COR's Professional Helping Model
for Organizational Learning

COR’s helping model is basically an educational process which merges two types of functions: learning and relationship. It involves learning at the individual, small group, and larger levels, consistent with the concept of the “learning organization.”¹ The basic goal of this model is to assist the learners to not only solve the immediate problem they confront, but also to gain information about why the problem arose in the first place, critical skills for addressing potential causes, and how to solve similar problems in the future without external assistance. This is the basic educational process of capacity building.

Sometimes this learning project involves traditional settings, such as workshops or retreats. More often, however, it occurs as a by-product of meetings in which COR assists/teaches members of the organization to look at their situation in new ways; the skills of deep listening, facilitation, coaching, asking questions, and modeling new behaviors and processes can all be used to help clients learn to build their own skills and knowledge while addressing issues of importance to them.

One of the most important vehicles in the organizational learning process is its dependence on the development of a trusting relationship between the helpers and the clients. A partnership of this kind is extremely powerful in addressing learning goals in an organization because it builds on a combination of two prior types of knowledge: the insider’s intimate knowledge of the culture, history, specific people, etc. of the organization, and the professional helper’s knowledge and skill bases which are true of organizational dynamics in general. It is this knowledge that the helper shares with the clients as they focus together on a specific set of issues important to the organization.

Edgar Schein² describes three kinds of relationships that professional helpers can have with a client organization. The first is based on the “purchasing of expertise,” in which the professional helpers serve as consultants who essential diagnose and resolve the problem for the client organization. The second kind of relationship is similar, in that the helpers bring a diagnostic expertise of the situation, and then prescribes what the organization should do about it after they leave. Both of these types of relationships cover what is popularly referred to as organizational consulting or content consultation.

However, in the third type of relationship—which is about the process of working through an organizational issue—professional helpers are collaborators. Both helpers and client collaborate in defining the problem, deciding what initial steps each will take in confronting it, and consistently evaluating what occurs. Schein calls this type of relationship process consultation, a model most consistent with COR’s philosophy of professional helping.