Lecture with Professor Edgar Schein

Helping: How to offer, give, and receive help

by Professor Edgar Schein, MIT Sloan School of Management

OBS! Closed for further registrations

Introduction by Professor Majken Schultz: The influence of the works of Edgar Schein in Denmark and at CBS.

In this lecture, Edgar Schein will explore the nature of the helping relationship and its implications for leadership and group dynamics.

Many words are used for helping - assisting, aiding, advising, coaching, consulting, counseling, supporting, teaching, and many more - but they all have common dynamics and processes. Edgar Schein exposes and shows how to resolve the inequities and role ambiguities of helping relationships, describes the different roles that helpers can take once the relationship is balanced, and explains how to build a balanced relationship and how to intervene as that relationship develops.

He examines the social dynamics that are at play in helping relationships in order to better understand why offers of help are sometimes refused or resented, and how to make help more helpful.

Edgar Schein

Ed Schein was educated at the University of Chicago, Stanford University (where he received a master’s degree in psychology in 1949), and Harvard University (where he received his Ph.D. in social psychology in 1952). He has taught at the MIT Sloan School of Management since 1956 and was named the Sloan Fellows Professor of Management in 1978.

He is currently professor emeritus.

He has worked as an organizational consultant with a number of major corporations, both in the US and internationally.

Schein has written extensively about a number of aspects of organizational psychology and organization theory, such as organizational culture, process consultation, the research process, career dynamics, and organization learning and change.

In Organizational Culture and Leadership (1985), a theory of culture was formulated, still seen as one of the cornerstones of our defintion of this phenomenon. In Career Survival: Strategic Job and Role Planning (1994), he presents concepts and activities for managers and employees based on research he first reported in Career Dynamics: Matching Individual and Organization Needs (1978). He has elaborated on and developed the notion of process consultation through the books Process Consultation Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (1969, 1987, 1988), Process Consultation Revisited (1999), and these ideas are brought further in his most recent book, Helping (2009).