Sending commercial email messages without following the Acts rules can get you into a lot of trouble as the DIA works hard to enforce this Act. Mobilize Mail has written extensively about the Anti-SPAM Act and how businesses can avoid falling foul of its rules.

The DIA have now created a newsletter for NZ businesses covering important news and topics related to the Act. The DIA’s description of this newsletter is below.

The Electronic Messaging Compliance Unit at Internal Affairs is about to begin the publication and distribution of a news letter called Compliance M@tters.

Compliance M@tters will be a regular electronic newsletter about complying with the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007. Items regarding our work, news of interest and urgent warnings regarding what may be considered significant scams will also be covered from time-to-time. We already provide publication and coverage of scams that are circulating on the Department’s website and through the use of social media.

The Department is also be interested in your feedback regarding the newsletter, and information on how to provide feedback will be outlined in the subscription and sign up process.

I recommend all businesses should subscribe to Compliance M@tters which you can do here: http://www.dia.govt.nz/diawebsite.nsf/wpg_URL/Services-Anti-Spam-Anti-Spam-eNews?OpenDocument

Would you have done this? All three of these people are givers and help make their team a “giver” rather than “taker” culture.

In my last Blog post, I introduced you to the work of Adam Grant, who has explored the differences between giver and taker work cultures. I discovered Grant’s book Give and Take as a result of reading an interesting article Givers Take All: The Hidden Dimension of Corporate Culture in the McKinsey Quarterly published in April.

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 -

1. “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.”
2. “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.

Another Structural Idea – Peer Bonuses

Cash incentives that reward collaborative behaviors do support giver cultures. However, they won’t by themselves convert taker cultures into giver cultures because the takers will figure-out how to game the system. What does seem to work are “peer bonus” systems that come in all shapes and sizes. A “peer bonus” is when team members have a budget of money they can use to effectively “tip’ co-workers for helpful behavior. These usually include public notices of thanks to the recipients. These systems typically reward collaborative behavior and are in small denominations so that cash motivated individuals don’t undermine the intent.

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.

Some firms are now testing for aggression. Larry James from Georgia Tech has developed an effective pre-employment assessment widely used by security companies that tests for aggressive and taker tendencies.

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.

I had never thought about giver and taker cultures before and it makes total sense to me now. I’m very lucky to be working in an organization that leans more toward the giver culture – how about you? If not, what can you start doing to change it?

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Ricard has spent a lifetime exploring the concept of happiness. As Ricard says;

“whatever we do, whatever we hope, whatever we dream – somehow is related to a deep, profound desire for well-being or happiness”.

If happiness is something that is going to determine the quality of every instant of our life, then it is important that we know what it is. Not knowing what happiness is makes it much harder to find.

Happiness is often defined as pleasure, but pleasure, says Ricard, is contingent on a time, a place and an object. For example, if you eat one piece of chocolate cake you will feel pleasure; eat three and you will feel sick.

Rather than a mere pleasure sensation, happiness is well-being. It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment that pervades and underlies all emotional states, and all the joys and sorrows that come one’s way.

Very often, people pursue happiness by looking at the outer world and acquiring objects to bring happiness. However, our control of the outer world is limited, temporary and often an illusion.

You might have a luxurious apartment on the top floor of a magnificent building, but if you are deeply unhappy within, you may well be looking for a window from which to jump.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are people in very difficult circumstances who manage to keep serenity, inner strength and inner freedom. It is wonderful to have external trappings such as a nice place to live, a new car and travel, but these things are not enough.

Happiness comes from within.

I believe one thing that distinguishes organizational cultures is whether the cultures themselves are framed by “giver” or “taker” philosophies. You can feel the difference when you are in each, and you know which is the right fit for you.

In a recent article entitled Givers Take All: The Hidden Dimension of Corporate Culture, Adam Grant summarized very well the difference between giver and taker cultures –

“In giver cultures, employees operate as the high-performing intelligence units do: helping others, sharing knowledge, offering mentoring, and making connections without expecting anything in return. Meanwhile, in taker cultures, the norm is to get as much as possible from others while contributing less in return. Employees help only when they expect the personal benefits to exceed the costs, as opposed to when the organizational benefits outweigh the personal costs.”

When I think about these types of behaviors I can see where some are natural ones that flow from the individual and some come from the culture created over time by the leaders.

In this post I’ll write about how mission plays a role in the development of the giver-taker culture and in Part 2, I’ll explore the elements of building a giver culture including selecting givers for your team.

Mission Attracts Givers

Of course a giver culture starts with the organization’s leadership and how it forms the mission, communicates the mission, and then behaves in ways that support the mission. If leaders are interested in building a giver culture they should infuse the mission with terms that encourage cooperativeness and reciprocity, even when the primary mission is to efficiently and profitably make some widget. Then leaders need to practice giving behavior and hire others who are givers. This helps the giver culture develop.

One of the advantages of not-for-profit organizations is that often their positive mission attracts givers with whom your mission resonates. Volunteers and employees both often give of themselves freely for the achievement of the common mission.

Family Promise

I have been volunteering for a number of years for an organization called Seacoast Family Promise. This organization succeeds because its mission attracts volunteers and staff who are really givers at heart. Its mission “is to empower families experiencing homelessness to achieve lasting self-sufficiency.” We are a collection of volunteers, area churches and synagogues that house homeless families (guests) and help them become independent. When we communicate real stories, like this one from last month, it is easy for us to attract the givers among us:

A local mother and her two sons entered Seacoast Family Promise after living in their car for most of May. This mother, Sara (not her real name) said:

“We are very thankful that we at least had a car to get into– some families don’t.” When I asked about their daily routine, Sara explained “Thank God I have boys. They were able to go into the woods to go to the bathroom. We used to travel to the trails in Northwood so the boys could run and we could wash in the waterfall.”

During this time the boys were out of school for over a week and a half. Sara confided:

“I was afraid that I would lose my children, I had no snacks to give them, and they did not have any clean clothes.” With no money coming in she was also trying to decide where she would drive and what to spend what little money she had on. “I was trying to save gas. I needed to buy bits of food from the Dollar Store so that the boys could have something to eat. It certainly makes you want a hot meal.”

Pausing, Sara went on to say “I finally ran out of gas in Exeter and noticed the Town offices. I went to the welfare office and they sent me here to you.”

If there is an upside to this difficult time, she explained, “we grew stronger, we talked more, and we tried to figure out what we would do next. To be honest it stinks both literally and figuratively.”

Building and leading a giver culture in the business world is challenging and fascinates me. If you are a leader interested in building a giver culture, perhaps these questions quickly come to mind:

1. Do I exhibit giving or taking behaviors?
2. How do I make sure the organizational structure facilitates giver behaviors?
3. How do we go about recruiting and hiring givers?
4. Can we teach takers to be givers or to, at least, give when it is most important?
5. Can we make sure that giving behavior doesn’t dominate the culture so much that important things don’t get done when they need to?

In part 2 of this post, I will write more about givers and takers and I’ll tackle these and other questions.

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