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The Importance of Being Selfless at Work - Part Two

Selflessness at work pays off in the long-term in several ways. But you need to be smart about it.
Someone helping two other people
Photo by Mimi Thian / Unsplash

This is part two in a three-part series of being selfless at work. If you haven’t read part one yet, read it here first.

We’re self-centered creatures, by nature, and, with some exceptions of those who are naturally selfless and those who are naturally narcissists or sociopaths, as we grow through childhood we’re (ideally) socialized to be more selfless. But even though we’re socialized to be selfless, we often find ourselves working mainly toward our own self-interest at work, either consciously or unconsciously.

While I believe it’s important to be selfless in all aspects of our lives, here I’m making the case for being selfless at work. In part one, I discussed being selfless with your team, meaning your boss, your peers, and, if you’re a leader, those who you lead. In this article, I’m explaining why it’s important to be selfless at work while building informal networks within your organization.

If you want to skip ahead, in part three I discuss being selfless in advertising yourself.

Building Informal Networks

Selflessness in the workplace also manifests itself in the informal networks we create across the company simply by talking with other people we don’t work with as part of our normal functions.  These informal networks are where you can connect people and their information together to the benefit of the greater organization.

Here’s another real-world example of selflessness in building your informal networks.

At one of my consulting employers, our cloud team had undergone a lot of resource changes at a time when one of our customers was interested in evaluating their services portfolio for a potential move to the cloud. Due to this turnover in the cloud team, we didn’t have any assets on what is considered a standard engagement, performing a Five Rs assessment. This meant no one-pagers, no engagement sizing calculators, nothing. We could talk about doing it, because we had done it for other clients, but that’s all we could do, talk.

Coming up dry on materials from the cloud team, I reached out to my friend Tam, on another sales team, who I would chat with once in a while, to see if his team had done this for a customer before. They hadn’t, but he had heard from someone else that maybe Becky in Denver might have done something like this recently. I gave Becky a call, and not only had her team done this before, but they were at the end of one these engagements right then for a customer ten times the size of mine, and she has all the marketing materials, presentations, legal documents, and sizing worksheets we need. She was a godsend. We saved ourselves and the cloud team an enormous amount of work reinventing the wheel, and having all the slick marketing materials helped us win the deal.

Informal networks are incredible tools. The relationships you build throughout a company will be invaluable to other people, as you hear things and connect others. Someone you speak to in marketing is working on a campaign about X, and that reminds you of a person in Product Development who had artwork created for that product. You introduce them, and now that artwork filed away some place the marketing team didn’t even have access to before is now part of a multi-million dollar marketing campaign.

Conclusion

Humans are social creatures, and as such, we connect with other people for various mutually beneficial reasons. Depending on where you land on the sociality spectrum, it may be easier or harder for you to deliberately seek out connections with people around the company you don’t have to work with already. But no matter how easy or hard it is for you to talk to people you don’t know, make an effort to make those connections, maintain those relationships, and help connect people across your network who can help each other. It’s priceless to your company, and it will ultimately benefit you in the form of goodwill, or when you need something from that network.

The last part in this series discusses being selfless in advertising yourself, your altruistic motivations, and balance.