Creating a Helping Organisation

Creating a Helping Organisation

extracts from the Book

Creating a Helping Organisation

by Ganesh Chella

The research for the book inspired by changes in Help-seeking behavior

We perceive a slow shift in help-seeking behavior from informal to formal sources.

• Counselors• Psychiatrists• Psychologists• Consultants• Coaches

• Managers• Mentors

• Family• Friends• Acquaintances

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Traditional sources of help dwindling - family a

victim of globalisation

New sources of help have not yet caught up

Given this transition, organisations can step in and

make a difference

What are employees’ specific helping needs?

• A little help in living life

→ Managing one’s marital relationships

→ Other personal relationships with others in one’s family

→ Balancing the demands of work with the needs of the family and

one’s own personal needs

→ Parenting, health and finances

What are employees’ specific helping needs?

• A little help in their work lives

→ Support on performance

→ Managing career concerns and aspirations

→ Realising potential

→ Resolving workplace grievances.

What are employees’ specific helping needs?

• A little help with life skills that will help them help themselves

Life skills - “abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life.” - WHO

UNICEF classification : Communication and Interpersonal Skills (Learning to live together*)• Decision-Making and Critical Thinking Skills (Learning to know*)• Coping and Self-Management Skills (learning to be*)

What employees of today need is a Helping Organisation

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an Organisation that is willing, capable of helping its

employees

cope with their life challenges and fully utilise their talents and

achieve their full potential.

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An Organisation that will be sensitive to the contexts in which its employees live and work

the Organisation, the family, the society, the culture and the global economy.

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Such a Helping Organisation will resemble a large tree with many branches, each serving as a distinct source of help and all of them collectively representing a

helping culture.

The layers of help

we can visualise five layers of help within an Organisational context:

1. Community Help2. Barefoot Help3. Qualified Help 4. Professional Help5. Referral Help

starts with the most informal sources for our everyday work life

goes up to the most formal sources of help for more complex needs

The five layer helping model

Community Help

What is Community Help

Community help refers to the sense of community

experienced by employees through which they are able to enjoy a

sense of cohersion, connect and are therefore able to draw courage,

support and strength.

This can come from

• friends, supervisors

• self directed work teams

• forums resource groups and support networks.

The meaning of community help in an organisational context

1. Gives people a strong sense of emotional safety and security making it possible for them

to reveal how they are feeling to others in the community and not suffer alone.

2. With emotional safety, they feel accepted, open up to their friends, colleagues and team

members and in the process feel less burdened.

3. A true sense of interdependence - feeling empowered to influence the actions of their

work group - allow their work group to influence them.

4. Interdependence also leads to the fulfilment of their psychological needs.

5. Members also bond and come closer in the face of certain shared events of the

community like a crisis.

6. Their sense of shared history becomes an even greater glue to bind them together.

7. The feeling that they have invested in co-creating an institution or organisation in a

psychological sense more than in a physical sense.

The three dimensions of community help

Barefoot help

What does barefoot help mean?

It is the ability of every manager to demonstrate helping orientation as a part of his or her everyday managerial style.

There are several coaching / mentoring behaviours which when demonstrated as a part of one’ style can become very helping oriented.

The term barefoot is inspire by the China’s barefoot doctor experiment – what most employees need is quite basic and simple and does not call for some specialist coach’s intervention.

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Qualified Help

What does qualified help mean?

It refers to the ability of leaders within organisations to acquire formal competence in coaching and mentoring relationships so that they are able to truly make a difference to the employees they are responsible for grooming and developing.

Such help will become useful for several critical organisational contexts like new hires, internal progression and career transitions.

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Three roles of qualified internal coaches

Professional Help for Executive Coaching

What is Executive Coaching?

Executive Coaching is defined as “a helping relationship formed between

a client who has managerial authority and responsibility in an

organization and a consultant who uses a wide variety of behavioral

techniques and methods to help the client achieve a mutually identified

set of goals to improve his / her professional performance and personal

satisfaction and consequently to improve the client’s organization within

a formally defined coaching agreement” (Richard R. Kilburg, 2007).

Other dimensions to the relationship

Coaches work with psychologically healthy executives who are

performing well.

Coaches help them find solutions to their problems and fully

utilise their potential.

Coaches are constantly ensuring that there is a goal towards

which the executive is working, a goal that the executive is

committed to - a goal that will give the executive true leverage

and value.

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The three dimensions of coaching needs

Professional Employee Assistance

How EAP works

Typical Needs

Managing personal relationshipsCoping with stressDilemmas and decision pointsParentingFinancial & legal aidWorkplace issues

Typical models

In-houseFreelanceThird party providers

Ganesh Chella

ganesh@cfi.co.in