Balancing Generosity and Boundaries: Lessons from Reb Rebele (Part Two) [Part 2]

Collaboration and generosity are essential for meaningful work, but what happens when they become too much of a good thing? Could saying yes too often be holding you back? This is Andrew Soren and In this second part of A Meaningful Work Matters two parter with personality psychology expert Reb Rebelli, we explore the hidden costs of collaboration and generosity.

Reb shares why organizations face collaborative overload, how helpful employees often burn out first, and what individuals can do to reclaim their time and energy. We also discuss practical strategies for balancing helping others with protecting your own wellbeing, like setting boundaries and reassessing team norms. If you've ever felt overextended at work or struggled to manage the demands of collaboration, this episode is

for you. Oh, and if you missed part one of this two parter on personality dynamics, be sure to go back and hear reb's insights on how you can align your personality with what matters most. Oh, and before we dive in, I have some exciting news. We're piloting a POD club. Think about it as a book club, but for our podcast community. Our first session is coming up on Wednesday, February 26th and I'd love to see you there. Head to EUBD CA podclub to learn more.

Welcome to the Meaningful Work Matters podcast. I'm your host Andrew Soren, founder of eudaimonic By Design. On this podcast we'll dive into the world of meaningful work, explore its complexities, and examine its impact on people and the organizations they're a part of. Each episode features insightful conversations with cutting edge experts who are successfully navigating the challenges of meaningful work.

We hope to offer you ideas, frameworks and tools to unlock potential and design work that's fulfilling, impactful, and supports everyone's well being. Subscribe or follow us now and let's make Meaningful Work matter. Welcome back to Meaningful Work Matters. We are here with Reb Rebel. This is part two of of a two parter episode with reb. If you missed last week, you should

go listen. We spent the better part of an hour talking about personality dynamics and the multitudes that are contained within us and how we try to figure out how to get to know them, how we use them, how we can understand ourselves in moments when there are great demands that are placed upon us and we are striving to be able to do meaningful work and we need to understand how do we

resource ourselves? How do we fill up our batteries? What are the things that we need to know about ourselves to create the context where we can kind of bring the best of ourselves to do meaningful and important personal projects, to use the language of Brian Little. This week. This week we are switching to two other big topics that we're going to try to squeeze into a single episode. One is around collaboration and the other is around generosity.

And so I am excited to dive into both of those topics and the complexities, the perhaps too much of a good thingness of both of those things in the context especially of meaningful work. Reb, is there anything that you want to say before we jump right in? No. Let's do it. Okay. Let's start with collaboration. So one place that I certainly find a lot of meaning in the work that I do is the capacity

to collaborate with other people. It is a hard thing. It's possibly the hardest thing in my work as, as basically a solopreneur to have to not collaborate with other people. And I crave it. I crave it so much that even when I started my company, Eudaimonic by Design, I started by bringing like 30 people together in an old historic house outside of Philadelphia where we can just brainstorm it together. I couldn't do it alone.

Collaboration is an incredibly important thing for people and their capacity to find meaning at work. And yet you seem to find that people can collaborate too much. Tell us more. Yeah. So let me ask you, Andrew, So solopreneur, but I want to ask you about your typical work week. So in a. And, and I know probably for you no week is typical.

Right. But if you just think of a fairly banal week that you picked at random that wasn't atypical in some strong way, how much of that week do you say, would you say, work wise, you spend in meetings A lot. Um, so like, if I would say, and it depends on what the meeting is. But like, and I mean, I work, I work in Halifax. Almost nobody that I work with is in Halifax. So. So generally I'm on zoom with people and I'm on zoom, like on a day, on a good day,

on a day that I actually like, I'm on zoom. Probably, you know, four to six hours a day. Okay, so more than half your workday. Yeah. And then what additional time are you spending responding to emails or messages from colleagues? Every other minute of the day. Yeah. And how much time are you spending on independent work where you're just actually working on something yourself? On self. Direct, directed tasks? Not, not all that much. I mean,

it, it depends on the day. But on probably on average, if I get an hour of time to actually focus on independent things, it has nothing to do with Anybody else, like it's not responding to an email or in some way thinking person. And I'm just doing self focused, deep work, maybe an hour a day. Okay, how's that all working for you? When you ask me that question, it makes me think about the fact that it is almost 9pm at night and I'm still working. So, you know. Yeah,

you're also accommodating my time zone in Australia. But that is not an unusual day though for me. I would say from the moment that I get up to the moment I go to sleep, work is usually accompanying me. Yeah, so look, this isn't a psychoanalysis session. I think the, the thing is your experience is very

typical. Right. So I've asked lots of different audiences to go through that exercise and people at home obviously can do the same thing to just go through, make a list of what percent of your work time is spent on first meetings, then on replying to various kinds of messages or calls. Add those two numbers together and that's the percentage of your work time you're spending on collaborative activity versus what percentage of your time are you spending on independent activity?

So my colleague Rob Cross at Babson College, he's done a lot of research on this topic and one of the things that he's really found is that even before the pandemic pushed everybody onto zoom, right, Time spent at work in collaborative activities had ballooned by 50%

or more. Um, so in terms of just thinking about a resource consumption perspective, the amount of time we spend on collaborative activity at work versus independent activity, collaborative activity, just eating the workday and unfortunately sending everybody home during the pandemic did not exacer, like did not mitigate that trend.

In fact, in some ways it exacerbated it. So some data from Microsoft suggested that increased remote work led to slightly shorter meetings on average, but greater frequency of meetings. And they also saw a trend that they called the rise of the triple peak workday. Where having.

These days where we're working from home traditionally we used to see spikes in collaborative activity in sort of two peaks of the day, sort of like a morning peak of collaborative activity and then an afternoon peak of activity. But now what we're seeing for many people is the rise of a third peak after dinner. So it's okay, I have got my morning peak of meetings and responding to people, then I get a brief lunch break,

right? And then I come back and have my afternoon peak and then, and then I break and maybe I'm lucky. My job offers me flexibility to like go Pick up my kids from school or, you know, go do something of interest to me or exercise or whatever in the late afternoon, early evening. But then I'm logging back on, whether that's to account for the fact that my team is now distributed around the

globe. And there's some people who are only on, you know, online late at night, or what's often the case is like, oh, I'm logging back on because I have to get through all the stuff that I couldn't get to while I was in all those meetings, the only. Time I can get work done. So we see this general strong empirical trend, right? People are spending more time in collaborative activity.

And then what are the consequences of that, right? So in any business, normally, as a leader, if you see one of your key resources being consumed at a much higher rate, you would scrutinize that quite closely. But many organizations are not necessarily doing that when it comes to sort of people resources. And so we've seen this resource consumption challenge being matched

by sort of overload challenges by employees. And many employees report just subjectively feeling like too many meetings is one of the biggest barriers to their productivity or their barriers to achieving their goals at work, feeling quite depleted as a result of it. Many people are familiar with the term zoom fatigue, right? So being on remote meetings in particular at times can be quite draining and challenging. And what Rob in particular has found in some of his research is that

some employees are particularly susceptible to this. So Rob does a lot of network analysis. So he asks employees to answer short surveys about all of their colleagues, right? And then you can understand how different people in the organization are interacting with one another. And so two of the things that he asks people are to rate your colleagues on how effective of a source of information is this person, right? Is this person a source of good information, useful information for your job?

And then the second dimension is how much access do you want of this person? Do you want more of their time, less of their time? About the same amount of their time. So in general, what we find, unsurprisingly, is that people who are seen to be good sources of information are in demand, right? People want

access to them. So on average, if your colleagues see you as somebody who knows what they're doing, knows what they're talking about, has information about how the organization works, you start to get a reputation as that's somebody who's good to talk to. I should talk to Reb Rev. Yeah, yeah. So. So what ends up happening, right, is you start to get more meeting requests and you start to get more emails and messages that come to you. So all of your good deeds are going punished.

Right. And I'm thinking of so many volunteer commitments right now that I have overextended myself for that very reason. Yes, yes. Okay. So odds are right, if you get that reputation, people start to come to you. However, not everybody who has a reputation for knowing what they're doing is in demand. There are some people who have the reputation of this is a good effective source of information, but people don't generally want more access to them. Why is

that? Well, it could be because they're jerks, right? So like they're really good at what they do, but I just don't like them interpersonally and so I'm going to avoid them. It could be that they're so they've sent out so many signals that they're too busy. Right. And don't have the time. And so it feels like a lost cause to try to reach them, those kinds of things. There might be a range of other factors. Now we want to focus on these two groups of people or both represent. They both have

reputations for being good sources of information. Some of them are in demand, some of them are kind of ignored. These two groups of people have very different experiences of their work. The people who have reputations of being good, but they're kind of ignored, they're generally very engaged in their jobs, very happy, and they're happy to stay at that company. The people who reputations are being really good and they're in demand, those people engage.

It becomes one of the strongest predictors of attrition. Right. Rob has in his data. So you become known as the really helpful, smart, good information source person. It sets the seeds for your potential demise in that organization because you're one of the best collaborators in the company. Right. This should be a blaring red flag for any leader who's thinking about, well, the people who have reputations for being helpful and desirable colleagues and really good

at what they do. Those are the people we should most want to keep around. But they're often the people who are most overloaded. And then they end up leaving the organization for maybe greener pasture somewhere else. We'll see. But I think that's sort of the rub is collaboration is highly valued. So many organizations have it as one of their core values. It's something that they actively try to promote. In general, as organizations get larger, there are a variety

of forces that pull people in the direction of more collaboration. There are more people you need to get input from that. So there's both explicit, intentional pulls toward being more collaborative. There's also implicit kind of structural forces that pull people in

the direction of being more collaborative. But this starts to become really problematic for that particular group of employees who are really capable, really good colleagues, but then get so overloaded with requests and demands on their time. And managers do this inadvertently, right? So they develop trust for a particular person, your team, because they know I can count on Andrew, right? Because Andrew is good at what he does, and he is always willing to help,

right? He's always willing to put in that extra effort, and so I can count on him. So rather than throw it over to somebody else on the team who may also be good, but I don't necessarily have the same high degree of confidence that they'll be willing to help me out, or they might put up a bit more of a fight about it or something like that. I'll just default to the

easier path of giving it to Andrew. And poor Andrew, right, Is then suffering because Andrew has no time left in his day to think or breathe or do other things that are valuable for the organization. And so what we call collaborative overload is this phenomenon where organizations inadvertently burden their people with too many meetings, too many collaborative requests, and, uh, nobody's necessarily getting done some of the stuff

that they really need to. And it's all in service of this, like, getting together. And there are good things. Like, we can't just write off collaboration and say, let's just stop collaborating because it's productive, it's meaningful, right? It's a source of great connection with people. One of the things I love to ask my MBA students is I put up a poll at the start of class about how do you feel about small talk before and after a meeting? Do you find it energizing or depleting?

And I love this question because I always get a roughly 50, 50 split in the class where there are people who say they love small talk before meetings, right? And then other people who are, like, they find it so draining. And we have this. We then have this debate, right, about, like, why they feel the way that they do. And it's these competing tensions where on one hand, people want to be productive and efficient. On the other hand, they want to enjoy their experience, connect, be human,

get. To know each other. Yeah, yeah. And some of the people who love small talk before meetings, right? Who love. Have. Who, A, love meetings, right? And then B, love the small talk. They. They love it because they find that it actually both Helps them enjoy the experience. They find it meaningful, but also they find it useful. Right? They actually, in those moments, learn things or establish rapport that helps the meeting then run more efficiently. The other people

don't like it so much. They find that the experience is not very meaningful and gets in the way of efficiency and productivity. These are all good values. And so people need to figure out how to manage this. But the argument we make in our collaborative overload piece is that this is an organization wide problem. It's also a collective action problem because very often the fires coming from inside the building, so to speak, the is all the meeting requests are often coming from our colleagues

within the organization. So we all share the same belief that there are too many meetings, too many emails, but we're the ones scheduling the meetings and scheduling the emails. And so we just leave it up to ourselves. We'll make all these individual decisions about do I need a meeting about this, do I need to send an email about that? And it'll all just keep adding

up. Instead, we argue that the better solution is to think more systemically and strategically across the organization about how do we manage collaboration as a process. What does that look like? Well, in an extreme version, it means appointing a chief collaboration officer, right? I don't know of a company that's actually appointed somebody with that title. But if you think about it, it's one of your most important processes within the organization.

So do you have anybody within the organization who is tasked with thinking about the processes by which we collaborate? That includes things like what are the software tools that we're using? Some data Rob's collected more recently has shown that many people are struggling. So collaboration software, so things like Slack and Microsoft Teams, that includes chat software, but also team

task management and project management software. There are all these different tools and apps that purport to help you manage collaboration with your team. They can play a role, right, in helping to facilitate more effective collaboration. So I don't know if you use virtual whiteboard software or any kind of shared project management documents, it can be really helpful.

But in a sufficiently large organization, there will be enough different opinions about which tools to use that all of a sudden you've got nightmare five or ten different collaboration tools and now you're spending some of your time and energy at work on this, like meta collaboration, of figuring out how you're going to use all the different collaboration tools that you're using.

So part of it would be actually having whether it's an individual or a group of people who are Tasked with sort of saying, well, what are the set of tools that we're going use that offer the right mix of, you know, features and value for our particular needs? And how do we, like, leave open the space for people to experiment with new tools that might be helpful without making it free reign? And then all of a sudden, there are too many issues. Now that's like

the tool side, but it also looks like. So the company Dropbox at one point was dealing with a similar issue where they had way too. They had too many people with too many meetings. And so working with a couple of researchers, they decided to declare our meeting. Get in. So they said, we need to blow up the way that we

collaborate and the way that we handle meetings. And so they actually decided there was going to be like a point in time where they were going to actually take all recurring meetings out of people's calendars. So people came into work one day and they had sort of of basically upended the meeting norms, and they said, you can't have these recurring meetings. You can't schedule new recurring meetings for the next couple of weeks. You can schedule meetings as

you need to, but you can't schedule recurring meetings. Because what happens is you put in a recurring meeting thinking that we might need this time, and then you find something to justify using the time because the time is held. So they said, let's. Let's blow that up and take a pause before we start adding any of those back in so we can ask

which ones are actually really important. They also reset the norms where they said, if you're invited to a meeting and it is unclear to you why you need to be there or what your expected role is to be, then you should ask, right, for clarification, do I need to be here? Right. Are you just including me because you want to be inclusive but you don't actually need me, or are you just including me because, I don't know, some other reason? Reason?

And so they reset a new norm across the organization to say, if you're invited to stuff that you don't know, why you should be there, instead of what, doing what most dutiful employees do of sort of going to the meeting and sitting there and multitasking in the background, you know, as secretively as you can, you know, you actually say, do you need me here? Because why should I divide my attention in that way? Sure. If I'm not actively needed?

So I think a lot of it from the collaborative overload perspective is recognizing. I think we have to start by recognizing collaboration is important. It's important to the organization, right? It's where a lot of good ideas come from. It's a lot of how shared decision making and work gets done. It's also really important to employees, right? So when employees are wanting to go back into the office, very often it's because they want

that shared experience and connection with people. It's the social side of meaningful work. So we need to create space for that, but we need to manage it well, and we need to think about how to manage it together. Because our default behaviors very often lead us into a place where we get more of the worst of both worlds, right? We have lots of time together, but not necessarily the good quality time together. And then we don't have as good of time apart

and we don't have as good a time together. Instead, think about how do we actually think about, given our organizational needs, given our preferred ways of working as individuals and as teams, what's the right collaborative setup for us? And how might we make that responsive to changes in, you know, the time of year and the different kinds of tasks we need to do? Certainly one of the things that I've seen in organizations that I've worked with and especially, you know, over.

Over the period of time during which people were doing a lot of more hybrid work and we're trying to figure out how do we. How do we do hybrid? Well, how do we hybrid? There was. There was this whole kind of movement of trying to have how we hybrid conversations that, that I started to see. A lot of this was pioneered through Harry's. The Razor Blade company created this whole Howie hybrid kind of meeting structure where people, basically the instruction

was come together as a team and talk about your. Your team norms around how you communicate and how you collaborate and actually make explicit the things that are never made explicit. Like when do you like to have conversations? How do you like to. Are you spontaneous? Do you. Do you like to have things planned? Do you like. Let. Let's actually talk about all of those kind of aspects. What meetings are actually on our books? Which of those meetings do we need to be in person? In. In person for

which of the meetings could we take while we're going? Or we don't need to be on camera, all of those. Which tools are we going to be using? Let's just have an agreement about when we send a text and when we send an email and actually talk about all those things, which I think is a wonderful thing in theory and actually really hard to do in practice. Like it. It's and you

could maybe do it once. But the idea of revisiting all of those team norms again and again and again, I don't think I've seen anyone ever actually do it. I think the other thing. So I talk to my students sometimes about this idea of creating a user manual, right? And so you can create a user manual and then talk about what's in your user manual with your team and then talk about what are sort of the right norms given everybody's user manual

for how. What their preferred ways of working are. I find this to be a really effective exercise for starting conversations about the fact that there are different preferences about the best way to work. Like even when you have the shared goal, right? Like if, if you are on the same page about what the goal is for what we should be trying to achieve in our work and, and broadly

about our values, right? For how we like to work together, you can have the same ideas about that, but still have quite different idiosyncratic personal preferences about the best ways to achieve those goals and enact those values. So it's really good for surfacing those differences. I think where I've seen lots of teams and people get stuck then is the creative solution design to figure out how to find a way of working that accommodates those differences, right?

In an example of like the hybrid workspace, so seen so many organizations grapple with how many days a week should people be in the office? And I've looked at that and sort of often been bemused a bit by the fact that it's always a question of how many days per week. And not really considering other structures. There are a handful of companies that have said, well, how many weeks per quarter do we need to get together, right? Or how many days per month, right? Because if you anchor on how many

days per week, right? And let's say, you know, it's this debate, is it, is it 2, is it 3, is it 4, is it 5, right? Different companies come up with their own solutions. All of those require everybody to live within commuting, reasonable commuting distance of the office, right? Because you're expecting them to be. They can't live somewhere else and then commute for the once per month where they need to get, you know, they can't travel for the once per month where they need to

get together or the once per quarter. There are companies that are experimenting with this a lot more. And in general, Nick Bloom at Stanford's research has shown that. I think he's the one who did the research or at least heard about it through him, that younger companies. So companies that have been around for less time or newer companies that are just starting are often being more open to different structures because it creates a lot more space to come up

with different collaborative systems completely. I feel like it would be such an amazing thing for an organization to say, let's just be all in the office one week a month and have that one week be the week that we all are in the office so that we're not coming into the office so that we can go on to our Zoom calls and, like, sit in an open office and

all. Beyond Zoom, but, like, actually all of us are doing it, and we can have all of the meetings and make those meaningful meetings intentional and collaborative and creative. That doesn't happen much. What ends up happening is organizations pull people back into the office, so they set these policies that everybody needs to be in a certain amount of time, but it's very rarely the case that everybody is actually in the office who needs to be in a given meeting.

So what ends up happening is these people are sitting in offices on zoom. Meetings on Zoom. Yeah, cubicles. Right. So they've spent all this time, effort, money, to commute in, all in the name of improving collaboration, because that's the biggest, you know, that leaders often put forward. It's like, we need to collaborate more. We need to collaborate better. And I said at the end of last episode, you know, we should talk about the difference between the

meaning of work and the meaningfulness. Meaningfulness, Right. So, like, when we talk about collaboration, well, what's the meaning of that? What's the purpose of collaboration? And that is often, you know, it's about. It's about connection and creativity and creating something that's greater than the sum of its parts. Right. So the meaning of collaboration to many people when it comes to work, is coming together to make

something that's more than the sum of its parts. The meaningfulness of collaboration is about that shared bond and sense of connection that we feel in the moment. Right. So it's about. Actually, does it feel like we are a group of people who are aligned on key values and connecting and having deep fun, working hard to solve a difficult problem. Right. That's often when collaboration feels meaningful. So these are like the great brainstorming sessions or.

I worked with an airline once who. A lot of people would tell stories about the times where snowstorms required everybody to come together and to work to get through sort of a crisis or. Super. Absolutely. That's like, people hold that up Is like, that's really meaningful collaboration. And all this other stuff, the day to day meetings, the day to day emails, sometimes people

say that's not collaboration, right? Like, because in their mind, collaboration as a term only refers to the meaningful experiences. It doesn't refer to the meaningless activities that happen to be collaborative in nature.

And so what we're sort of saying is, well, let's just focus on the basic meaning of collaboration, which is coming together to try to make a decision or produce something that is greater than any one individual would produce and recognize that some of those are meaningful experiences and some of them are not. Some of those are successful at achieving the purpose of collaboration, which is, you know, people coming together to produce something greater than

they would separately. And other times the collaboration part of that is counterproductive. So Adam Grant has talked about, like, the benefits of brain writing as opposed to brainstorming. Brainstorming together as a group often feels more meaningful than sitting down individually to write a list of your ideas together or, sorry, independently. But what research has shown, right, is that oftentimes when people are given time and space to brainwrite individually,

it actually. And then you bring those ideas together as a group, you actually get higher quality, higher quantity ideas than everybody together in a brainstorming session. And so I think we have to ask, well, what's the meaning of what we're trying to do together? What's the purpose of it? And we could think about what's the most meaningful way to do it and what's the most effective way to do it. And sometimes those will go

hand in hand and other times they'll separate. And so then we have to think about, well, is part of our goal right now to create a meaningful experience? Is it about team bonding and team building and, you know, engagement and that kind of stuff? Or is it about achieving some particular purposeful objective? In which case we could ask, does actually coming together to do stuff together help that purpose or hinder that purpose?

Hey there. If you're one of our listeners who usually fast forwards through my intro spiel to get to the good stuff, I I thought I'd catch you up here. Inst said we're launching the Meaningful Work Pod Club. On February 26th at 4pm Eastern Time, we're hosting our very first virtual session. Now, this isn't another passive webinar. It's a chance to engage with other professionals who are just as passionate about meaningful work as you are.

We'll take the ideas directly from our episodes and we'll work together to figure out how to actually implement them in the real world. Just head over to EUBD capodclub to save your spot. And I'm looking forward to having the kind of rich discussions we can't fit into a podcast episode. Now back to our conversation. So let's switch gears and think a little bit more in that same vein around meaning and meaningfulness about another topic that you've spent a fair bit of time

thinking about, which is generosity. So how does generosity and meaningful work kind of play together? Sure. So I think they're hand in hand. Right. So we're not actually switching gears that much. So generosity work is really about helping people. Right. Which is part of collaboration. Right. So in, in helping, you are inherently connecting in some way with another person. But it's specifically geared toward pro social efforts to help people out and to help the

greater good out in the organization. So from a research perspective, we study this under the terms of helping, generosity, organizational citizenship behaviors. Right. Which are all of the various things that people do at work to contribute to the functioning of the organization that are outside of their core job tasks. Like being the person that everyone goes to for help and that also you want to go through for help. As you were talking, I was like

that. But collaborative overload. It's like those are the people who demonstrate, you know, organization citizenship behaviors. Yeah. It's also more mundane stuff, right. Like taking notes in meetings and, you know, setting up meetings, like coordinating things, throwing parties, organizing the card for somebody who, you know, has had a celebration in their life or sadness in their life. So some of it's emotional tasks. Right. And supporting

the emotional well being of employees. Others are administrative tasks that are about the effort to coordinate the group. And these are often so companies and organizations where lots of people are willing to engage in these citizenship behaviors, they're willing to help out either specific individuals or to help out the greater functioning of the group, even if it's not in their job description. Those organizations outperform others all the time. Right. So large meta analysis.

Right. Of company, lots of companies, lots of different metrics of citizenship behaviors and various outcomes generally show that when helping is the norm. Right. Organizations perform and function better. And it's also generally better for employees. So it's a good thing to encourage helping in organizations, however. Right. For individuals,

again, it can be a good thing. So pro social motivation, seeing your work as an opportunity to help people is associated with higher meaning and lots of other positive outcomes for people's experience and performance at work. But when we zoom into helping Behavior specifically like actually following through on your interest to help people, the results

start to get more mixed, right? So individuals who do lots of helping, they can perform better at certain tasks but struggle at other aspects of their jobs. They can be really at risk of burnout. And so that's one of the things that Adam and I in particular have studied and written about is the phenomenon of generosity burnout where somebody is highly pro socially motivated in their work. They want to help other people, they want to have a positive impact, right? These are people with calling

orientations towards their jobs. They see their work, you know, in many ways. The meaning of their work is in large part to help other people. It's to do good things for their colleagues. Then the question is, well, like, do they actually achieve that? Right? How effective are they at creating those positive impacts for other people? And also what happens to them in the process, right? Do they feel like their work is meaningful?

And there are groups of people who, for whom the meaning of their work is very positive and pro social and service oriented, but their work doesn't always feel meaningful because they're bogged down in just the overwhelm of how many people need their help or how many demands there are on their time and their decreasing ability to deliver help that will matter for them. So we studied this in particular in a group of teachers. So it's a profession

that is defined by helping motivation, right? So in general, when you survey teachers, good news is like they're often highly motivated to help people. They see the meaning of their work as an opportunity to make a difference. On average, there are individual teachers here and there for whom that's not. Not true. But even within that broad category, we then actually ask, well, how to some extent, how extreme is your focus on helping

other people? And in particular we ask, is your desire to help others paired with self interest in your own goals and your own needs, or is it paired with a lack of self interest and a lack of attention to your own needs? So we think about selfless. We could think about pro social motivation or generosity varying on this degree of selflessness. So highly selfless employees are ones who, they're really focused on helping others and they really don't care about

their own needs and goals. At the same time, other employees, Adam's coined the term otherish, which is what they do is they really care about helping other people and they're attentive to what their own needs and goals are, right? And as a result they look for ways to achieve both. And what we found with this group of teachers is that the teachers who are the most selfless. Right. So they're really dedicated to helping others to the point where they don't even prioritize

their own interests and needs. They actually have students who achieve less than teachers who are less selfless. So we use standardized student achievement measures. These teachers have students who are advancing less academically than teachers who maintain some degree of self interest and boundary setting. Why is that? So we don't fully know. Right. I think we have some empirically at least. Right. So we have a lot of speculation though, that part of it is about privileging

of meaningfulness over meaning. Right. So when you're so focused on helping other people, you tend to gravitate towards if somebody's in front of you asking for help with something thing, you're going to want to say yes and you're going to want to offer as

much as you can. And so you stop thinking about those other things that you should be attending to because you're so caught up in the meaningfulness of this particular need that it can be hard to step back and say, well, if the meaning of my work is to try to have as much impact on as many people as I can, and that may or may not be what the meaning of your work is for you, but if that's what the meaning of your work is, let me think strategically about what will actually improve at

that. And so one of the things we found is that some of the teachers who were the most selfless seemed to spend less time and invest less in their own development. So these are relatively early career teachers. And so they spent less time in their own sort of goal setting and engaging sort of the core tasks of teaching in the classroom because they're so focused on all these individual spot needs. Sure. Whereas if you actually hold out some time or space or attention

to think about, how do I become a better teacher? Right. How do I actually monitor my own needs and resources and like make sure that I'm recovering and all those kinds of things. But also how do I reinvest some of my time in stuff that won't help anybody now, but it might help somebody, it might help me teach somebody better or respond to somebody better six months from now. Now. Right. Or now. And so we think about self development often as kind of a selfish activity.

Right. It's like, oh, I'm going to take time away from helping the people that I could be helping today to go learn something that's of interest to me. And we discount the fact that if I take that time now, it might make me even better at helping people later on. So it's. It's like the collaborative overload thing in the sense that not everybody who tries to be helpful at work, you know, has a burnout problem,

right? So some people are more susceptible to this than. Than others, but the ones who are, they're undermining their own stated meaning and purpose of their work. And so I think it again comes back to that question of how do we flexibly regulate and make decisions to think about over time? How am I investing enough in helping people who need my help? Helping myself with the things that are just my own needs and interests, and also investing in myself

so that I can be more helpful to people later on? And that requires being selective about who you're going to help now. And I guess one last thing that sort of connects these two is we haven't talked about the role of asking for help. So some data suggests that 70 to 90% of helping in organizations happens because somebody makes an ask, right? So there are these cases where, right? The great givers among us are just like, wandering around and they see a need or an opportunity and

they just offer their help unsolicited. But most of the time, the reason somebody, you know, offers help is because somebody has asked for help. So that's a key factor here in terms of what are the norms in the organization about help seeking. One of the things I often encourage people to do is to make a map of their help network. So I want you to make two lists, right? The first list is make a list of all the people who've come to you for help,

big or small, in the past month, right? And you can think about whether it's the best month or the past week. Pick whatever time horizon makes sense for you. But who are the people who've come to you to ask for help? Help with something. And they might not have literally said help, but they just come to you for input or for advice or to help them move or whatever the case may be. So that's list one. List two is who are the people you've gone to for help

over the past month and what for? And then you've got these two lists side by side, and you can ask yourself a few questions, right? Who's not on these lists but should be? Who are the people who are not coming to you for help but you feel like they should, or you wish they would come to you for help a bit more often? Why? Right? Is it because they don't know that you're available is because they don't feel safe. Right. There could be a range of potential explanations there.

Who are you not going to for help, but you could or maybe even should, why? Right. Are there people who are on the list who are especially responsible for shaping your work day or your work week? Right. Because they pepper you with a lot of requests for help. How appropriate is that dynamic for the relationship between your roles? Right. So if you're a manager and your direct reports coming to you a lot for help,

that might make a lot of sense. Right? It might be perfectly appropriate, especially if they're a junior employee still, you know, it may be like, oh, for this time and this place in that employee's journey, it makes sense to have lots of incoming requests from them. However, if they're coming to you for stuff that they could be going to somebody else with and that you think they should be, that's maybe

have that conversation with them. And so in doing this first for yourself and then doing it within your team, you can start to see how have we fallen, like, what's the pattern that we've just fallen into naturally? And if we were to look at this more intentionally and strategically, how might we restructure that either for ourselves or across our team? I'm reflecting over this whole conversation and the two episodes that we have been

speaking together. And I think for me, as we kind of wrap up these conversations, I'm just, I'm struck by. There's so many times in, in, in this whole podcast series and in all the research that I've done around meaningful work where meaningful work really can be this double edged sword. We really want things to have meaning. And yet in those situations where, you know, they are or they are not meaningful things tend

to fall apart in different ways. And they often fall apart because of the fact that people feel like they get taken advantage of or they get explo. They get asked to do too much or they get asked or they're alienated or it's just, it takes over the rest of their life. Like those boundaries, the resources, they all seem to fall away and we don't seem to necessarily be able

to figure out how to manage. And I think so many of the episodes that we've had on this podcast I have really tried to focus on, well, what are the systemic things, what are the organizational things, what are the structures we can put in place to in some ways protect ourselves from too

much meaning in some way, shape or form. But I think that one of the things That I keep hearing you say in this episode and I think is so important to be able to recognize is that we do have so much more control of understanding the demands that are placed upon us, the resources we need to be able to be successful, the context and situations we're going to be thrust in that are going to require from us either a lot of collaboration, a lot of generosity, a desire, a want,

a real need that we have to be able to do those things because they. They construct meaning for us and at the same time, like a bit of a critical distance to be able to say, hey, how do I do this stuff? In ways that aren't going to deplete me, that aren't going to destroy me, that I can take accountability

for, that I can actually have agency over. And it's incredibly empowering at that individual level to know that no matter what situation you're in, you still do have some degree over control, the control with which you think about those resources. You try to create a sense of boundary, you take some sort of action. It's such a great synthesis. It is very empowering. I have to, though, put a note on there, right. Because I. I don't know how much control we

actually have. Right. I think we have some amount of agency to try to shift these things around and again, to change the odds of what our experience might be like in any given moment or over time. But I think part of the other theme and what we've talked about is that. But there are all these situational factors, right? Collective action, norms within the organization, the ways your manager shapes your experience that put boundaries to some extent around how

much freedom you have to move within those spaces. So I do think we have agency in the sense that I think we have this ability, at least at a micro level, to really think about, well, how do I want to be intentional and sort of show up or what do I want to get out of this particular moment? I don't know that we have control. Right. I think we have the opportunity to try to steer things or to influence. Yeah. The probability of a good outcome.

And I think for me, the other piece is just recognizing that, like coming back to the idea of dynamics. Right. The meaning of our work changes and fluctuates. Right. The meaning of. So some of the great work on recent work on work orientations, job, career and calling. Right. In general, if we just look at differences between people, some people have a job orientation, some people have a career orientation, some people have a calling orientation that's helpful for distinguishing between

people but also within us. There will be times in our life, for each of us where we're going to think about our work more as a job, more as a career, and more as a calling. There might even be days or hours where we think about our work, right? The meaning of our work is is changing depending on what perspective we're bringing to it. Therefore, our experience of meaningfulness will

shift in relation to that. And I think paying attention to those small, but no pun intended, meaningful change like fluctuations, how we're relating to the work can open up the space to say, okay, how might I approach this a bit differently if I'm understanding what's the meaning of this particular activity or what's the meaningful experience I want to get here, but also not just doing it internally, but thinking about, especially if

you're a manager or leader, how do you create the space for this to be optimized across your team so it's not just left to everybody to manage their collaborative overload and their generosity burnout on their own? Because that's just making the problem harder. Once again, Reb, you have only made things more complex. Thank you. I'm exhausted. I love this. Thank you. I'm so grateful for your wisdom, for your capacity to be able to dive in, for, for just your friendship.

It's really, really fun to be able to have you on this podcast. Thank you, Reb. It's been a delight. Andrew thank you. Foreign thank you for joining us for another episode of Meaningful Work Matters. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform. And if this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to leave us a review. Your feedback helps us make this podcast better and reach more listeners.

You can connect with me, Andrew Soren on LinkedIn or visit www.eubd.ca to learn more about Eudaimonic by Design. Finally, if what you heard today spoke to you, tell your colleagues and people in your community about our podcast. We really appreciate your support in making meaningful work matter. See you next.