When Help Isn’t Help.
By Colin M. Fisher, Teresa M. Amabile and Julianna Pillemer
Amy was a senior designer at “Glow Design,” a pseudonym for a globally admired design consultancy known for its strong culture of collaboration. When we first met Amy, she was a vocal champion of the firm’s helping ethos. Eighteen months later, she was in tears—overwhelmed, unsupported, and considering quitting. What went wrong?
The answer: unhelpful help.
Helping was woven into the fabric of Glow—so much so that it was enshrined in the employee handbook as the “mother-lode of all Glow values.” It was because of this culture that we approached them about conducting an in-depth study of help at work. We spent years studying how helping worked at Glow, including conducting 69 interviews and analyzing 401 daily diary entries from team members about help they gave and received. And yet, despite the strength of this culture, we discovered something unexpected in our data: 25% of help-seeking episodes reported in the daily diaries were rated by recipients as unhelpful.
Read the full Harvard Business Review article.
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Julianna Pillemer is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at NYU Stern School of Business.