When Helping You is Hurting Me: How to Encourage Healthy Teamwork

In case you missed the news, Intertech was named a “Best Place to Work” by the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal. While this marks our ninth time on the list, I’m still as delighted as the first time we received the honor in 2004.

Unlike the many awards we’ve received for growth during the past 20 years – which also are greatly appreciated – the Best Places awards are extra special because they are based on the candid (and confidential) responses of our employees. While I never take the outcome for granted, our company has many practices in place to ensure that employees feel valued and have opportunities to do great work for great clients.

Intertech’s ACE program—recognizing our core values of Attitude, Commitment, and Excellence—has institutionalized the importance of noticing the contributions of colleagues and making sure those contributions are called out and appreciated. A recurring theme in our employee recognition program, which is based on employees nominating each other for ACE awards, is the importance of teamwork. Intertech consultants frequently go the extra mile to help each other meet a deadline or handle a particularly challenging assignment.

Helping each other is a cornerstone of Intertech’s culture. So I was particularly interested in a recent article in Harvard Business Review, “In the Company of Givers and Takers” by Adam Grant, which looks at the decisions employees make every day about whether to contribute to others—and their willingness to help other employees, which is “crucial to group and organizational effectiveness.”

Grant, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the author of Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, has given a lot of thought to workplace generosity. He writes:

“In a competitive, often zero-sum, world, generosity can be a dangerous path. How can leaders foster it without cutting into productivity, undermining fairness and allowing employees to become doormats?”

His article shares some surprising answers to this question, which are based on a review of 38 studies of organizational behavior representing more than 3,500 businesses in a wide variety of industries. In my next three posts, I will pass along some insights highlighted in this intriguing article, as well as how Intertech encourages employees to help – without harming – each other.

Would Your Employees Recommend You?

The latest issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review had an interesting article “Would Your Employees Recommend You?” by Julian Birkinshaw. Mr. Birkinshaw is a professor at London Business School and the author of Becoming a Better Boss: Why Good Management Is So Difficult.

In his research, he and his team, developed a Net Management Promoter Score (NMPS). The NMPS (think of it as an internal Net Promoter Score) was based on the question:

“How likely is it that you would recommend your line manager to a colleague, as someone they should work for in the future?” (1 = not at all, 10 = extremely likely.)

The article states “…the NMPS is a good indicator of the level of employee engagement in a company… the correlation between employee responses about their level of engagement at work and the likelihood that they’d recommend their manager to a colleague is approximately 0.75.” A correlation of .75 is very high. In short, if you’re likely to recommend your boss, you’re very likely to be engaged at work.

High engagement indicates how likely someone will put discretionary effort into a job. While there are other factors in engagement–quality of work, physical working environment, etc.–the NMPS suggests no matter how great a workplace, it may mean nothing if the employee dislikes his or her immediate manager.