No, don’t worry. I’m not going to write you shouldn’t help anybody. Helping colleagues is important. It helps people grow. It can help them learn. Or it can just make their work sometimes a bit easier. It’s just…. helping, it’s not enough. It’s not everything that is needed.

The dangers of helping

No equality

When one helps and the other receives help, you are not equal. One is the teacher, the coach. The other is the student. And that places one above the other.

Gratefulness

The person who receives help is generally expected to be grateful to the helper. That person is making time available, without a benefit for him or herself. But when the good intentions to help in reality don’t help. Or the person doesn’t want help, it creates tension. May times in that situation the ‘helper’ feels unappreciated. And the ‘receiver’ feels blocked in solving the problems another way.

Voluntary

No one can be forced to help someone. So, most of the time you do it because you want to. Because you are willing to spend time on someone. Until you don’t have it. Then that person should understand there is no time left. While you are always willing to help, in the end, it’s not part of your job.

Helping and Agile

When you work together in general no person should be more important than the other. What you do is not to benefit one person, but the team and/or the product. And always, always should you create an open environment where people feel free to talk about what isn’t working.

While helping each other is good, you should be aware that, it can create problems that are mentioned above.

Let me tell you how I see it. Yes, you should help each other. But it should be a small part of the time you spend working with someone, not the main part. When you help, you do something mostly for someone else.

The other option is to work together. This means you do something that helps both you and someone else. What is the difference?

Imagine a person is making a mistake. For example, a developer creates a bug, because he or she didn’t know that a function was not only used in screen A, but also in screen B.

Now you have the option to help. You talk to the developer and tell him/her how the functionality works. Why it is on both screen A and screen B. That, if you change something in screen A, you should always check screen B too. Your goal is to help the developer prevent mistakes like this.

Or you work together with the developer. In that situation, you do exactly the same as written above. The difference is, that is not all. Besides talking to the developer you also listen. Why was this bug created, why didn’t he or she already know this information? Was there not enough info in the story? Was there too much time pressure, so questions were not asked? Is there anything you can do better to prevent bugs like this? Your goal is to improve the product and process and you ask the developer to have the same goal.

When you help, you have a different goal than the other person. Your goal is to help, the goal of the other one is to achieve something. While this sometimes is the case, it’s not what creates a team. I am a strong believer that teams can only be teams if they have common goals. And sometimes that is just as simple as realizing this:

What is important during Agile is working together. As written earlier, I really believe that is what creates a team. And working together is sometimes done by changing the way you think. Is it beneficial for you when developers make fewer mistakes? If so, why? Is it beneficial for developers when they make fewer mistakes? If so, why? Why do they make mistakes? Why didn’t you prevent them? What can you do to help? What can you do to help prevent it? So yes, helping is still part of Agile. It is still an important part. The difference is: you are not better or above the other and you benefit from it yourself. And that makes it always worth spending time. It’s important for both of you. Not only the other person.

Almost every improvement a person wants leads to improving the product, improving the process, or improving the team. And isn’t that a goal you can support and, because of that, is worth your time?

Agile and working together

The danger of helping in an Agile environment