Generosity Burnout

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2017

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Senior leaders Brad Feld, Sarah Robb O’Hagan, Mike Ghaffary, Heidi Roizen, and John Rogers Jr. discuss burning out on giving, the techniques they use to avoid it, and how they recognize it in their employees.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.
0:05.9	HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous
0:11.9	leaders through raw honest career questions
0:14.6	that we all face.
0:15.9	Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free
0:18.3	wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBO Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review.
0:32.7	I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.
0:35.0	A few years back, Wharton Professor Adam Grant wrote an influential book
0:38.3	called Give and Take, which showed how some of the most successful business leaders
0:42.2	are givers, namely people who look to help
0:44.7	those around them. Givers turn out to be some of the most valuable employees in a company.
0:49.7	Generosity, the willingness to share information, bring others along, make connections, and promote insights, is essential to collaboration and high-performing teams.
0:59.0	The drive givers have to help others often propels them into senior leadership, but new research
1:05.1	published on hibr.org shows there's a limit.
1:08.4	Adam Grant and his fellow researcher Rebrebeli find out that being overly selfless and generous can actually have a high cost.
1:16.0	Givers risk what the researchers call generosity burnout.
1:20.0	Grant and Rebbly say that givers need to put boundaries around their generosity, and those who don't do that
1:25.0	who don't do that wear themselves out.
1:27.0	They end up harming themselves and even those they want to help.
1:30.0	So today you're going to hear from senior leaders who were givers at heart and who have suffered from generosity burnout.
1:36.0	They've struggled with how to set limits and they are going to share with us their best practices from what they've learned.
1:41.0	They're storing now from HPR senior
	...

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