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Karl Moore: This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today I am delighted to speak to Ed Schein, who is a senior professor at MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.] and has written about change for many, many years now. Good morning, Ed.

Ed Schein: Good morning.

KM: Ed, you have written a very interesting book with a one-word title. I guess that if you have been in a career long enough, you are allowed to have, like Madonna, a one-word title sort of thing. Your book is called Helping . What are you saying in this new book?

ES: As I observe the scene today, there are several things going on beyond the economic issues: globalization, information technology that is creating more loose boundaries of organizations, changing nature of work, and increasing technological complexity.

What all of that means to me is that, the leader of the future, whatever else that leader has to be able to do, will have to be able to give and accept help because he or she will not be able to know enough, or have enough connections to be able to sit on top of an organization and make decisions. The subordinates will know more, they will be spread around the globe, connected by more and more sophisticated information technology. So helping as a skill, both to give it and receive it, I believe will become absolutely crucial for leaders of the future.

KM: Partly this is just more of a sense of humility, a sense that you have your limits, but it seems that compared to 30 years ago that the world is more demanding. We probably needed humility 30 years ago but today you critically need the sense of ‘I need help.'

ES: Exactly, because everything is more complicated and distributed. The reason that people in leadership roles could be leaders in earlier times is because they had all of the resources in their head or at their fingertips. The leader of today is sitting in an office by himself, has a network out there someplace of people doing various projects, and each of the people below him are technical experts in some area or another.

Now, what is different I think is that we have always sort of loosely used the word ‘help' without ever really analyzing what exactly is involved in help. You hit the key word when you said humility, because what I am really pushing in the book is the idea that to be helpful, you really have to engage in humble inquiry. Instead of leaping in when somebody asks you a question, you'd better find out what it is that they really want or need. That requires humble inquiry.

Furthermore, having to ask for help puts you kind of one [step] down and vulnerable, so that is probably the part that is going to be hardest for leaders – to actually admit that they need help and to go to a subordinate or a peer and say ‘Look, what should we be doing about this particular problem?'

On the other hand, that subordinate will have to learn how not to jump in and say ‘Okay, this is what we do, boss' but rather say to the boss in a humble inquiry mode, ‘Well, what exactly is the problem? Let us talk about it.'

So, for help to be helpful the relationship has to be equilibrated and the client, so to speak, the person seeking help, has to be lifted back to an equitable position from the one down feeling of needing help. Helpers have to be careful, therefore, not to overuse the power that is granted to them when someone asks them for help. Does that make sense?

KM: Absolutely. I was a manager at IBM, and my training as a manager was ‘You bring me a problem and I give you a solution.' Problem, solution all day; all day was problem and solution, so I got into this mode of always giving solutions. What you are saying is that it may have worked in the past, but today the world is too complex, so when it is a matter of bringing a problem we are more apt to discuss it rather than leap to a solution right away.

ES: I use a lot of examples from daily life, like a parent-child [relationship]. The kid comes along and says, ‘Dad, can you help me with my homework?' The father can jump right in and do the problem but supposing the kid really wants to talk to his father and the only way that he knows how to do that is to bring something concrete like the homework. What the father really should be doing is saying, ‘Okay, let us sit down and talk' and see whether it is really about the math problem or whether there is something else on his mind. The same thing I think would apply to executives saying ‘I do not quite know what to do in this situation, we need to talk; we need to talk it out and see what the problem really is before any of us will have a solution.'

KM: Let us say that we are talking to 20- or 30-year-olds, younger people who are just starting out in their managerial careers. What advice would you have to them to help them get to this place where you could say ‘Live this way'?

ES: When I think about younger people, that brings back all of the research that I did on career anchors. The first thing that I think is important is for them to understand what they are really after in their career. Are they after climbing a ladder? Are they after autonomy? Are they after security? Do they want to serve society? The first few jobs really are only a kind of calibrating of self.

So I would say to people, ‘Do not leap too quickly at any one thing.' Once you know whether you want to be a technical expert or a super manager or a lone ranger, then you can develop a career path that makes sense. From an organization's point of view, that means that the time that they should really be doing careful selection is when a kid is five to 10 years into his career, not before he even enters the organization. I think that careers are multifaceted, complex, and people want different things. We keep stereotyping them as if everyone wanted to climb the corporate ladder. Of the samples that I have looked at, only about a quarter of the people who come, let us say out of business school, actually end up wanting to be general managers.

KM: This has been Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today, I have been speaking to Ed Schein, a senior professor at MIT.