Generosity in Leadership
Generosity is really important to us at FlexPoint. You won’t find the word generous in our aspirational culture elements, and yet I’d argue that generosity connects them together:
If we’re going to give more than we take, it assumes that we want good for our clients, partners, and team members.
If we’re going to do the right thing, it often includes going above and beyond what was expected, drawing upon generosity in time, expertise, and more.
We enable and empower others because we’d rather share knowledge and resources to help clients and team members excel without us than be a bottleneck for their long-term success.
Leadership also matters a lot to us. The work of business transformation requires engaged, courageous leaders to equip and support their teams through challenges. One of the most visible roles is an executive sponsor for a transformation program. According to Prosci, change management experts, great executive sponsors:
Actively and visibly participate throughout the project
Build a coalition of sponsorship with peers and managers
Communicate directly with employees
A spirit of generosity is the foundation of each of these elements. The sponsor who takes time to prepare thoughtful questions in a status sync can make program leadership feel heard and valued. The sponsor who meets with a manager resisting change to understand their perspective builds rapport and trust. The sponsor who shares warm updates directly with employees – through emails, video messages, meetings, etc. – acknowledges the magnitude and importance of change that everyone is working through.
But don’t take our word for it that generous leadership is worth the effort: Adam Grant wrote a whole book on this!
We loved reading Adam Grant’s book Give and Take and his data-driven insights that givers – those who contribute to others without expecting anything in return – can have an immense impact on their organization’s success.
Grant introduces the concept of takers, who mostly seek their own interests, and givers, who focus on contributing to others. In between are matchers, who strive to “preserve an equal balance of giving and getting” and “operate on the principle of fairness.” Especially in the workplace, “people fear that they’ll be exploited if they operate like givers” and often act competitively or keep score. Being a giver also doesn’t mean you never accept help; in fact, “givers who excel are willing to ask for help.”
To avoid being taken advantage of, also known as being a doormat, Grant recommends sincerity screening. This is when givers default to trusting people but try to quickly identify whether a person is a giver or taker. No amount of generosity will be enough for a taker, so protect yourself when interacting with takers by going against your generous instincts and choosing to act as a matcher. He writes:
This is what I find most magnetic about successful givers: they get to the top without cutting others down, finding ways of expanding the pie that benefit themselves and the people around them. Whereas success is zero-sum in a group of takers, in groups of givers, it may be true that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Grant shares a neat story of Lillian Bauer, a manager at an elite consulting firm whose accelerated promotion to partner was delayed because she “needed to say no to clients more often.” While Bauer wanted to stop being a doormat to takers, she didn’t want to stop helping matchers and givers. She found that offering group mentoring sessions internally was more sustainable than one-on-ones and “engaged others in sharing the workload, creating opportunities for them to become givers.” This allowed her to expand the pie and enabled her “giving to have a broader impact while protecting her own time.”
Generosity in Leadership Works
Generosity matters in enabling everyday innovation and teamwork, and it really counts in times of crisis.
Generosity and Innovation
Innovation is one of those buzzwords that has lost much of its heft. But let’s marvel at it for a moment: genuinely creative, fresh problem-solving is amazing! It often includes combining existing concepts in new ways or building on the kernel of an idea from someone else. Of course, there are lightbulb moments in isolation, but most of the innovations we encounter during the day have roots in collaboration.
Generosity – particularly modeled by a leader – allows that teamwork to really count. When team members share resources for learning more about the topic at hand, they extend their influence beyond what was possible directly. When individuals share not only the knowledge they’re confident in but also what they’re still working through, it allows the group to build insights together – and strengthen everyone’s problem-solving and innovation chops.
Purposefully highlighting credit for a breakthrough insight or solution is a really impactful moment, too. That moment when a leader takes time to shine a light on a team member’s creativity is empowering – it shows that the leader observes and appreciates their contribution, and it can foster more generosity in sharing thoughts in the future.
On the other hand, I fear that many of us have been in a room where a leader took credit for work that they had a very small hand in. That’s demoralizing for the rest of the group and, frankly, can make others less willing to share insights and efforts going forward.
Generosity in Times of Crisis
Extreme innovation may be needed when a company or team must dramatically change course in order to continue. This innovation can be around what is done: for example, pursuing an adjacent market or discontinuing a product line. It can also be around how the work is done: for instance, adopting a culture of greater accountability to support operational efficiency or equipping fast-growing engineering teams with coaching skills to ramp up new hires far more effectively.
Tobias Fredberg’s HBR article Why Good Leaders Pass the Credit and Take the Blame described observations from a study of CEOs using me (individually-focused) versus we (group-focused) language. He noted more me language from leaders in the midst of turnaround situations – taking their organizations in dramatically new direction – and dug into examples. He wrote:
It’s no big news that leaders in turnaround situations tend to play a more prominent role in their companies than leaders in business-as-usual scenarios. What’s interesting is, in interviews, the CEOs who had led turnarounds took personal responsibility when things went wrong and did not hesitate to share the credit with their teams when things went right.
These types of higher-ambition CEOs acknowledge the role they must play as exemplars. They see the willingness to accept personal responsibility — especially during tough times — as critical to winning the trust of employees and other stakeholders.
Those leading through crisis understood that they needed to harness the efforts of their entire companies to make it through. So, they took personal responsibility for challenges, which built trust with key stakeholders that they relied on for overall success. They also shared credit with their teams when things went well, turning the flywheel of trust, creativity, and teamwork further toward their collective success.
If you’ve been in the trenches with this kind of leader, I bet even though the overall experience was challenging, you can look back with fondness at how the team rallied around the challenge together.
Here’s to Being Generous Leaders
Business transformation is full of challenges, both in what is done and how the work is done. I hope we’ll choose generosity in those moments of challenge, calling on ourselves and our teams to share resources and insights, take personal responsibility when things go wrong, and enthusiastically share credit when we win together.
Many of us love giving but are afraid (for good reason) of being walked all over like doormats. In Give and Take, Adam Grant explains that “the dangers lie less in giving itself and more in the rigidity of sticking with a single reciprocity style across all interactions and relationships.”
With this in mind, I invite all of us (myself included!) to be well-grounded givers. This will look different by season and by relationship. If I’m in a really busy time, I may need to scale back the time I spend giving toward efforts that aren’t in my direct line of sight. And if I have to make a choice in how I spend a specific 60-minute window, I may choose to give time to someone who has demonstrated follow-through and responsiveness over someone who has a history of asking for input without taking subsequent action.
Personally, one of my big goals is to take the advice of flight attendants around the world: “secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others.” I have a habit of putting others’ needs ahead of my own – and then getting tired and resentful when I didn’t take care of myself. Every week I survey how I did against this goal and incorporate lessons learned to be more likely to take care of myself the next week.
Right now, this looks like swimming at the local YMCA three times a week, eating more vegetables, and taking several dog walks each day. Moving my body, getting fresh air, and fueling up with something healthy provide a foundation for generosity – if I try to give without filling up my own cup, I come up empty!
How can you be a generous leader today?
