Generosity Burnout

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Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Greene Carmichael. A few years back, Wharton professor Adam Grant wrote an influential book called Give and Take, which showed how some of the most successful business leaders are givers—namely, people who look to help those around them. Givers turn out to be some of the most valuable employees in a company. Generosity—the willingness to share information, bring others along, make connections, and promote insights—is essential to collaboration and high-performing teams. The drive givers have to help others often propels them into senior leadership, But new research published on hbr.org shows there's a limit. Adam Grant and his fellow researcher Reb Rebbeli find out that being overly selfless and generous can actually have a high cost. Givers risk what the researchers call generosity burnout. Grant and Rebbeli say that givers need to put boundaries around their generosity, and those who don't do that wear themselves out. They end up harming themselves and even those they want to help. So today, you're going to hear from senior leaders who are givers at heart and who have suffered from generosity burnout. They've struggled with how to set limits, and they're going to share with us their best practices from what they've learned. Their story now from HBR senior editor Curt Nickisch.

Generosity burnout hit Brad Feld at a technology convention.

The first week of January 2013, I went to CES in Las Vegas.

Feld is an early-stage investor at Foundry Group, of a US venture capital firm.

And within, you know, 2 hours of being in Las Vegas, I was in my room in the hotel with the door locked and lights out and, you know, pillow over my head. Like, I just knew I was depressed and I knew I wasn't able to cope with what was going on.

That was the beginning of a 6-month depressive episode. Naturally, there's a lot wrapped up in that, but Feld thinks a big part of it was his nature as a giver.

Yeah, no question that my overall His way of behaving was a piece of that.

To understand how Feld burned out on generosity, you have to know he started out as an entrepreneur. In startups, maybe more than in other industries, there's a feeling that you win if everybody wins. Where the opportunity is growing, so does a culture where people help each other. And that served Feld well for a long time. He even came up with his own mantra, give first. When somebody wanted an introduction or some advice, he just said yes. And maybe down the road, some of those people he helped would help him. Either way, his first reaction was to be a giver. What he didn't realize is that what was so satisfying and energizing for so long was actually starting to hurt him. As he became more successful and experienced and networked, that meant the asks came thick and fast.

You know, standing at the end of a talk in front of you know, 250 people, my normal MO is to stand there and wait and answer questions until the last question is answered. If I give a lecture to a group of students, afterwards I hang out in the hallway until the last student has asked whatever question they want, you know, before I leave.

Giving started to become draining.

I would often find myself in a classic boom-bust scenario where I'd just be, you know, I'd be cranking along and then I'd just be completely out of gas.

One of those busts was that depressive episode. It hurt not only him, it kept him from helping other people too. Burning out on giving taught Bradfeld that he needed to set some limits.

You can have a very, very deep underlying philosophy around generosity, but even in the context of having that philosophy, you should understand your own boundaries as a human. If you don't know what your own natural limits are, Well, you know, like many, many natural forces, the generosity will expand to fill all available energy.

How to prevent generosity from expanding to fill all the available energy is one of the results in the new research from Adam Grant and Reb Rebbeli. Although it's good to share your time, energy, and smarts at work, the researchers find that the most effective givers set boundaries around their generosity. So how do you do that? 4 senior leaders are going to tell you.

I'm Sarah Robohagen, and I founded a movement to help young people get the most out of their own potential.

Robohagen is the former president of Gatorade and also of Equinox Holdings, the luxury fitness company. She since founded the company XtremeU. That accent, she's from New Zealand. She says her father was a well-connected businessman who never burned out on generosity.

You know, if my father was still alive and looked at me in the workplace today, I think he'd be like, "You people are crazy." What's different today, she says, is internet technology, instant communication, and vastly amplified professional networks.

That's why Rob O'Hagan says generosity burnout is something new, something that's about far more than simple time management.

Somewhere in the last 10 years, just because the floodgates have opened and everyone can ask for something doesn't mean that it's productive for you to respond.

O'Hagan eventually learned that lesson the hard way. Her introduction to giving as a virtuous cycle came early in her career. Mentors and company leaders were a big influence on her.

Probably one of the most pivotal examples for me in my career, so I was 3 years into my first job out of college and I was working for Air New Zealand, which is the national airline. I applied for a job to move to Los Angeles and for a number of reasons, I couldn't get a visa for the first 6 months. 6 months. And so that meant I can't get a driver's license and you can't get a bank account and you can't get all these things if you don't have a visa in the US. And this particular guy who was the GM of the region, he said, oh, no problem, you can just come and private board in my house until you get a visa. What an extraordinary act of giving, you know. And that was just one of so many examples of the way he gave and supported other people. He and his wife, their entire orientation was giving. And I think it has a very profound impact on me, made me so, so driven to help him achieve what he needed. That virtuous cycle continued.

Sarah Robohagen advanced through her career with a growing understanding that her drive to help others was actually one of the main reasons she was successful. She even calls herself a compulsive giver, and that has something to do with the generosity burnout she experienced. She remembers how she squeezed in a whirlwind trip to support a family member. When her plane was hopelessly delayed, she called her husband sobbing. She had pushed herself too far.

The misconception about giving is that it's unlimited and that it's always a good thing. It can have negative effects. You can only give to others if you are sort of fully energized. So it's like a bank. If you keep spending money without building up your balance, you're eventually going to run out, you know.

To head off generosity burnout, Rob O'Hagan has learned to gear up for the high-stress times in her life. For example, if she's preparing for a book launch, she'll reach out to her colleagues, friends, and family to let them know she'll largely be out of touch for the next few months. But she says setting limits to generosity doesn't just apply to top performers like her. It applies to everybody.

You're doing more for other people when you find the time to be selfish, whatever that means for you. Like, you need to take an hour undisturbed lying on the couch watching football or whatever that may be for you. You know, it's not being selfish. That's actually restocking your energy sources to be able to contribute to others in a more balanced way.

Another senior leader who's learned to be a self-protective giver is Heidi Roizen. I am definitely a giver. Roizen is an operating partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm DFJ.

I like to make good things happen for other people. It makes me feel good, and I believe it's good for my business as well.

Like Brad Feld, Roizen works in the world of high-growth startups where the asks for ideas, connections, and funding are constant and persistent.

I jokingly refer to it as being the universal donor, right? You can't always just give and give and give.

Each week, Roizen gets dozens of requests from people she doesn't know asking for meetings or advice. She can't say yes to all of them, but before she says no to anyone, she gives them some homework. She prompts them for specifics or refers them to other resources. That can weed out the lazy takers, she says, and highlight where the need truly lies, where she can have a bigger impact.

The important thing for students of giving is you have to decide what your comfort boundaries are.

When Roizen encounters persistent takers, she defends herself by behaving like a matcher. Which basically means she keeps score and expects reciprocity. And eventually, as much as she hates it, she does say no to other people. And it's not just to protect herself.

You know, I grew up in the tech industry, and so some of my friends are super famous, super wealthy people who people constantly want access to for all sorts of reasons. Bill Gates. Bill and I've been friends for a long time. Some person will see a documentary about Bill Gates. Bill Gates is the richest person in the world. They can't get to Bill Gates, but they can get to me, and they email me and they say, "I want you to introduce me to Bill Gates because I have a charity that he needs to donate money to." And I say no. And I say, "Bill and Melinda have set up the Gates Foundation, and its mission is on their website, and you should go through that route." And literally one time someone responded, again, a person I don't know, "Because you are not willing to forward this email to Bill Gates, children will die and that's on you." And sometimes you can stretch those. Sometimes you might say, "Well, I'm going to go out of my way because this is a particularly worthy person or worthy ask, or this is someone who doesn't have access to this by other means. I'm very careful about it, but I will make that introduction." And I think you learn sometimes because you overreach yourself and then you are told by that person, "I'm unwilling to do that and I'd like you not to ask me for that ever again." And you learn, right? And so you have to be judicious about those things. It isn't just that you're using up my capital, you're asking me to use up somebody else's capital as well.

Roizen has learned how to fend off rampant requests But some givers warn against being too protective. If you're overly defensive, they say, you pass up opportunities.

Where I really came to have this idea that, you know, giving was the right way to lead your life, it really came from my basketball coach, Pete Carril, at Princeton.

That's John Rogers Jr., the CEO of Ariel Investments. He grew up in Chicago as an only child and was used to getting all the attention. But on the college practice court, Coach Carroll showed Rodgers day after day how selfless play led to more victories.

The main thing he taught you right away is if somebody's open, you throw them the ball. It's as simple as that. You know, you don't hold the ball looking to do something for yourself, dribbling around, dribbling around, looking for a window of opportunity for yourself to score. No, you're looking to see who's open and always throwing the ball to the open man, good things happen. He used to always say, "If somebody's open, throw them the ball." Which is like obvious, but if you go to any health club gym, you'll see that very few people do that. And you'll watch a lot of NBA games and WNBA games, you'll see people just holding the ball, looking for something for themselves. And that is really a huge problem in the business world. And in life in general, there's just some scorekeeping that is totally an anathema to those of us who believe you can help because you enjoy helping and seeing others succeed.

Rogers developed his philosophy of giving from those years of playing basketball. He takes a teaming approach to helping others. First, he treats all the groups he works with as teams. That gives him some boundaries. Doing anything that does not benefit one of his teams probably is not the right way to spend his time and energy.

And when I've done it the wrong way and I've said yes to something, I've tried to learn how to have off-ramps pretty quickly when I realize I've made a mistake and to look for off-ramps when I realize I am spending time doing this and it just really doesn't quite connect to everything else.

But once he's joined a team, Rogers gives it everything he's got. Second, he believes that teammates who share values share the work. They're less likely to overextend themselves. They look to pass when they're too busy or too spent to move something forward on their own. Third, the teams he joins are often connected. They play in the same arena of philanthropy or political action, so they support one another. That way, each act of giving goes further. So Roger says when his core teams are clicking, it feels just as exhilarating and gratifying as it did for him on the basketball court in college.

And I can't get enough about how much it just— when you learn to play that way, it was such a freeing— the game was so much more fun when you were just thinking about how to help your teammates. You know, all these great things happened and the team would win and you would win together. It was just such a different feeling than when you were thinking about, well, did I score? How many points did I get at halftime? And, you know, how many rebounds do I have? I'm gonna take the ball from someone else so I can go off and score and be the hero. Once you learn to play the other way, it's just so, again, freeing and fun and makes it a joy.

So for Rogers, to avoid generosity burnout, it has less to do with protecting yourself from overgiving. He says it's really about finding ways to amplify your giving.

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Now, the risk of generosity burnout does not apply to only people at the top. Givers are found at all levels of a company. Their genuine inclination to help others progress and to freely share expertise—that leads to wins in today's collaborative, networked organizations. As a result, givers are often asked to join more teams and projects. And work is not the only place where givers are piled on. At home, it's common for family and friends to keep going back to the well of generosity. So that's why Mike Guffari spends a lot of time watching out for generosity burnout in his employees as well as himself.

I've definitely burned out on giving at times. There's times where I've stretched myself too thin.

Guffari is the CEO of Eat24. It's a Yelp subsidiary. He says he's learned to recognize the signs when he overdoes it as a giver.

I start doing like early morning phone calls. I tell people, hey, you can just try me at like 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning. Here's my cell phone number. And then maybe I can talk to you also on the way home from work. Pretty soon there's not even a minute free to like decompress. You're from the moment you wake up, you're kind of talking to people and people are grabbing bits of your time. And then if I'm in back-to-back meetings for a lot of the day and talking to folks on the way home, you could get very drained. So I've had to dial it back.

And being able to recognize his own physical and emotional signs has made him better at recognizing it in his employees.

Employees? It's paradoxical because one of the traits that makes a great employee in any venture, especially startups and tech companies and entrepreneurialism, is the ability to say no and focus. The very nature that made a lot of them good and made me want to hire these folks in the first place was actually they were great yes people. I think one of the biggest signals someone has gone overboard, it's when you start giving them new opportunities. And they say, well, I just have no time for this. And you say, well, why do you have no time for this? Well, my schedule is back to back to back. So that's the point when someone tells you they're breaking and they can't handle any more input, they've gotta figure out a system to start funneling and narrowing.

And so that, that's when Ghaffari will share with them how to set boundaries. One of his favorite techniques is to screen help requests. The goal, he says, is to find out what the true request is. All too often, People don't know exactly what they want or how you can help. Sometimes, he says, they even hide what they're really after. And that gets really confusing, right?

'Cause you might spend half an hour giving advice to somebody who doesn't really wanna hear it. All they wanna know is, are you in, are you out on a dollar basis? So trying to tease out some of this stuff upfront so it can be a good use of time for both people.

There's another technique Ghaffari likes to share. He acknowledges that email makes it easier to get inundated by requests for help, But he tells his team that email helps too.

You know, some of the best givers I know, what they'll do is they'll say something like, hey, I'm so swamped right now. We can circle back next quarter to see if things clear up a little bit. But are there any specific questions I can help you with by email? Because often 5 minutes of emailing, you know, might get that person their answer versus a half an hour, 1-hour call. And then you just recognize when people on the team have gotten to that place and help give them those tangible techniques.

These tangible techniques, the ones shared by Mike Gaffari and by Sarah Rabohagan, John Rogers Jr., and Heidi Roizen, they developed those over their careers. And now these techniques are getting recognized as good practices in the new research on beating generosity burnout. As Adam Grant and Reb Rebbeli have found in their research, managing your energy is critical and it's something you can control. It's something that Brad Feld of Foundry Group had to figure out on his own through very painful experiences. His depressive episode a few years ago forced him to reevaluate his motivations and his life philosophy.

I essentially recommitted to this notion of give first. I adjusted some of the ways that I thought about it, and most importantly, I recognized behaviors that I had that were making what was an underlying philosophy unsustainable over a long period of time. And so by making, you know, some of those changes, I was able to create, you know, sort of a next version of it that was way more effective. I couldn't have got to that point if I hadn't had the collapse or the crash or the exhaustion or whatever you want to talk about, right? Because I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have been motivated to then go do that work to understand how to approach it differently.

Fortunately, if you're a giver at heart, there's now more understanding of Generosity Burnout and How to Avoid It. It is normal if you feel exhausted by constant requests for help or collaboration. Even so, as a giver, you're responsible for yourself. You can learn to minimize the cost of helping others while still maximizing the impact of your giving. After all, giving is how givers thrive.

That story and those interviews were produced by HBR senior editor Curt Nickisch. Find out if you are at risk for generosity burnout and how you can sustain being a giver over your career at hbr.org/generosity. That's where you can find an article by Adam Grant and Reb Revoli about their research. There's also a webinar and a self-assessment. Again, that's hbr.org/generosity. I'm Sarah Greene Carmichael. Thanks so much for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. Cast.