Continuing the recent “X” Is The New “Y” theme, I liked this very rich write up from McKinsey on the culture of organizations and how cooperative behaviour (or lack thereof) impacts results. It documents some excellent data and research.

Organizations that give more than they take are the highest performing. In giver cultures, employees are:

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.

Most organizations fall somewhere in the middle. These are “matcher cultures,” where the norm is for employees to help those who help them, maintaining an equal balance of give and take. Although matcher cultures benefit from collaboration more than taker cultures do, they are inefficient vehicles for exchange, as employees trade favors in closed loops.

Yes, and closed loops are increasingly isolated as the social organization reconfigures around transparency and openness. Loops need to iterate too, reforming with new pulses of data, new inputs, new participants. The article shares mechanisms to pursue “Giving” as the new “Taking.” And Giving is social…

←This Much We Know.→