Should I Mentor You For You or Mentor You For Me?
Exploring Altruism in Corporate Spaces
You’d be shocked at how many partial articles I have written and are just sat in my drafts list. I revisit them every now and again and the time just doesn't feel right anymore —either the season of relevance has elapsed, I personally don’t care about it anymore, or I can’t think of what to add to it to make it pop… Good thing is that if you’re reading this, I got to the end of this one.
It’s pretty common to hear that, especially in the West, we are in a “dog eat dog world” — which often infers the belief that people take actions that are laced with ruthless competition, or simply describes people’s inclination to do anything to be successful, even if it harms other people. That’s nuts, right? Or is it? It’s not uncommon and it’s not a new phenomenon. I guess, if you think about it, it’s not wrong either (I mean, who defines what’s right and wrong anyway?). I have my priorities, the things that drive me, the things I want to achieve… why should my priorities have to take a side step in order to accommodate the needs and feelings of someone else, especially someone whose actions can rarely affect me in any significant way? This all made me ask the question: does anyone at work actually care about me?
I think the answer is short and sweet. No.
That’s the end of the article. Thanks for reading guys.
No, no, I’m joking… mostly.
It is safe to say that nearly no one cares about your career the way you care about your career. Not your colleagues, not your manager, not your subordinates, and certainly not the CEO. Maybe your mum might… but even then, there are cases where even your mum just wants to use you for bragging rights:
“Hey Brenda, you know my daughter is now a Partner at NASA! She just turned 26 and she single-handedly built the International Space Station. In her spare time she mentors Barack Obama and plays in the men’s first team at Manchester United… How’s your son? I heard he got promoted to Co-assistant-vice-deputy-manager in the Lewisham branch of KFC”
Does NASA even have Partners? 🤔
Altruism is widely considered a concept that doesn’t truly exist in practice. Oxford dictionary’s definition: “disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others”. The issue is the word “selfless” — can one truly be selfless? If I were to give money to someone begging on the side of the street, am I doing that for their benefit? Of course. But it also feels good, your body floods with euphoria and makes you feel as though you’ve done your part. Now due to those feelings, can we say that giving the money was truly selfless? It’d be hard to argue.
The working world is all about interactions between people: between colleagues, buyers and sellers, managers and subordinates, between partner companies and the list goes on. Most well-meaning people want to be able to help and support people along the way, but that feeling rarely ever surpasses the strength of your feeling to ensure your back is covered and you are getting the most out of any situation you’re in. I am certainly no pioneer in this space, there are plenty of research papers that have looked at altruism in the workplace.
A paper by Robert Dur and Jan Tichem (2015) sought to understand the effect of altruism and relational incentives on a number of factors, including financial factors in the workplace. One of their observations was that they had shown that the credibility of relational incentives depends on the altruism or spite between a manager and employee. And now in English… for us to truly understand the heart behind any incentive, reward, or even punishment, it’s important to understand the levels of altruism or spite that are present between the two. Interestingly, the same paper indicates that altruism has the ability to be a positive driver in both low and high concentrations i.e. the lack of presence of altruism isn’t, in and of itself, evidence of the presence of spite.
We find that altruism undermines the credibility of a threat of dismissal but strengthens the credibility of a bonus. Among others, these two mechanisms imply that higher altruism sometimes leads to higher bonuses, whereas lower altruism may increase productivity and players’ utility in equilibrium.
Ultimately, all roads lead somewhere — whether it’s around improved working relationships, increased salary, better bonuses, more seniority, or simply going home with a sense of achievement. Julio Rotemburg uses the word cooperation. Cooperation is so important for the production of goods and services that firms use all possible tools at their disposal to achieve such cooperation. The simplest of these is to design jobs so that the actions of each are easy to specify and so that each job involves activities that are complementary to those of the other jobs in the same firm. The firm then achieves a form of cooperation by the simple expedient of paying individuals to carry out particular tasks (Rotemburg, J, 2006).
Am I a cynic? I mean, I can be, but more than anything, I think I am a realist. I think it’s healthy to take a more pragmatic lens to the working world. Work has the ability to build or break you, and this is all before we involve human-to-human relationships. So when your company instates new CSR (Corporation Social Responsibility) initiatives or builds a shiny new D&I team, remember there is a chance that it’s not all for the advertised external good — this allows scope for objectivity and then action in the areas which are most beneficial to the most amount of people. If you have a new mentor, sure, they may be in it for their own personal development, network building, or to actually give back (disingenuously or otherwise); but remember a lot of that is less relevant than the fact that you can still leverage that relationship to support your development and progression. So, addressing the question in the title, Should I Mentor You For You or I Mentor You For Me?… it doesn’t really matter as long as both sides are getting out of it what they desire.
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Peace and love x
