Jessica was overwhelmed and didn't know what to do. She's a generous person by nature who had volunteered as she often does, to help a stressed out colleague. This time, it was a recent hire at the IT firm where they both worked, who was inexperienced for the companies customer relationship management system, and had fallen behind. Jessica knew the system inside out, so she offered to take over a data entry task on her colleagues behalf. But what soon started as a simple favor for a colleague in distress, grew into a colossal headache for Jessica. "The additional workload didn't seem overwhelming when I agreed to help", she told me, "but I quickly realized how time-consuming it was." She began coming into the office early, staying late and working through lunch to keep up with her existing job duties. She became resentful, of the rest of her team for going out to lunch or leaving work at 05:00 PM. "I was even resentful when people stop by my office to catch up." She said, "A 15 minute conversation with a co-worker meant 15 minutes. I wouldn't be able to spend with my family that evening." Jessica needed some help of her own, but she never asked for it. "I assumed that my other team members had full plates also, so I continue to labor through the Workload." She explained, "I didn't know how important it was for me to raise my hand and ask for help. I assumed that was the responsibility of my manager, or co-workers to notice how much extra work I was doing and offered to help shoulder the load." As Jessica's desperation grew, she saw only one solution, quit and that's what she did. Looking back in her situation, she realized that the problem was never her job or her employer. It was our own failure to ask for the help she needed, to get her work done. "I will never make that mistake again.", she said. A true story, the only thing I changed was the name. Jessica is an example of what we call an overly generous giver. Somebody who freely gives, who freely helps, but doesn't ask for what she needs. Now I know it sounds like heresy to say that it's possible to be too generous, but it is. If you're so generous that you get burned out, you become de-energized, you compromise your resources or your ability to help other people to live up to your commitments, then you're an overly generous giver. The solution is to put boundaries around your generosity, and to ask for the help that you need. Now the opposite is the selfish taker. The selfish taker is someone who takes it all in, who asks and never gives. I mentioned this once to a friend of mine who used to work for IBM consulting and he said, "Oh yeah, we call them sponges because they just suck everything in and they don't let her drop back out." The third type is the lone wolf. And in some ways it's the most tragic of all the types because they're disengaged. They got their head down doing their work. They don't give they don't ask. The best place to be is the giver, requester. Those are people who give, they're generous, they're helpful and they ask for help when they need it. That's the best place to give for an individual, for a team, or even for an entire organization. Now I've told you one story, one data point, but I mentioned four categories. Even I know you can't generalize from an end of one. So what we needed was to develop an assessment of both giving and asking, and then use that assessment to collect data from a very large population. Now, I don't know how to do that thing. So I needed help, and I asked one of our wonderful Ph.D. students, Hilary Hendricks, if she would help out. She graciously said yes, and we developed and validated this assessment. We use it to collect data from a large population and this is the result. So what do we have here? We have here on the vertical dimension, giving, rarely, giving often. On the horizontal, we have asking from very seldom, to often over here. The dark blue line has been super imposed on this graph, that's where there's a balance between those two. You can see that almost everyone is above the 45 degree line. Almost everyone is up in that generous giver category and some people are way up there, just like Jessica. Now fortunately, we don't see a lot of selfish takers down here. Although there are some, we do see quite a few of lone wolves. People don't ask much or give much. About ten or 50 percent would be up here, in the giver, requester category. Now you may wonder, are there differences by gender, for example? Surprisingly there are no differences, they are very small differences. So men and women are very similar in the same tendency. Also I want to point out, in addition to Hilary Hendricks, we needed help in terms of getting this into a qualtric survey,, that we could administer to a large population. I want to acknowledge Lillian Chen, for helping us in that regard. This assessment is available for you if you would like to take it, go to the website. All you have to do is ask.com and slash assess and you'll be able to take the assessment yourself.
