E073: Generosity as a Strategy

(Transcribed by UniScribe (https://www.uniscribe.co). Upgrade to remove this message.)

Hello, welcome to the Big Strategy Podcast. I'm your host and fellow strategist, Jeff Hyatt. This is your go-to spot for real talk with the masterminds of business strategy. It's about sharing stories, insights, and those little nuggets of wisdom to help you unlock big growth.

Let's turn the key and spring into action. Welcome back to the podcast. As you know, this series is reflecting on three elements from my dad's life that I included in his eulogy. We're going to bring them out here, share them with you, and see how they tie back to your business strategy.

One of the things that came out of reflection on his life and what he stood for was generosity. Not generosity as a soft skill. It's a foundational strategy, your personal strategy, your business strategy. Without it, every growth playbook is just extraction.

What do we mean by extraction? Well, if you look at the history of human progress, we've lived in an extraction economy. In my lifetime, I grew up in Pennsylvania where they mined coal from the ground, extracting stored energy and using it for gain in the present. That evolved into oil, same idea, extraction for use today.

And now we're seeing it evolve digitally where AI is extracting value from the data that exists on the internet. Today, I'm going to share with you a personal story, a story from my client work, and a reflection on where generosity meets its limits. So where did my dad's spirit of generosity come from? He lifted himself out of every difficult circumstance that he encountered as a child.

And he always wanted others to have a smoother path than he did, not just his family, but everyone that he came in touch with. Now, if you're a CEO, that's hard to scale, right? My father ran Toyota's operations at the Port of Baltimore. He had 150 people working for him, and he couldn't be totally generous with everyone, but he could give each person something simple, a little recognition, some respect, fair treatment.

All of these things, these small doses of generosity, these are the things that began to snowball into a culture. And this is actually what I look for when clients come to me with strategic planning needs. I look at the small doses of generosity that they show their employees. It's a huge differentiator between companies where the culture survives the CEO's departure and companies where it falls apart the moment that charismatic leader leaves.

When my dad worked for Toyota and then Lexus, he visited the dealerships and he knew everybody's name. He wasn't too shy to write them down in his day timer. Who were their kids? What were their activities?

He kind of kept a social Rolodex. And in today's world, it's even easier. If you follow people on Instagram, they're sharing their lives. You can know one piece of information that when you tie back to them builds a connection.

For example, if you asked me about my daughter's horse riding, we'd have a completely different conversation than if we just leapt into business. So I want to pause for a moment. Think about a direct report, a colleague, someone you're trying to build a better relationship with. What's the one thing you can ask them on a personal level that would build a real connection?

The second piece is this. When people help my dad, it was because they felt genuinely cared for. So think about your organization. Do people do things for you out of fear, out of respect, or because they feel it's a genuine give and take?

Not transactional, but foundational to their relationship. I'm pretty sure my dad would walk into a dealership, talk to someone in the service department, and that person might think of him as the most generous person that they knew. And he wasn't even a relative. Imagine creating that culture at your work.

The way I visualized his work was like a boomerang. Giving without the guarantee of receiving, but knowing. And more than knowing, like trusting, really believing that many of those boomerangs you throw will come back. With that, I inherited these traits, but not all inheritances are positive.

I inherited my dad's spirit of generosity, but I also inherited some of the downsides. During COVID, he was sick, so he never experienced the full weight of that unmooring experience. caused by the uncertainty. Every hour was a new normal.

But I could talk to him and pull from him that spirit of generosity. And when I was unmoored, giving became my default. So I took every extra Zoom call, showed up for everyone that I knew, and the result was 12 or more hours a day on Zoom calls and teaching online classes, many of them for free, just to help others through a difficult time. And while that was generous, it resulted in burnout.

I wasn't able to reflect on this until we came out of COVID and life settled down. And I realized my dad had always helped others over asking for anything for himself, and I was doing the same thing. And honestly, I believe it may have impacted his career trajectory. If you're always the nice guy or gal, some leaders may wonder, does that person have the courage to make the difficult decision?

I mean, just pull yourself out for a moment and think about when you've had to make a difficult decision. It was really hard to feel generosity in that moment, right? And sometimes the people who were able to make those difficult decisions seemingly the easiest may have felt like the least generous of people. And this, my dad was in even more of a unique position because he spent his entire career with Toyota.

And that company has a culture that values tough decisions and you're seen as the generous one that can actually be viewed as a weakness. So I'd ask you to take a moment. When have you been generous and when has it returned? Did you double down when it wasn't reciprocated?

And have you experienced burnout from being generous, throwing those boomerangs? Or were you viewed as something other than a leader that you wanted to be because of that spirit of generosity? What I took away from this experience is that focus leads to success. Generosity without boundaries isn't generosity, it's actually depletion.

I was drawing from my internal reserves. I'll admit it, as much as I like to think that humans know themselves best, my aura ring knows me pretty well. It keeps track of my sleep score, and I actually use that as a quantitative measure of how much I'm giving. How could I do this?

Well, if I'm writing that extra letter of recommendation, I might not go to bed at 9. I go to bed at 10. And the next morning, my sleep score reflects it. And the Oura Ring tracks sleep debt.

You want to see a scary number? Take a look at your sleep debt. How much am I incurring from lost sleep in service to others? This is where I had to learn to say no.

And that was difficult. because my dad modeled generosity as the only way. Maybe it was a little bit stubborn, but I've learned that yes, I can give, but I also need to ask in return. And here's the principle I want you to take away.

And that is that generosity is empathy in action. Helping others requires sitting in their shoes, feeling their emotions to create deep, meaningful human connections. That's the true reward of generosity. So to really drive this home, and because it's a strategy podcast, I wanna tell you a brief story from my consulting work.

I was working with a company that had a heads down, do your job kind of culture. Recognition wasn't in their vocabulary. They had a large blue collar workforce, folks who took pride in punching in and punching out, a decentralized culture. And when they went home, the job was done.

They weren't thinking about it, talking about it, doing anything beyond their shift. And then in ones and twos, good people started to leave. It wasn't a flood at first, not until the company hit a crisis. I remember having a conversation with one of the leaders and suggesting that some generosity could help with their workplace challenges.

He says, well, what happens if we invest or are generous with our people and they leave? And the inverse, of course, is what happens if you don't invest in them and they stay? That question wasn't answered at the time. In fact, initially, he was right.

Doubling down on the old way of doing business was profitable. But this crisis and the ensuing questioning of its own identity from people inside the company looking to leadership for directions and those on the outside, the new leadership began to make different decisions. The company made a bet. A bet on training, leadership development, frontline skills building, and most importantly, visibly recognizing people, not just with pizza and donuts, but a real investment, a culture shift, not just a policy change.

This was a fundamental shift, moving recognition from the corporate center out to the frontline employees who are actually making the real impact with the customer. And that's an ego shift for the company. I'm not talking about the ego of a single leader. I'm talking about the ego of an organization, decentralizing credit and recognition to where the work actually happens.

We talked about the leadership of this company and one of the holdovers from the previous regime was... a leader in their operations department, and he was old school. He'd come up through the ranks, and this idea of recognizing individuals, he was resistant. So instead of trying to change the whole culture overnight, we got his permission to trial this in just one small operation within the company.

And over the course of the next few weeks, the change could no longer be denied. More people punching in on time, punching out on time, breaks were the appropriate length, the work output was consistent throughout the day instead of tapering off or spiking. That's the data side of it. But the real shift was human.

You couldn't see it, but the energy was different. And that's what convinced this skeptic. What happened? Retention improved.

and the company's internal standing elevated. Employees were now proud to say that they worked for this company that only recently had been in crisis. And the customers who interacted with the company realized that this new kind of employee represented a change, a way to create distance from a difficult period, and more importantly, showing the path forward. Now, my dad always knew that investing in people was the strategy, not separate from it.

And he did it by instinct at the dealership level, knowing names, knowing families, making people feel seen. And that's the same approach I recommend to my consulting clients. But here's the part that matters. Generosity still needs structure.

My client didn't just start being nice. They built a system, training programs, recognition frameworks, measurable outcomes, because generosity without structure is just exposure. Let me repeat that. Generosity without structure is just exposure.

And from my experience, it leaves you vulnerable. What happens when a frontline person has a vested interest in the status quo? Well, when clocking in on time and taking the appropriate breaks feels like a loss. because the old way, let them stop work whenever they wanted or whenever their buddies stopped so they could talk about the game, right?

You have to be generous, but still have boundaries. You can invest in people and still hold them to standards. That's how the best companies do this at scale. And that's how people show up differently for someone who genuinely cares, but who also cares enough to create structure around that generosity.

So as we're wrapping up this episode, I want to close with what I call boomerang check. Think about where you've been generous, but haven't been getting a return. Should you keep throwing out those boomerangs? Or is it time to pull back, right?

Have you been generous in a way that's made you look weak? Or is in a way that's made you more respected by the people that you want to work with? Is there a place where you can set boundaries to make your generosity more appreciated, more impactful? and in a way that doesn't deplete you or burn you out, like it did for me during COVID, and ultimately, like it did for my dad and his health.

With that, I want to say generosity is just the starting point. It's what makes everything else possible. Next time, we're going to talk about standing on the shoulders of others, how the generosity of those before us creates the platform that we can build from. Before we go, I want to leave you with this.

My dad spent his whole life throwing boomerangs. Not everyone came back, but he kept throwing. The question isn't whether to throw. It's knowing which ones to keep throwing and when to let go.

So subscribe, share your stories in the comments or in a direct message to me, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. (Transcribed by UniScribe (https://www.uniscribe.co).

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