Month: October 2017

“Generous” is a broad term. Many of my posts have touched on generosity one way or another. But today I want to encourage you to help others succeed professionally, even if it never benefits you.

Use LinkedIn With a Generous Spirit

If you’re on LinkedIn, you’ll find several ways to help others, starting with being open to connecting with people you don’t know. When I first joined, I believed strongly that LinkedIn wasn’t a place to accept connection requests from strangers. There are articles that advise just that. Then I received connection requests from two young women who had graduated from my alma mater and wanted to talk to me about my career. After they explained why they wanted to connect, I decided to accept their requests. Because the women lived near me, I could talk with each of them face-to-face. When the first woman contacted me, I questioned my ability to help. But both seemed to appreciate the connection and the chance to talk about their career ambitions. I still don’t accept every request, but now I’m open to connecting with strangers if I can genuinely help them.

You can also help others through recommendations. Of course, it’s great to respond positively to direct requests for recommendations, assuming you feel the person who approaches you is worth recommending. But if I like someone’s work, I won’t necessarily wait for them to ask me to write a recommendation. I’ll just write one, which they can accept, reject, or ask me to edit. If you’re connected to someone on LinkedIn, a recommendation can be a wonderful gift of appreciation.

Leave Positive Reviews

This year we had to call a repair person to look at our washing machine. He declared it dead (or, rather, not worth the expense of fixing) and recommended certain brands to replace it. He also told me to check out professional reviews, such as Consumer Reports, rather than relying solely on review sites. “People are more likely to leave negative reviews than positive ones,” he said. He’s right. There are times where I’ve had a particularly bad experience with a business or product and felt motivated to write a negative review. While I do leave positive reviews, I think I’m less likely to take the trouble to do so. In fact, I’m ashamed to say that the repair person’s business card is sitting in a pile, waiting for me to go online and recommend him!

We don’t need to forego all negative reviews. I think there’s a time for that. But it would be great if we left at least as many positive reviews as negative ones — if not more. Especially for small businesspeople, such reviews can be gold. If you love something — the way the stylist cuts your hair or the food at that little restaurant you’ve been going to for years or the new podcast you just discovered — give it a positive rating. We base so many of our choices on ratings these days; let’s help the people we appreciate get more business by giving them positive reviews.

Say a Good Word to Someone’s Manager

This is something I think about doing from time to time, and I always lose my nerve. A good part of it is that I imagine myself as the person behind the counter and think that the words “Can I see your manager” would probably sound like the prelude to a complaint. I don’t want to make the person panic, so I don’t say anything at all. But if we made a practice of asking for the manager to share kind words about someone, maybe people wouldn’t assume the worst when we asked to see their supervisor. And I’m sure managers must get tired of always being summoned for complaints. Hearing compliments about employees could very well brighten a manager’s day, too.

Offer People Opportunities to Build Their Credentials

Many years ago, I sat in a meeting in which people discussed two different speakers for a nonprofit conference: a man and a woman. The people who had heard them both speak felt they were equally good speakers, but the man had more speaking experience. Eventually, the people in the meeting decided to offer the speaking opportunity to the man because of his experience.

There’s no denying that name recognition is a big deal, so if you can afford the person with more credentials, it makes sense to offer that person the opportunity. But at least some of the time, I think it can be appropriate to pick the less experienced of two people with equal abilities, if only to give them the opportunity to grow their career. This is particularly true when you can add diverse voices to an event or a team. If we don’t give opportunities to capable people with less experience, we’re holding them back… and we’re missing out on what they could contribute if only they were allowed to do so.

It’s Okay to Ask for Help

There are reasons experts warn people away from self-centered networking: real relationships aren’t about using people. That’s why I believe in giving without expectations. That doesn’t mean you can’t ask for what you need to achieve your career goals. I’ve asked people for LinkedIn recommendations, and I’ve asked people to review my book. But when I do things for others, I don’t want them to feel that what I’ve done for them is part of a transaction. If I choose to write a LinkedIn review for someone, I don’t want that person to feel beholden to pay me back with a review. My review of their work isn’t about getting something back. It’s about offering help to that person. If we want to make the world a better place, we can make a real difference through little things, like generously helping others to grow their careers.

… or, if you prefer the British spelling, grey.

I’ve stated before that I believe in right and wrong. But I also believe that we live in a world where many issues are not black-and-white. There are shades of gray. And if we embrace the gray, we may be able to listen to and understand others better.

I’m going to use a personal example that will probably alienate me from many people on both sides of the abortion debate. I have talked about this with very few people, but it feels like the right story to share here.

When I was a teen, I identified as pro-choice. For me, my stance was a no-brainer. Legal abortions were safer abortions. It was clear to me that many women would seek to terminate an unwanted pregnancy for a variety of reasons, whether or not abortion was legal. I believed that legal abortions would at least protect the lives of the women who chose them.

Partway through college, I changed my point of view. A large factor in my shift was an ethics class I took. During class, we examined abortion through a pro-choice perspective outlined in the “people-seeds” example from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” While many people agree with Thomson’s reasoning, I was disturbed by it, because it granted no consideration to the “person-plant.” To stick with Thomson’s analogy, since a woman whose mesh screen failed to keep a “people-seed” from taking root in her home would only be obliged to put up with the person-plant for nine months, it seemed to me a callous point of view not to consider possible pain and suffering and even a right to life on behalf of the person-plant. In fact, it seemed to be a very selfish point of view.

During this time, I began to encounter liberal people who embraced feminism but who were also pro-life, challenging my sense of what sort of person a pro-lifer was. Meanwhile, my fellow pro-choicers were alienating me. I was put off by the slogans chalked around campus, such as “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries.” It seemed to me that many women were approaching the issue from a very “me-centered” point of view. While I continued to believe in the legality of abortion when a woman could lose her life or was a victim of rape or incest, I was concerned about the rights of the unborn child, too. So I began to identify as pro-life.

While I did switch sides on the debate, I refused to condemn the faith of pro-choice women. Some Christians (though certainly not all) seem to equate being a Christian with being pro-life. I knew that I was every bit as passionate about following Christ when I was pro-choice as when I was pro-life. I no longer agreed with my previous pro-choice perspective, but I knew I’d held it out of a deep concern for what I thought was the best solution to the difficult problem of unwanted children. This willingness to acknowledge good will in another’s point of view is part of what I mean by embracing gray.

Since college, I’ve continued to meet people on both sides of the debate who are people of good will. I’ve witnessed acts of intolerance by both pro-choicers and pro-lifers toward people they disagreed with (although I can’t think of a time when a pro-choicer has bombed a pro-life facility). I’ve met women who chose to have an abortion, such as a Catholic woman who was pregnant with an anencephalic baby. I’ve met women who chose not to have an abortion, including another woman who was told her baby had anencephaly — and the diagnosis turned out to be wrong. (I don’t believe this means that the first woman I mentioned was wrong to make the choice she did.)

I’ve been deeply disturbed by people who say they are pro-life but who will not embrace completely pro-life principles, including abolishing the death penalty. Likewise, I’ve been frustrated by some of the proposed pro-life legislation at state levels that seems to prove exactly what pro-choicers have said about pro-lifers: They only care about unborn children, not women. Many pro-lifers seem to fail to see that by addressing issues related to women and poverty, such as paid maternity leave and adequate health care, they will go a long way to reducing abortions.

On the other hand, I’m saddened by the refusal of many pro-choicers to refer to an unborn child as anything but “fetus,” to avoid doing anything to humanize him or her. We need to have serious conversations about pain and suffering and about how oppressed groups are frequently dehumanized. Are we dehumanizing and oppressing unborn children, who cannot speak for themselves?

While I don’t see both sides of the issue completely (I’m not God), I do see them to some extent. I believe there are nuances we need to acknowledge and discuss. We need a deeper conversation than merely whether or not abortion should be legal. For me, abortion is not a black-and-white issue. It’s colored in shades of gray. Maybe that’s why I’d rather not identify myself as pro-life or pro-choice these days.

I’m not telling you this because I think I’ve reached some sort of mystical state of enlightenment on abortion. I haven’t. If anything, I’ve felt a little jaded lately and could use more of God’s grace. But my journey is an example of how we can acknowledge that issues are more complex than the stark black-and-white colors we want to paint them in. We live in a world of gray, and that’s not a terrible thing. If anything, being willing to embrace gray may help us grow in humility and in love for those we disagree with.

As we engage in debates about all sorts of issues, let’s acknowledge that there’s a lot of gray in the world. We don’t need to become relativists. But if we’re willing to respectfully engage in deep conversations and to wrestle over more difficult questions than “Which side of the issue is right?” we may actually make progress on some of the world’s most difficult problems. If nothing else, we’ll ease some of the tensions between groups with opposing points of view.