Leaders Who Get How to Give

A few years ago Margaret Barrett received a copy of Give and Take, by Wharton professor Adam Grant, from a colleague at Intel Corporation. It changed her life. In her typical empathetic fashion, Barrett noticed a bookmark in the pages and suggested her colleague finish the book before lending it to her. But he handed it back with both hands, saying, “You have to read this.” When she did, she understood why. Suddenly, many of the dynamics in her personal and work lives became clear to her. “I held my head up higher,” Barrett remembers. “It helped to focus me on knowing that what I brought was valuable. And in the melee that I work in, that’s actually quite rare and important.” A born giver, Barrett feels compelled to share her time, energy, and knowledge with others. But that instinct hasn’t always benefited her in her work as a decision specialist. “Hiring, promotion, all mechanisms — the entire infrastructure is designed for those people who are self-promoting and assertive,” she says. Takers contribute to the corporation’s competitive fire. But they can make life very difficult for givers. Barrett is no stranger to this concept. She once prepared a presentation and then watched a coworker deliver it as if it was his work, creating the impression that he was the expert. In the past, colleagues have pumped her for information, connections, and coaching. To many of the people she’s worked with, she and similarly generous colleagues have been considered “doormats.” Yet givers like Barrett are among the best employees in a company. Their genuine inclination to help others progress and to freely share expertise can lead to wins in today’s collaborative, networked organizations. As a result, givers are asked to join more teams and projects. Often that pattern repeats itself at home, where spouses, family members, and friends return to the well of the giver’s generosity. Until it runs dry and the giving energy drains away. Which is exactly what happened to Barrett. . . . “Generosity burnout” is what Adam Grant and his colleague Reb Rebele call this phenomenon. They find that although it’s good to share your time, energy, and smarts at work, it’s not good to be totally selfless. Their research shows that the most effective givers set boundaries around their generosity. Givers who don’t do that wear themselves out. They end up harming themselves — and those they want to help. HBR spoke to some of the senior leaders and professionals whom Grant and Rebele have interviewed. Many of them feel exhausted by the constant requests for help they receive. But over time many have learned to find ways to minimize the cost of helping others while increasing the impact of their giving. Brad Feld, an entrepreneur and early-stage investor at Foundry Group, remembers the moment generosity burnout hit him. He had just arrived in Nevada for a big technology convention. “Within two hours of being in Las Vegas, I was in my hotel room with the door locked, the lights out, and a pillow over my head,” he recalls. “I wasn’t able to cope with what was going on.” That was the beginning of a six-month depression, one that Feld attributes in significant part to his giving nature. Before then he had almost religiously followed the mantra give first. Mentoring and connecting budding entrepreneurs in the technology industry had long served him well; seeking and giving help is integral to getting startups off the ground. But his depression taught Feld something he didn’t expect. His behavior, he realized, was making his “underlying philosophy unsustainable over a long period of time.” The generosity burnout phenomenon has become more prevalent in the era of internet technology, instant communication, and vastly amplified professional networks. “If my father were still alive and looked at me in the workplace today, he’d be like, ‘You people are crazy!’” says Sarah Robb O’Hagan with a laugh. But the former president of Gatorade and Equinox says today’s social network effects are about far more than simple time management. “Somewhere in the last 10 years, the floodgates have opened. Just because everyone can ask for something doesn’t mean that it’s productive for you to respond.” That’s a lesson Robb O’Hagan, a self-described “compulsive giver,” has learned at some cost. Now the founder of the media platform ExtremeYou, she has experienced generosity burnout several times during her career. One instance, when a whirlwind trip she’d squeezed in to support a family member, found her sobbing on a plane that was delayed for takeoff. “You can give to others only if you’re fully energized,” she says. “It’s like a bank. If you keep spending money without building up your balance, you’re eventually going to run out. You’re doing more for other people when you find the time to be selfish.” Heidi Roizen, an operating partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm DFJ, has learned to be a self-protective giver — the kind that Grant and Rebele say is the most effective. When Roizen encounters greedy takers, she defends herself by behaving like a “matcher,” which basically means she keeps score and expects reciprocity. Like Feld, Roizen works in the world of high-tech startups, where the “asks” for idea, connections, and funding come thick and fast. “I jokingly refer to it as being the universal donor,” Roizen says. But as Grant and Rebele point out, you have to be deliberate about whom you help. “You can’t just give and give and give,” Roizen acknowledges. When you’re being asked for career advice or introductions to influential people, Roizen says, it’s important to safeguard your time and protect those in your network. You don’t want to blow through your energy reserves and social capital. “It isn’t just that you’re using up my capital,” Roizen says. “You’re asking me to use up somebody else’s capital as well.” What does Roizen do? First, she says no. (The pangs of guilt subside eventually, she adds.) Second, she sets limits for herself. “I can’t give 100 meetings a week to business school students,” she says. When Roizen does stretch beyond her limits, she does so selectively, when it’s for an especially worthy cause. And she means it when she says no and pulls back from persistent takers. “You can do it in a very polite way,” she says, “but at the end of the day, you also have to be firm about it: ‘This is no longer a good use of my time, and I’m not going to do it for you anymore.’” Protecting yourself against rampant requests is one thing. But for givers, the whole point of giving is to give. To put it another way, it serves you to serve others. It also serves organizations. Top managers are coming to the realization that givers, who advance important projects for the company even when it doesn’t directly benefit themselves, are their best employees. Organizations need people who share freely, see the big picture, and have networks that are built to help others. That’s why John Rogers Jr., the CEO of Ariel Investments, cautions against givers being too self-protective. (Though he acknowledges the flip side, that people can give to the point of it becoming counterproductive.) Rogers’s practice of long-term generosity was inspired by his background. Growing up in Chicago, he saw his mother participate in the civil rights movement and serve on boards at organizations including Mobil Oil, Howard University, and Trans World Airlines. But his understanding of giving crystallized during his years on the Princeton basketball team, playing for legendary coach Pete Carril. “He pounded into you that it wasn’t about you,” Rogers remembers. “It was about the team, and it was about helping your teammates succeed on the court.” Rogers saw vivid examples of selfless play lead to new opportunities. “I’d gone to basketball camps and baseball camps, and everyone wanted to talk about teamwork,” Rogers says. “But it really didn’t change behavior. Coach had a way of changing the way you thought about life and thought about others. It was profoundly impactful for me, because I had grown up as an only child, with a lot of attention centered on me.” From his years of playing basketball, Rogers has learned to take a “teaming” approach to helping others, which has three parts. First, he treats all the groups and organizations he works with as teams, which gives him some boundaries. Doing anything that doesn’t benefit one of his teams probably isn’t the right way to spend his time and energy. But once he’s joined a team, he gives it everything he’s got. Second, he believes that teammates with shared values can more readily share work. They are less likely to overextend themselves — they “look to pass” when they’re too busy or too spent to move something forward on their own. Third, the teams he joins are often connected (for instance, they play in the same arena of philanthropic or political action), so they support one another, which magnifies their impact. Each act of giving goes further. Rogers says that to avoid generosity burnout, finding ways to amplify your giving is as important as protecting yourself from overgiving. After all, he says, givers are ultimately happier and more influential than insatiable takers. “The people I see who are miserable are the selfish people who never quite got ‘in the room’ — in the spirit of the Hamilton musical — the room where it happens,” Rogers says. “Other people have started to catch on to that, and they say, ‘You know, if I’ve got some tough decisions to make, tough things that I’ve got to work on, I want people in the room who are thinking about how to help us achieve our ultimate goals.’ Those who’ve done it in a selfish way start to see later in life that they’ve been left out of those opportunities.” Like Rogers, Mike Ghaffary, the CEO of Yelp subsidiary Eat24, inherited his initial giving impulse from his parents, who always got a jolt of energy from helping others. His self-protective streak, too, came from his parents. His mother, who had been burned by negative experiences with moochers, worried that others might take advantage of her if she gave too much. One technique Ghaffary has adopted is screening help requests. He asks several pointed questions up front so he can suss out what people are really after. “People swear that they’re just asking for advice when they really want investment,” Ghaffary says. “That gets confusing because you might spend half an hour giving advice to somebody who doesn’t want to hear it.” Wandering down that sort of rabbit hole wastes time and energy. Roizen gives homework to folks who ask for help. She says that prompting them for specifics or referring them to other resources can weed out the lazy takers and clarify where the need truly lies — and where she can have a bigger impact. “Pass the bar before I’m willing to give time to you,” she says. To head off generosity burnout, Robb O’Hagan has learned to gear up for the high-stress times in her life. If she’s preparing for a book launch, for example, she’ll preemptively reach out to her network of colleagues, friends, and family to let everyone know she’ll be largely out of touch for the next few months. But despite her best efforts, there are times when Robb O’Hagan reaches her giving limit and has to recharge. She knows she can’t help others effectively unless she can “balance the energy equation.” Being selfish is not selfish, she insists: “It’s actually restoking your energy sources to be able to contribute to others.” As Grant and Rebele have found in their research, managing your energy is critical — and it’s something you can control. . . . It was an emotionally expensive lesson for Barrett. The Intel decision specialist has been through a few taxing episodes of generosity burnout in both her work and her personal life; one went hand-in-hand with a divorce. She now knows it’s up to her to spend her energy in ways that help her succeed. “Nobody else can see the gauge,” she says. “If my well is empty, which it has been at times, that’s my responsibility.” Much like some of the high-performing leaders interviewed for Grant and Rebele’s research, Barrett has gone on her own journey of giving, overgiving, burnout, and learning. “It took a while to get there,” she says. Now she keeps a lookout for self-centered takers. “I can actually feel my energy being drained by them,” she says. “And once I know somebody is a taker, I don’t give to them. I’m kind to them, but I’m done giving to them.” She also knows she will keep giving as long as it doesn’t hurt her. “I love giving to others. I don’t really want my name on the plaque or the award. But I need to know that I’ve made an impact, the same as anybody else does,” Barrett says. “If I’m a healthy giver, with that full well of generosity, who has that passion for advancing the careers and the learning of other people, it can be a really wonderful thing.” The Big Idea

Leaders Who Get How to Give

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