IDEO’s Culture of Helping
by Teresa Amabile, Colin M. Fisher, and JuliannaPillemer
Few things leaders can do are more important than encouraging helping behavior within their organizations. In the top-performing companies it is a norm that colleagues support one another’s efforts to do the best work possible. That has always been true for pragmatic reasons: If companies were to operate at peak efficiency without what organizational scholars call “citizenship behavior,” tasks would have to be optimally assigned 100% of the time, projects could not take any unexpected turns, and no part of any project could go faster or slower than anticipated. But mutual helping is even more vital in an era of knowledge work, when positive business outcomes depend on creativity in often very complex projects. Beyond simple workload sharing, collaborative help comes to the fore—lending perspective, experience, and expertise that improve the quality and execution of ideas.
Helpfulness must be actively nurtured in organizations, however, because it does not arise automatically among colleagues. Individuals in social groups experience conflicting impulses: As potential helpers, they may also be inclined to compete. As potential help seekers, they may also take pride in going it alone, or be distrustful of those whose assistance they could use. On both sides, help requires a commitment of time for uncertain returns and can seem like more trouble than it’s worth. Through their structures and incentives, organizations may, however unwittingly, compound the reluctance to provide or seek help.
The trickiness of this management challenge—to increase a discretionary behavior that must be inspired, not forced—makes what the design firm IDEO has achieved all the more impressive. Ask people there about the organizational culture, and invariably they mention collaborative help. Observe how things get done, and you see it at every turn. Actually map the networks of help, as we did, and it becomes obvious how broad and dense they are. Clearly the firm is high performing; it is lauded all over the world for innovations in business, government, and health care, and regularly called upon to advise other firms that want to increase their innovation capabilities. All this help seeking and help giving apparently pays off.
The question for the rest of us is, How has IDEO managed to make helping the norm? Are there principles that leaders of other organizations could learn and apply to similar effect? We spent two years making observations, interviewing people, and conducting surveys to find out.
IDEO may seem like a very different kind of company from yours, but it is probably less so than you think. Your organization, too, is full of knowledge workers tackling complex problems. It, too, needs to boost its productive creativity. It could produce better outcomes for customers and provide a more attractive working environment for top talent if your employees, like IDEO’s, engaged in effective mutual help. Let’s look at the four keys to achieving those goals—beginning with a challenge to the people at the very top of the organization. Judging by IDEO’s experience, that is where building a help-friendly company begins.
Leadership Conviction
Not every large company’s leader would, if asked about organizational priorities, bring up the topic of encouraging collaborative help in the ranks. But IDEO’s leadership is explicitly focused on it. For Tim Brown, the CEO, that’s not only because the problems IDEO is asked to solve require extreme creativity; it’s also because they have become more complicated. Brown says, “I believe that the more complex the problem, the more help you need. And that’s the kind of stuff we’re getting asked to tackle, so we need to figure out how to have a culture where help is much, much more embedded.” Essentially, this is a conviction that many minds make bright work.
Leaders at IDEO prove their conviction by giving and seeking help themselves. For example, we observed a particularly successful event (in terms of new ideas generated) when a C-suite-level helper joined a team for an hour-long brainstorming session. The team’s project hadn’t even formally kicked off yet, so it was not a situation in which help was desperately needed. Nor was this leader the only one qualified to provide it. His arrival in the room signaled strongly that helping is an expected behavior in the culture and that everyone is part of the helping network.
Our mapping of that network in one IDEO office clearly captures leaders’ personal involvement. (See the exhibit “Mapping Help at IDEO.”) In the diagram each person is represented by a circle; the larger the circle, the more times that person was named by someone else as a helper. Notice that the most popular helpers are spread across all levels of the organization. Contrary to common wisdom and even to much of the scholarly literature on helping in organizations, status is no barrier to being asked for help at IDEO. Low-level people are willing to approach those at the top—who, conversely, are not afraid to make themselves vulnerable by asking for help from people several levels down.
The Two Sides of the Helping Coin
It would be easy to assume that to promote helping in your organization, you should focus on increasing your experts’ willingness to offer assistance. Consider the story Jon Gertner shares in The Idea Factory, his history of AT&T’s Bell Labs. At one point AT&T’s patent department wanted to figure out why certain individuals in that famously inventive group were more successful than others at hatching novel ideas. They discerned just “one common thread,” Gertner wrote. “Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist.” Nyquist was particularly skilled, it turned out, at asking good questions.
At first glance Nyquist seems to be the helping hero of that organization. But many of those lunches probably occurred because he was invited by someone who was working on a complex problem and needed a sounding board. There are two sides to every helping encounter, and both must be encouraged and supported.
People in many organizations might well hesitate to extend such an invitation. Because most cultures have norms of reciprocity, getting help from others can put you in their debt. Even if you are unfazed by the prospect of a future request, you might worry about seeming weak or incompetent if you ask for assistance, especially from someone of higher status. IDEO makes a conscious effort to sweep that hesitation away. From the beginning of every project, designers are encouraged to assume that they’ll need help. A project team with a demanding client learns that it would be irresponsible not to ask a colleague who had a lot of experience with that client to review its work. The team members might ask for that colleague’s input throughout the project, in sessions lasting anywhere from 15 minutes to half a day. At IDEO there is no shame in asking for help, and this psychological safety shows up on many levels: For example, people cheerfully accept frequent all-office e-mail blasts along the lines of “Does anyone have experience with Spanish-language radio?” or “Who’s tried the new quick-loss diet?”
In most cases, however, asking everyone in the organization for help isn’t particularly effective. The help seeker must figure out whom to approach. You might assume that the best helpers in your organization would be the people with the greatest expertise, but that assumption turns out to be flawed. Expertise is of course valuable, but our study of the IDEO helping network shows that it matters less than you might think. Look again at the helping map. The horizontal axis indicates people’s status as experts. (We computed expertise scores by using a separate survey in which several key people in the office listed the primary experts in each of the many disciplines and functions represented there.) On the basis of previous research, we expected that expertise in a field would strongly predict popularity as a helper. But we were wrong. Many popular helpers had two other attributes going for them.
In our survey of the entire office population, people were asked to click on the names of all those who helped them in their work and to rank their top five helpers from first to fifth. (See the exhibit “What Makes an IDEO Colleague Most Helpful?”) Then they were asked to rate their number one helper, their number five helper, and a randomly suggested “nonhelper” (someone whose name they hadn’t selected) on several items. Those items assessed three characteristics: competence (how well the person did his or her job); trust (how comfortable the respondent was sharing thoughts and feelings with the person); and accessibility (how easily the respondent could obtain help from the person).
Here was the surprise: Trust and accessibility mattered much more than competence. That doesn’t mean competence is irrelevant: People did rate their number one and number five helpers as more competent than their nonhelpers. (And IDEO has experts in a wide array of domains, so it’s pretty much guaranteed that the competence to solve any problem exists somewhere within the firm.) But the number one and number five helpers received fairly close scores for competence, whereas people trusted their top-ranked helpers more than they did their fifth-ranked helpers, and they trusted both much more than their nonhelpers. The results for accessibility were similar.
The finding that you have to be trustworthy to get to the top of someone’s helper list at IDEO is consistent with work by Amy Edmondson, of Harvard Business School, and her colleagues. They find that groups work much more effectively when members feel safe discussing mistakes and problems with one another. (See “Speeding Up Team Learning,” HBR October
IDEO’s Culture of Helping
by Teresa Amabile, Colin M. Fisher, and JuliannaPillemer
Few things leaders can do are more important than encouraging helping behavior within their organizations. In the top-performing companies it is a norm that colleagues support one another’s efforts to do the best work possible. That has always been true for pragmatic reasons: If companies were to operate at peak efficiency without what organizational scholars call “citizenship behavior,” tasks would have to be optimally assigned 100% of the time, projects could not take any unexpected turns, and no part of any project could go faster or slower than anticipated. But mutual helping is even more vital in an era of knowledge work, when positive business outcomes depend on creativity in often very complex projects. Beyond simple workload sharing, collaborative help comes to the fore—lending perspective, experience, and expertise that improve the quality and execution of ideas.
Helpfulness must be actively nurtured in organizations, however, because it does not arise automatically among colleagues. Individuals in social groups experience conflicting impulses: As potential helpers, they may also be inclined to compete. As potential help seekers, they may also take pride in going it alone, or be distrustful of those whose assistance they could use. On both sides, help requires a commitment of time for uncertain returns and can seem like more trouble than it’s worth. Through their structures and incentives, organizations may, however unwittingly, compound the reluctance to provide or seek help.
The trickiness of this management challenge—to increase a discretionary behavior that must be inspired, not forced—makes what the design firm IDEO has achieved all the more impressive. Ask people there about the organizational culture, and invariably they mention collaborative help. Observe how things get done, and you see it at every turn. Actually map the networks of help, as we did, and it becomes obvious how broad and dense they are. Clearly the firm is high performing; it is lauded all over the world for innovations in business, government, and health care, and regularly called upon to advise other firms that want to increase their innovation capabilities. All this help seeking and help giving apparently pays off.
The question for the rest of us is, How has IDEO managed to make helping the norm? Are there principles that leaders of other organizations could learn and apply to similar effect? We spent two years making observations, interviewing people, and conducting surveys to find out.
IDEO may seem like a very different kind of company from yours, but it is probably less so than you think. Your organization, too, is full of knowledge workers tackling complex problems. It, too, needs to boost its productive creativity. It could produce better outcomes for customers and provide a more attractive working environment for top talent if your employees, like IDEO’s, engaged in effective mutual help. Let’s look at the four keys to achieving those goals—beginning with a challenge to the people at the very top of the organization. Judging by IDEO’s experience, that is where building a help-friendly company begins.
Leadership Conviction
Not every large company’s leader would, if asked about organizational priorities, bring up the topic of encouraging collaborative help in the ranks. But IDEO’s leadership is explicitly focused on it. For Tim Brown, the CEO, that’s not only because the problems IDEO is asked to solve require extreme creativity; it’s also because they have become more complicated. Brown says, “I believe that the more complex the problem, the more help you need. And that’s the kind of stuff we’re getting asked to tackle, so we need to figure out how to have a culture where help is much, much more embedded.” Essentially, this is a conviction that many minds make bright work.
Leaders at IDEO prove their conviction by giving and seeking help themselves. For example, we observed a particularly successful event (in terms of new ideas generated) when a C-suite-level helper joined a team for an hour-long brainstorming session. The team’s project hadn’t even formally kicked off yet, so it was not a situation in which help was desperately needed. Nor was this leader the only one qualified to provide it. His arrival in the room signaled strongly that helping is an expected behavior in the culture and that everyone is part of the helping network.
Our mapping of that network in one IDEO office clearly captures leaders’ personal involvement. (See the exhibit “Mapping Help at IDEO.”) In the diagram each person is represented by a circle; the larger the circle, the more times that person was named by someone else as a helper. Notice that the most popular helpers are spread across all levels of the organization. Contrary to common wisdom and even to much of the scholarly literature on helping in organizations, status is no barrier to being asked for help at IDEO. Low-level people are willing to approach those at the top—who, conversely, are not afraid to make themselves vulnerable by asking for help from people several levels down.
The Two Sides of the Helping Coin
It would be easy to assume that to promote helping in your organization, you should focus on increasing your experts’ willingness to offer assistance. Consider the story Jon Gertner shares in The Idea Factory, his history of AT&T’s Bell Labs. At one point AT&T’s patent department wanted to figure out why certain individuals in that famously inventive group were more successful than others at hatching novel ideas. They discerned just “one common thread,” Gertner wrote. “Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist.” Nyquist was particularly skilled, it turned out, at asking good questions.
At first glance Nyquist seems to be the helping hero of that organization. But many of those lunches probably occurred because he was invited by someone who was working on a complex problem and needed a sounding board. There are two sides to every helping encounter, and both must be encouraged and supported.
People in many organizations might well hesitate to extend such an invitation. Because most cultures have norms of reciprocity, getting help from others can put you in their debt. Even if you are unfazed by the prospect of a future request, you might worry about seeming weak or incompetent if you ask for assistance, especially from someone of higher status. IDEO makes a conscious effort to sweep that hesitation away. From the beginning of every project, designers are encouraged to assume that they’ll need help. A project team with a demanding client learns that it would be irresponsible not to ask a colleague who had a lot of experience with that client to review its work. The team members might ask for that colleague’s input throughout the project, in sessions lasting anywhere from 15 minutes to half a day. At IDEO there is no shame in asking for help, and this psychological safety shows up on many levels: For example, people cheerfully accept frequent all-office e-mail blasts along the lines of “Does anyone have experience with Spanish-language radio?” or “Who’s tried the new quick-loss diet?”
In most cases, however, asking everyone in the organization for help isn’t particularly effective. The help seeker must figure out whom to approach. You might assume that the best helpers in your organization would be the people with the greatest expertise, but that assumption turns out to be flawed. Expertise is of course valuable, but our study of the IDEO helping network shows that it matters less than you might think. Look again at the helping map. The horizontal axis indicates people’s status as experts. (We computed expertise scores by using a separate survey in which several key people in the office listed the primary experts in each of the many disciplines and functions represented there.) On the basis of previous research, we expected that expertise in a field would strongly predict popularity as a helper. But we were wrong. Many popular helpers had two other attributes going for them.
In our survey of the entire office population, people were asked to click on the names of all those who helped them in their work and to rank their top five helpers from first to fifth. (See the exhibit “What Makes an IDEO Colleague Most Helpful?”) Then they were asked to rate their number one helper, their number five helper, and a randomly suggested “nonhelper” (someone whose name they hadn’t selected) on several items. Those items assessed three characteristics: competence (how well the person did his or her job); trust (how comfortable the respondent was sharing thoughts and feelings with the person); and accessibility (how easily the respondent could obtain help from the person).
Here was the surprise: Trust and accessibility mattered much more than competence. That doesn’t mean competence is irrelevant: People did rate their number one and number five helpers as more competent than their nonhelpers. (And IDEO has experts in a wide array of domains, so it’s pretty much guaranteed that the competence to solve any problem exists somewhere within the firm.) But the number one and number five helpers received fairly close scores for competence, whereas people trusted their top-ranked helpers more than they did their fifth-ranked helpers, and they trusted both much more than their nonhelpers. The results for accessibility were similar.
The finding that you have to be trustworthy to get to the top of someone’s helper list at IDEO is consistent with work by Amy Edmondson, of Harvard Business School, and her colleagues. They find that groups work much more effectively when members feel safe discussing mistakes and problems with one another. (See “Speeding Up Team Learning,” HBR October
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