On being helpful

One of my favorite things to say is “what can I do help?”. It feels good to help others. And before you pull a muscle rolling your eyes I know it sounds cheesy and I don’t care. I was talking to a colleague about ways to be helpful and I’ve come up with what I think are the 3 ways anyone can be helpful:

1. Directly. This is the most obvious way. Contributing to solving the problem at hand.
2. Clear roadblocks. This one can be challenging because it could require anticipating the upcoming needs of a dynamic situation. If you try to solve a need of the next step but in the meantime the needs have changed at best you have wasted time but at worst you have created a new problem.
3. Get out of the way. This one is probably the hardest to truly do correctly. It requires leaving space for others to tackle the problem AND not diverting resources while doing other work.