Sustaining any sort of effort for the long term is difficult. Think about New Year’s resolutions for a moment. About 80% of everyone’s New Year’s resolutions fail in the second month. That is a huge probability of failure! There is an exciting, energized January, but in February effort just dies off. Why does our motivation and emotional energy just seem to fade away? We think it is because deep down within that person, the spark was never there to begin with. There may have been an artificial “convincing oneself” moment in December that some New Year’s effort was important, and the thought of “I should really care about it” came across the brain. However, those half-baked grey matter moments did not pull the heart strings hard enough. Given these challenges, what ignites people? This article cover how helping others is the cornerstone for growing and sustaining culture!
Did you catch that term ignite? Ignite is a strong word, and has the synonyms “kindle”, “fire”, “explode”, “burn”, and “stir”. Ignite is to start action by generating emotion. Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code, discusses the term “ignition” and states that it is about a set of, “signals and subconscious forces that create our identity”. He also says that, “ignition burns out of our awareness, largely within our unconscious mind”. Igniting someone (or oneself) is about envisioning ideal future self. How? Small, powerful, cues along the way. How does this tie back to culture? As Coyle puts it, we need to ignite the “small, powerful idea”… in case that idea is helping others.
Helping others is probably the most important cornerstones of successful, sustainable cultures and it transfers into every aspect of it. Here is why helping others is so powerful and transferring:
- Leads to more diverse perspectives.
- Empathy increases
- Opportunities for inclusion increases
- Servant leadership philosophy grows
- Increased innovation opportunities
- Respectful communication increases
- Perspective taking increases
- Relationships and bonding become stronger
- People growth and development increases
Powerful stuff, right? It is very compelling how transferring helping others is to many of the sub-aspects of culture. There are two questions though we still need to answer. One, how to ignite the small, powerful idea, about helping others in ourselves and our peers? Two, how to sustain that feeling over a period of time?
Let’s go through the first question. A lot about helping others stems from those powerful cues of a child growing up seeing helping actions of family and friends up close. Parents are huge role models for children, and the ones who “walk the walk” with helping people, may well ignite that powerful cue in the child for the future as an adult. Therefore, given the good probability of adults carrying on what they experienced and witnessed as children, seek to build out teams and groups of people who have stories of helping people. In a business organization’s hiring process, consider structuring opened ended interview questions that can unearth their philosophies and experiences regarding teamwork, helping people, people growth & development and empathy.
The previous is about seeking out people who had powerful cues as part of their natural environment. What about igniting the small, powerful idea regarding helping others with people who have had mixed upbringings and not necessarily ones that were about helping others? Certainly, this is more of a challenge to “teach an old dog new tricks”, but learning and personal development is continuous.
Consider this idea. Coyle discusses the topic of primal cues that drive motivation. The primal cues are: fear of loss, fear of not belonging, future belonging. Take the cue of “future belonging”. Have you ever had a time where you were inspired by a high-achieving group of people? Did you ever want to belong to that group? That is a power cue which sparks motivation. With that concept in mind, consider branding “helping others” as a high-achieving task conducted by a high-achieving group of people. Make people want to be a part of doing that. How? Here are a few suggestions:
- Recognize efforts of helping others and communicate that within
- Celebrate helping people victories
- Write and/or helping people articles
- Tell helping people stories
Knowing that helping others is a cornerstone and foundation to all aspects of culture, a real effort should be considered to ignite it.
With respect to the second question is how to sustain this ignition for a long period of time. In our article, Ramp Up to Peak Performance and Sustain the Baseline, it is impossible to maintain peak performance over the long term and ramping up to peak is a deliberate effort that involves timing and strategy. Therefore, a team, group, department, organization, or community can make the intentional effort to ramp up “helping others” for a purpose or cause. Then that group can ride those good feelings and sustain the “helping others” baseline until there is sense (or reason) to peak again. Everyone operating to a baseline hopefully elevates those who do not have “helping others” naturally within them.
It should be generously communicated within that “We are all here to help each other succeed. When we do that, you will succeed personally.” In other words, this means two things. One, act a little more selfless. Two, sometimes it is not about the task one is doing that brings about the ignition, it is the enjoyment and passion for helping others during the process, therefore helping yourself.
To sum this article up, hopefully you recognize and appreciate that sustainable efforts are hard to accomplish. It takes work amongst a lot of people over a period of time. Hopefully helping others becomes a part of who people are. Also, that “helping others” has so much spillover to culture, and it is worth the effort of everyone to embody it!