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
3

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

• A little help in their work lives
→ Support on performance
→ Managing career concerns and aspirations
→ Realising potential
→ Resolving workplace grievances.

• 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
8

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.
9

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.
10

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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 Help
2. Barefoot Help
3. Qualified Help
4. Professional Help
5. 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

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

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.
19

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 relationships
Coping with stress
Dilemmas and decision points
Parenting
Financial & legal aid
Workplace issues
Typical models
In-house
Freelance
Third party providers

Ganesh Chella
ganesh@totusconsulting.com

Creating a Helping Organisation

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