“I don’t need your help.”
What?
It was a relatively minor interaction I had with our college kid while he was home for Spring Break.
Since he was seven years old and took up the drums, I’ve been his unpaid roadie, hauling him and his drum set to dozens of gigs, from music camps and school performances to bars that his various bands have played in.
Playing the drums is cool. But as any drummer (or young drummer’s parents) will tell you, there’s a hassle factor. It’s no picnic loading cymbals, stands, pedals, floor toms, rack toms, bass drums, snare drums, sticks, backup sticks, and extra heads into your car (or if you’re lucky, a van.)
This is followed by unloading each piece to carry everything up a flight of stairs to a stage. From there, you must adjust the cymbal stands, attach and test the bass drum pedal, tune the drum heads, tweak the toms—it’s a complex task. Everything must be just right for a drummer to feel comfortable.
Doing this dance over and over again for our aspiring rock star, I eventually gave myself a promotion from “roadie” to “drum tech” with a sense of pride in how efficient I had become.
So, when I prepared to load his drums in my car for a gig he picked up while home for the break, I was taken aback when he very gently and politely told me he didn’t need my help.
As any good Dad would do, I protested.
“Why would you not want my help?’
He could do it on his own, but why would he when he had the (self-proclaimed) best drum tech in town ready to give him a hand?
After a few rounds of me insisting on helping him while he kindly responded that he didn’t need any help, he hit me with a quote:
“Helping is the sunny side of controlling.”
Apparently, he was learning something in college.
It’s an interesting saying that I hadn’t thought of before. Was I trying to help or control? Or maybe something in between.
In business, “helping” is generally regarded as a good thing. If a co-worker is struggling, offering to chip in is something every good team member does.
But there’s another side to offering help. As my kid told me, sometimes a helper’s motives are less altruistic but more about a need to exert some control.
Are you offering to give your sales person a hand in closing a deal because you’re not confident they can succeed or because they are overworked?
Is your offer to help the marketing department edit a press release born out of a desire to help them meet a deadline, or a fear that they won’t do a good job on it?
Did the person you’re helping ever ask for help?
You may be asking, why does it matter? Most of time I’ll take all the help I can get.
In a work environment, where helping for the wrong reasons can be perceived as stepping on toes, battles for control can ensue and company culture can suffer. Resentments on the part of the helper and “helpee” can build, resulting in a dysfunctional team—something no one wants.
My kid reminded me of this.
If you find your offers of help meeting with resistance, it might be wise to step back and consider your motivations, as well as how it might be
received. It’s even possible that your good intentions come across either as control, or worse: as a lack of faith in another’s capabilities.
As my kid drove off with the drum set that he’d easily packed on his own, I realized that my drum-tech days have likely come to an end. But you’ll still see me somewhere in the audience, ready to jump in if needed (or maybe just enjoying the show.) JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba, a custom software development firm and Nashville IT support company. Visit Atiba.com for more info.
