It’s hard to pass up noting anything recently written by Adam Grant, management professor at Wharton. In an article for McKinsey he makes a compelling case for the value of developing a “giving” culture within an organization, the challenges for doing so and some advice how to succeed. In an example he cites about a study conducted just after the 9/11 tragedy to understand what made the best intelligence units effective, it was found that…”the critical factor wasn’t having stable team membership and the right number of people. It wasn’t having a vision that is clear, challenging, and meaningful. Nor was it well-defined roles and responsibilities; appropriate rewards, recognition, and resources; or strong leadership.
Rather, the single strongest predictor of group effectiveness was the amount of help that analysts gave to each other. In the highest-performing teams, analysts invested extensive time and energy in coaching, teaching, and consulting with their colleagues.”
Yet, most organizations are developed around an individual competitive culture in which it doesn’t pay to be too helpful, or helpful at all, if you want to get recognized and rise to the top. Fears of having ideas stolen or helping a colleague surpass you prevents many from freely helping others. As Grant says in his article, “When leaders implement forced-ranking systems to reward individual performance, they stack the deck against giver cultures.” Yet when experiments have been conducted in some companies by organizing “reciprocity rings”, in which employees are available for certain periods of time to help peers who need help, it was found that there were very definite monetary benefits. For example, “30 reciprocity-ring participants from a professional-services firm estimated that they had received $261,400 worth of value and saved 1,244 hours.” And such results weren’t anomalies.
Although moving towards a giver culture has its challenges Grant has found through his research that it’s possible to turn the “taker” culture around through three practices: facilitating help-seeking, recognizing and rewarding givers, and screening out takers.
Read the article as published on the McKinsey website here: Givers take all: The hidden dimension of corporate culture