Building a Helpful Community Starting from Ourselves


This world is one big community of human. In normal circumstances, humans are always having interaction, always making communication to each other and these activities are even more frequent for those involved in organizations or specific community. Organizations demand us to work with many people with various character which is possible that sometimes we meet someone with different nature to us. Sometimes, dealing with people with complex and variant trait can be tricky even for an expert activist. Some even try to control these traits in their favor which seems to have less chance to succeed, or even cause paranoia. Now go the question “it is the best way to handle such a crowd, to make them behave as our will?” I don’t know. But I do know we can handle ourselves while we’re in such a crowd.
People who are self-serving in all their interactions are “takers”. They are all about “what can you do for me”. The opposite is the “givers” who go around and say “what can I do for you?”. It is not easy to tell whether one is a taker or a giver, especially on first impression. But according to Adam Grant, there are three kinds of people with inner motive: giver, taker, and matchers. I have explained the ideas of the former two. Matchers is people who try to balance both, “I will do something for you if you do something for me”. Matching seems to be the safest way to live in an organization, but is it the most effective? Again, Adam Grant stated the answer of this question is very definitive, “Maybe”. He studied dozens of organizations with thousands of people to find which of these three are most effective way to live an organization. He studied engineers, medical students, even sales people revenue. Start with the least, it turned out that givers are the worst performers in each of those jobs. Engineers tend to literally runs out of time to do his own job because of doing other’s, those in medical student with least grade agrees strongly to the statement “I love helping others”, and in sales, the lowest revenue accrued to the most generous sales people who wouldn’t sell customers one oh their terrible products. So, who is the best performers? The good news is, it’s not the takers. Takers falls in the hand of matchers. So, is it the matchers? It’s not. Adam Grant’s research shows that givers achieve the best result again in every company and organization he studied. Givers are overrepresented at the bottom and the top of every trackable success metric. This supports the wording often used in my organization, “give to get”.
I always believe that success is more about contribution than achievement. How we give value to our community. I believe, even the smallest contribution done by every member of a community can change the stereotype meaning of success. In my organization, I was given trust to lead one of the departments. The Development and Regeneration Department. It is basically the HRD of other organization. Always try to be positive, encourage others, and spread that aura to others is necessary as a member of this department. We have these “little favor” to do every time we are in a work project. For example, I encourage them to share their knowledge, or giving small feedback. We agreed to always try to introduce two people from different department or division, which may not know each other yet, who may benefit from each other. My subordinates also agree to regularly try to find if somebody’s work has gone unnoticed, they encourage them, and try to implicitly let other know. By doing those, it won’t give us any reward or achievement. That is why, the sincerest of heart have to be rooted in each of us. To not expect anything in return, to truly help others and build a helpful, help-seeking atmosphere. Try to counter paranoia with the idea of pronoia. Pronoia is believing there is a conspiracy for someone’s well-being, and it seems like a good environment to build.
As Steve Jobs once said, people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. Changing the world are big words to come out from such a small being. The world believe success is achieving, accomplishment, winning a competition. But I want to live in the world where givers are ones who excels. A world where success is more about contribution and those who gives are not forfeit. And that sounds like hell of a job that needs a lot of help. And I hope, starting from ourselves, we can build that world.

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