What Holds Us Back From Nurturing Others

Why we don’t spend time nurturing clients and team members?

I've been working with Cathy (not her real name, but a real person) who is very caring and really wants the best for her clients, she works hard and is 100% committed to her cause as a leader and business owner. In fact, she is so caring that she occasionally become embroiled in the dramas of others – including her clients.

This has become a problem because the dramas are overtaking her ability to provide the services (which she’s fantastic at) to those very same clients. It also affects her energy and resilience. So we've been working on mindset, boundaries and systems to help her to achieve her growth goals in her business and still be known for being the caring leader that she is.

When you have a practice or business, caring for and nurturing others should be a big part of your focus. After all, nurturing clients and staff has a positive effect on your business in terms of:

• Better employee retention

• Higher staff morale

• Increased practice efficiency

• Increased job competency

• Higher client satisfaction

• Increased revenue

• More trust and loyalty

• Increased customer/client awareness

• Better client retention

But this nurturing can’t be at the expense of your ability to run your business. Most business owners, experts, and thought leaders recognise this fact quite clearly. And it’s precisely this fear – among other worries – that holds us back from nurturing others at work.

So what are the things that hold us back from nurturing others in our work?

What Holds Us Back From Nurturing Clients and Team Members

1. We’re too busy

One of the biggest reasons that we don’t nurture clients, staff, and others in our practices is the feeling that we’re just too busy. This is a real concern. When I worked for a large productivity consulting company I found that people spent a great deal of time on activities that simply weren’t impactful or didn’t have a great return for them.

In fact, research shows that 83% of workers spend one to three hours a day ‘covering for or making up work for a colleague’.

But nurturing clients and team members – or having a culture of care – is actually a great way to bring those numbers down. Imagine Peter works in your office on the finance team, but he doesn’t understand how to run a report that’s part of his job. So whenever he needs that report, he comes to you for help.

Being helpful means that you’ll continue to run those reports for Peter. After all, it only takes you five minutes. But when you nurture, you actually take extra time to stop and teach Peter how to run the report himself. This might take a little longer on the ground floor, but it will scrape back all those minutes over the next year that you will be taken away from your own work. This focus on continuous improvement means that you (and Peter) get a return on your time.

In the same way, you may have a client that calls you every week for advice on how to manage a task. Rather than fielding that call, you may need to think about how you can put in a system to help and nurture your client without taking up more of your time. Maybe you have a staff member who can jump in and pre-empt this particular problem. Or maybe you spend some time filming a video to record what to do or helping them set up an internal system that can help them in the long term.

When it comes to your clients, you simply need to ensure that you have the right infrastructure and systems in place. These create the scaffolding, boundaries and support that allow you to provide care without burnout.  

2. Fear of not empowering others

Sometimes, we worry that if we ‘help’ too much, we might be seen as babying others – particularly our team. In other words, we can worry that we aren’t empowering others to take on their own development and growth. We may also have the thought that ‘I had to work this out myself; why shouldn’t they?’ Or ‘I was able to succeed. Why can’t they?’ Or even, ‘They just need to harden up and learn for themselves.’

The challenge is that where we are today is much different than where we were five, 10, or 15 years ago. Today, there is a greater volume of work, more content, increased data, drastically more available information, and so on. And the speed of change in the workplace reflects that. Today, people need more help than you think because of this speed of change.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t empower them. Giving your staff training, opportunities, and experience to develop and grow is vital. This allows them to stand on their own two feet (after a time). To nurture clients, you need to give them insight, transparency, and education so they can feel empowered working with you.  

However, to do this well, you need to recognise where you are on the spectrum. Am I assuming too much? Do they need more support? Then move towards providing that. Are you smothering them a little or assuming they know less than they do? Then more towards less support.  

It all comes down to providing the support they need in a way that allows them to learn, grow and develop. You can think of this like a plant. While the plant is young, it needs more water. But once it gets older and its roots are deeper and longer, then it needs water less often because it can access water from deep in the soil itself. In the same way, your clients and staff need more help in the beginning. But as you provide that, and they grow their own roots, they’ll need less from you.  

As Tom Peters says, ‘Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.’

3. Fear of becoming a rescuer

The fear of becoming a ‘rescuer’ is another reason why we may not initially focus on nurturing clients or staff. We don;t want to get caught up in the politics, the drama and distraction. The idea of a rescuer was set out in research by Stephen Karpman.

Karpman’s Drama Triangle

Karpman’s Drama Triangle is a dynamic model of social interaction and conflict developed by Stephen Karpman, M.D., nearly half a century ago. This triangle posits that people often play the unconscious roles of victim, prosecutor, or rescuer. The victim is the person who says, ‘Poor me’. The prosecutor is the person who criticises or blames the victim. And the rescuer is the person who says, ‘Let me help!’

Interestingly, not every person in this triangle will always realise they are. Someone – perhaps an employer, for example – can be cast in the role of the prosecutor without them even knowing. And often, people are drawn into the triangle against their wishes or are forced to play roles that may not even relate to the actual circumstances.

If you find yourself caught between wanting to avoid the drama and still trying to find a way to nurture and improve the situation, it's time to focus on the purpose and outcome.  Depersonalise the problem, decide on the specific actions to take and agree on measurable progress. It’s vital that those drawn into the triangle work to remove themselves. Otherwise, they can find themselves tugged into a situation that they don’t want to be in or into a role that they don’t want to play. Worse, they may be seen to be playing into the drama.

Questions

So what questions should you ask yourself to determine if you’re being hindered by these fears?

1. Do your team believe they’re achieving their potential? If not, how can you help them.

2. Are your clients able to get the support they need from you without impacting your own productivity? If not, what systems and structures can you put in place to start nurturing clients while maintaining your own boundaries?

3. Are you finding yourself embroiled in dramas? If so, how can you redirect this and avoid being pulled in?

I’d love to hear your thoughts….