Finding and keeping productive people is important to the health of any organization. Here’s a question you may not have considered:
When does a person’s individual productivity actually deter from the overall office or organizational productivity?
If you haven't pondered this difficult dilemma, it might be
worth some extra consideration because knowing the answer will guide you
towards making better decisions about what is ultimately of greater value in the long term.
One of the simple determiners of those you want to keep versus those you should consider parting ways with is assessing the "Giver -vs - Taker" variable. Here is what Steve Wood, President and CEO of the Leddy Group, recently had to say about this factor. His comments were based on Adam Grant’s bestseller, Give and Take, A Revolutionary Approach to Success:
"Grant wrote about the findings of Harvard researchers who studied why some teams in the US intelligence system were more successful than others. They were surprised to find that the more successful teams were those that had “giving” rather than “taking” cultures.
Here are two important findings from the research:
Many organizations don’t support information sharing. Worse, in ‘taker cultures’ the norm is for employees to get as much as possible from others while contributing less in return.
The amount of help a groups’ members give one another is among the strongest predictors of group effectiveness. Building a ‘giver culture’ pays.
Giving and Taking Behaviors
Givers help others, share knowledge, offer to mentor, and, most importantly, make connections without expecting anything in return. Takers get things from others without thinking they should give something in return. Importantly, they only give when they expect to receive personal benefits that exceed the cost of giving.
Most organizational cultures fall in between and are called “matcher cultures.” In these cultures people help others who help them. Because this forms isolated groups of people who practice collaboration, they are less efficient than true giver cultures.
Organizational Structure Facilitates Giving Behaviors
In flourishing giver cultures employees are very comfortable asking for help. One interesting finding by Stella Anderson and Larry Williams is that 75 to 90 percent of all help exchanged between team members comes from direct requests for help.
However, in many of our organizational cultures today people are hesitant to ask for help for fear of feeling weak or incompetent, which they may feel hurts their future advancement.
One Structural Idea – Reciprocity Rings
A professor from the University of Michigan, Wayne Baker, experimented successfully with reciprocity rings. These are 60-90 minute exercises with groups of employees. During the exercise each person makes a request for help with their job. Then others with experience or knowledge offer help and people get matched-up. Everyone has to ask for help with something.
This exercise has a number of benefits – 1) It communicates a norm that it is okay to ask for help; 2) It allows leadership to learn who are natural givers and takers; and 3) It teaches those who are “takers” the benefits and skills needed to be a giver.
Recruiting and Hiring Givers, Not Takers
Many organizations including Berkshire Hathaway have policies against hiring takers and they use customized team activities during the hiring process to screen-out takers. Here are some other ideas for screening-out takers:
Listen for candidates taking personal credit for successes. They might frequently use pronouns like I and me instead of us and we.
Takers often practice “kissing up, kicking down” and when dealing with powerful people, they become effective fakers, are charming, and sometimes charismatic. In these cases look for references from people who are supervisors; okay to ask for different references.
Takers often badmouth others. Listen for blaming responses during interviews.
Making Sure Giving Behavior Doesn’t Go Too Far
One drawback of unmanaged giving cultures is that people can spend too much time giving, and too little time doing their own work. Successful cultures build-in time limits for giving activity. Others set aside certain hours for giving or certain hours where no one can be interrupted."
Reading this material has helped me become aware of the degree to which this trait characterizes the people with which I am privileged to work.
How about you? How about your organization? Will knowing this information aid you in making tough decisions about productive but toxic people?
Perhaps more research should be done on assessing the collateral damage that takers have on their organizations. This would help leaders discern the true pros and cons of keeping (to realize the benefit of their production) or eliminating (to rid the organization of the toxicity) takers from their organizations.
I'd love to hear from you about your experience with both givers and takers and their impact on your organization.
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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.
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