known for a while.

It’s the discovery of nuance and connection and deeper meaning as you go through the process of articulating and refining your ideas. It’s [00:03:00] crystallizing your thinking about something you’ve known, yet at a deeper level. So today, I wanna break down something I’ve been learning or rather relearning about helping and providing support.

Let’s dive in.

My early thinking about the word helping goes back nearly 20 years to when I first learned about Edgar Schein’s framework about helping and the different ways we show up to provide it. I recently hosted Ed Schein’s son, Peter, on the podcast, episode 86, where we talked about these different modes of helping.

As humans, we have an innate desire to be helpful, and that desire to be helpful is our intention in how we show up as leaders, as parents, as human beings. The thing is that help and support are two different ways that our intention to be helpful shows up, and the actions we take have a fundamentally different impact.

Often we default to being helpful by being the expert with the answer, someone who has deep [00:04:00] knowledge and shares it or does it. As the expert, we’re granted or we take back ownership of the doing or the thinking about someone else’s problem. In contrast, we can show up to be focused on the process of getting to the answer or doing the thing by being helpful, by creating the conditions for the other person to keep ownership of the problem or challenge that they have.

It’s about providing the support that they need to get towards their answer. And what I clarified in that moment in conversation with Margie and in many more conversations in the weeks since is something that I’ve always known but hadn’t really fully articulated about the difference between these two concepts, and I want to share my thinking here with you.

So help tends to be more about the immediate, more transactional, more task-oriented, even when it’s done from a place of caring and kindness. Help get something done in the moment. It’s [00:05:00] about giving assistance that’s necessary to achieve an end. Think about when someone calls out for help. “Help!” It’s immediate.

I need saving. I need rescuing. I need something right now. For example, if you run into someone on the street and they say, “Can you help me with the directions to get to this place?” You’re not gonna say, “Well, what do you think is the right direction to start walking in?” The help that you provide in the moment is give them the directions to get them there directly.

Solve their problem. Support, in contrast, tends to be longer term focused. Its definition, support, literally means bearing weight for something or giving the encouragement someone needs to be successful. Support is focused on what you create for the other person, building a foundation, scaffolding, a structure where someone is developing their own competence and confidence towards success over time.

Now, these aren’t two fixed, isolated categories. Support can absolutely [00:06:00] include direct help in the moment, but here’s the distinction I’ve clarified for myself. It’s not about the duration of the helpful action. It’s where the ownership resides of the thinking, of the doing, of the problem. Are you doing something for someone?

Are you creating the conditions for them to make progress towards something they own and need to accomplish? This goes back to what I shared on episode 71. Providing support is about owning the thinking process, not the actual thinking. Helping is focused on getting the thing resolved now, finding the answer, even with the best intentions of being helpful.

And I always relate this to helping your kid with their math homework. Now, this is getting even more challenging as my kids are in middle school and high school. But, you know, if I help them by giving them the answer, ’cause there’s only one right answer in math, their problem gets solved, their homework assignment is completed.

But you know what? They just come back to me the next night [00:07:00] because they still haven’t learned how to get to the answer themselves. But instead, if I provide support, holding the process of teaching them and asking questions about how to get to the answer, I’m creating the conditions for them to learn their way forward, and the next time they can get there without me, or at least a few steps further towards better.

But this is not just about the thinking. You can also feel like you’re being helpful by jumping in and doing a task or working on a project that isn’t yours. I hear this from operational leaders all the time. They share how they’re exhausted from jumping in to help their team because they know how to do the work, honestly, because it’s faster and easier for them to just do it.

But then their own work isn’t getting done, the strategic thinking, developing the next generation of leaders, cross-functional collaboration, and their team members are never actually learning how to do the thing. The concept of [00:08:00] providing support has been core to my practice for over a decade, and I articulated the leader’s role of Leading to Learn as threefold in my book, “Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn.”

One, set the direction. Where do you need to go? What is the standard? What is the goal? Then two, provide support. Create the conditions for the other person to be successful in moving towards that goal. And then three, develop yourself. Setting the direction and providing support is how you create the conditions for learning.

The learning zone is that tension you hold between the challenge that needs to be achieved and the support you provide for someone to get there. And here’s what makes this difference between help and support so hard to see. Our intention and our impact aren’t the same thing. I observe that most people I work with have positive intention, a strong vision of the impact they wanna have, but there’s often a disconnect in their actual impact of their [00:09:00] actions.

We might have the heart and care, but our actions, and I put myself in here, too, don’t always align with the outcome we envision. And this is where my core phrase, Intention = Heart + Direction, comes in. It’s even on my Stanley cup. You might want to be a great leader who helps people grow or helps the project be successful.

Your intention, the goal you have for your impact, is right, but your actions lead you to overstepping, overdoing, overthinking for others. Your help becomes unhelpful, and you end up shortcutting the opportunity for people to develop their own competencies and confidence and clarity of the next step to take, and even a feeling of ownership and engagement in the work.

Someone commented on one of my LinkedIn posts with a line I’ve quoted a few times since then. “The Doer Trap is hard to see because it looks like care. The leader who carries everything for everyone isn’t a hero. [00:10:00] They’re a bottleneck with a good heart.” A bottleneck with a good heart, that is the description of what results when our actions don’t align with our intention, when we fall into the patterns of The Doer Trap, and I hear similar comments from the leaders I work with and the change leaders, too.

This is an actual quote from a leadership retreat I recently facilitated. One of the senior leaders said, “I just wanna help. I wanna remove what I can to make their life easier. But if I’m not there, I’ve realized it’s really not that helpful at the end of the day.” The unintended consequence of our stepping in with the desire to be helpful in the short term is that our caring becomes carrying, and we wonder why we’re always the ones who have to do it all just to keep things moving forward This desire to be helpful shows up in different ways.

We have different pulls to step in, and this is what leads us into The Doer Trap. We jump in because we really want to be helpful and get things done or save the [00:11:00] day, or we don’t want the project to fail or our teams to suffer. And the challenge is that there is struggle that comes with learning, with figuring out how to get to success, to the destination.

It takes time to develop competence, confidence, and clarity, and we have to get comfortable with the process of learning one’s way forward. And this means shifting our mindset from being helpful by stepping in to do it ourselves, by giving our suggestion or answer, or doing the action, even with the best intentions, towards providing support by creating that learning zone between the right level of challenge and the right amount of support Earlier this fall, when I attended the back-to-school nights in my kids’ middle and high schools, I was struck by the language teachers used about their approach for creating the environment for learning for their kids and how directly it aligns with everything that I’m talking about here.

I actually pulled out my phone [00:12:00] and snapped some photos of the slides the teachers were sharing. Some of the words were, “Students need to know that their productive struggle is a necessary step in their learning,” and, “If all goes according to plan, I make myself unnecessary.” Productive struggle and making yourself unnecessary, that’s the key.

We know that there’s struggle that comes with learning something new, whether it be a musical instrument, a sport, a new language. We know what this looks like when we’re developing our kids, but that’s also what we need to think about and anchor on at work. In leadership workshops and in my coaching, I help leaders see that we need to develop the skill of assessing the right level of productive struggle and getting comfortable with our own discomfort of someone being a bit wobbly, of them not having the answer immediately, of the project taking a bit more time than we had planned.

Treading water is productive struggle. You’re [00:13:00] staying up and building your muscles to take on an action or solve a problem. Almost drowning is not productive, and that is when we need to step in, at least briefly, to help in that moment. But we often think that some treading water is drowning. At a family dinner recently, I shared these ahas about the difference between helping and supporting and this connection to productive struggle that the teachers at my kids’ schools were talking about.

And we’ve talked a lot as a family about AI and whether it’s shortcutting the learning process. My high schooler has been thinking about it with his own schoolwork and reflected at that conversation that if he lets the AI do it for him, he’s not learning. When it does it for him, when it writes the paper or comes up with the answer, it’s not helping in the long run.

It’s shortcutting his learning process. And I can’t tell you, as a mom, how happy I was to hear him say this, that he’s finding it more helpful when he has his AI ask him questions or point out opportunities to improve or reflect on things he [00:14:00] hadn’t thought about. AI is helping provide the support for him to think better, not the, quote-unquote, “help” to just get it done in the moment.

And I noticed the same thing with my own use of it. When the AI asks me questions, it sharpens my thinking. When it tries to do the writing for me, it flattens my word and my meanings, and I get very frustrated AI can help you, but when it does it for you, at least on something that needs to be yours to own, maybe not a small task that you can outsource, is not the same as supporting you to do deeper thinking.

And it’s the same for us as leaders, coaches or teachers or parents. And most of us understand this with our kids. It just somehow feels different in a work environment. My husband reflected at that same dinner about how if you’re a leader, which he is, and you’re always stepping in, you aren’t growing capability across your organization.

He said, “You can help someone get a job done, but it doesn’t make them stronger.” And he realized that, “If I put my hands [00:15:00] on the wheel, I can’t put my hands on the other wheels.” All the things that he needs to have the purview for. This gets back to being the bottleneck with a good heart.

So what does providing support look like? Often when we’re asking for help, we’re thinking about something in the short term. There’s something problematic we’re trying to deal with, so we ask someone for help, and they want to be helpful, and the immediate thing to do is to come in and give an answer or do the thing.

So the reality is we have to decide and assess, is that person needing my answer immediately? Is this critical, or do they need support? What does this person need right now to move forward? Think back to the directions on the street. A stranger stops you. It’s transactional. They truly need to know where to go, and you’re not there to teach them how to figure out how to get to the next place.

Telling them how to get where they’re going is the most helpful thing to do. That’s a great example of being truly [00:16:00] helpful in the moment. You’re not there to grow their skills in navigation. The same thing happens when you’re in a position of power or authority or you’re seen as the expert, whether you’re a teacher, a leader with a direct report, or a facilitator at the front of the room.

Someone asks a question, and they’re asking because they want your help because there’s something they don’t have an answer to, or at least don’t think they have an answer to. But if you just give your answer, you kind of take away the ownership of the problem. One of the best and most effective things that I have learned to do, and I have to really practice this with intention still when I facilitate or I’m in conversation with people, is this: When I’m facilitating a strategy session, teaching a workshop, or coaching someone, and they ask me a question, instead of just answering or giving my suggestion or idea immediately, I pause and then ask them a follow-up question What’s one thought you have about that?

Or what’s one thing you’ve tried so far? And [00:17:00] then I’m silent. And the amazing thing is they often answer their own question. They didn’t even need my answer. They just needed me to hold the space for them to talk it out or think it through. And at the same time, through their response, I get more context for what additional information or support would be useful for them.

When I did this at a leadership retreat recently, a leader who asked me a question basically answered his question with my two follow-up open questions, and someone else exclaimed to the room, “Look at her Jedi mind tricks. She did exactly what she taught us earlier today, and you answered your own question.”

Later in the day, someone reflected that seeing me do that in practice, actually pausing, not answering immediately, and providing a open question back was so powerful. They saw how simple it can be. You can be helpful and not be the one stepping in to take over the thinking or just give your [00:18:00] idea. This is your superpower.

So what does providing support actually look like? Well, it’s this, and it starts with knowing what your role is in the moment and what you own. But that’s only one part. It’s also assessing what is needed for the other person. You as the expert who takes on the doing, gives the answer in the moment, are you helping them develop their own expertise?

Do you have special information or insights that they couldn’t find elsewhere on their own that’s necessary for them to make progress on their problem? Or are you there to help develop their competency to figure out the next steps? And you can’t know until you assess where they are by actually seeing them doing the thing or walking you through their thinking process.

A phrase I heard from Margie years ago, and I repeat often in workshops, is, “Before I heard where your thinking was at, I didn’t know what question you [00:19:00] needed.” It’s about what’s most useful for the other person in that moment, your help or your support. Support is about creating the conditions for learning for someone else and meeting them where they’re at.

Again, it’s that tension you create between challenge and support, the learning zone. Sometimes it could be asking open questions. Sometimes it could be holding up the mirror and providing observable, direct evidence of their practice or effort. Sometimes it’s just holding the space or giving them time to try and think or maybe even fail as they learn their way forward.

And it’s always about keeping the ownership of the problem-solving or the learning or the doing with them. Something to reflect on is that if you’re always helping someone do everything, how are they building the competence and confidence to do it themselves? So that’s what we’re really doing when we provide support to create the conditions for the other person to move forward.

We’re developing organizational capability and [00:20:00] personal competence and confidence. So the best way to be helpful in the long term is to provide the support for others to grow and learn while keeping the ownership for what’s theirs with them. So as you reflect on this episode, here’s what I invite you to try this week.

Next time someone asks you a question, instead of immediately giving your answer, pause and ask that one question first. What’s one thought you have about that? What’s one thing you’ve tried? Then hold the space. Count to 10. Let the silence be there and give them space to think. You might be amazed what happens.

Jedi mind tricks. If you’re listening and already asking yourself, “But aren’t there times I should step in?” Well, that’s what the next episode’s all about. Yes, there are, but far fewer than you think. If you or your organization would benefit from outside support [00:21:00] in making this shift, for being the ones with the answers to developing people who can get to their own answers, I’d love to help.

I partner with leaders and their teams through my trusted advisor work, custom facilitation and executive learning programs, and keynote speaking to inspire and equip you for more effective leadership. You can find out more at KBJanderson.com.