Working in teams has a way of muddying the waters when it comes to giving, taking, and “matching” (trading favors). Technology has been changing the team experience in many organizations — in ways that are good and bad for generosity burnout. Virtual teams save employees transit time and make it easier to share expertise across locations, but they can also reduce the visibility of people’s helping and citizenship behaviors when leaders and colleagues aren’t able to directly observe the kinds of contributions that don’t show up in a project plan but do shape team performance. Collaboration platforms like Slack and Basecamp, meanwhile, can increase the transparency of team communication and make it easier to find and distribute knowledge resources like FAQs, training documents, and reports. But they also feed the always-available mindset and culture, which increase connectedness but push people toward energy-depleting, reactive helping instead of proactive giving that can be higher impact and more efficient.
How important is it for a leader to be a giver?
I think it’s critical. Companies led by narcissistic takers have more volatile performance, because takers tend to be overconfident about their own strategies and put their own interests ahead of the firm’s. Meanwhile companies with servant-leader CEOs have better financial performance. When you have a giver at the top, you never have questions about that person’s loyalty. Of course, it’s especially important for leaders to be thoughtful about whom, how, and when they help. But as long as they align their giving with organizational goals, they’re the people you want in the corner office.
A group of all givers may sound like a dream team, but it’s not necessarily the ideal. Several people have asked me what to do about managers or colleagues who are overly generous and end up weighing their teams down with extra commitments. You might need to have a difficult conversation in such situations, just as you would if you were dealing with serial takers. It may also help to have some quid pro quo matchers on your team, because they will naturally strive to keep things evenly balanced.
Tips and tools for reducing the time it takes to help others?
Finding ways to cut down the time it takes to be helpful is a win-win: It allows you to help more people and gives you room for your own work, development, or rest. Specific time management strategies will vary by job and by the kinds of help you offer or get asked for, but a few of my favorites include:
Using an automatic scheduler for ad hoc meeting requests.
Putting the answers to common questions in your email signature, an autoreply message, or an FAQ doc you either post online or copy and paste from when needed
Bringing groups of people together on popular topics so you can address common requests all at once or connecting people with similar needs who can then help one another.
Doing more five-minute favors. When someone asks for an hour (or more) of your time that you don’t have to spare, see if you can do something smaller but still helpful (such as making an introduction or sharing a resource).
Selflessness at work leads to exhaustion — and often hurts the very people you want to help. Here’s how to share your time and expertise more effectively.
Virtually no one is a pure giver, taker, or matcher. We all have moments when we help with no strings attached (by mentoring a junior colleague, for instance), when we trade favors evenly (by, say, exchanging information with a competitor), and when we aim to maximize our own returns (as in a salary negotiation). But we all have dominant styles — our default preferences for how we treat most of the people most of the time. And these styles have less to do with personality than most people realize.
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