By Eugene Cha – Navarro
The most durable form of workplace generosity creates no debt for its recipient, and can help build cultures where performance and trust reinforce each other.
A Meeting Without a Reason
A few years ago, a man who had just started his own technology consulting business asked to meet me through LinkedIn. I was running a consumer goods business at the time and had no reason to say yes. He had no track record, no introduction and nothing I needed. I met him anyway, listened for an hour, and then introduced him to a business partner who I thought might use his services.
As he was leaving he thanked me, paused, and asked: “Why are you helping me?”
I did not answer him. It was not because I had no answer. It was because the honest answer had nothing to do with him.
What the Research suggests: The logic of Kindness
There is no shortage of respectable answers. Research on giving[1], warmth[2], organisational virtuousness[3] and psychological safety[4] all suggests that the way leaders treat people affects trust, learning and, ultimately, performance. Leaders perceived as warm are more readily trusted; teams whose members feel safe to speak up are better able to learn; and compassionate organisational practices can be associated with stronger outcomes.
All of this is true, and I have watched it operate in the businesses I have run. But had I said any of it in that pause, I would have told him something false about the meeting: that helping him was, in the end, about me.
These studies provide a robust framework for why kindness works in hindsight. But in that specific moment, my reason for saying yes was rooted entirely from my own past.
The answer I actually had: The True Origin of Generosity
Nearly two decades ago, during my MBA, I wrote more than a hundred cover letters and applied to more than a hundred companies. LinkedIn existed, but it had not yet become the default networking tool it is today. So, I went to every alumni event the school organised and sent emails to graduates working at the firms I was applying to. Some did not reply. Some did. They gave me an hour, told me what the interviewer might ask, and then, unprompted, introduced me to someone closer to the role. Some of those people I have since lost touch with. None of them has ever needed anything from me.
That was the debt I was settling in the meeting with the consultant. It was a real debt, and it could not be repaid to the people who created it. The only place it could be settled was with someone who was standing where I once stood.
This is the quiet logic of paying it forward. Help is not exchanged directly between two people. It moves through a network, often invisibly, and creates a social norm that no individual owns.
Why the reason had to stay unsaid: The Mechanism of Paying it Forward
This is where the difficulty lies. If I had said, “I am repaying people who helped me,” I would have handed the debt to him. Human instinct often turns a stated favour into a direct obligation. Once it is said out loud, it becomes a quiet pressure that he now feels, regardless of what is said. When it is left unsaid, generosity remains a choice that he may or may not make later for someone else when the opportunity arises.
Research by Wayne Baker and Nathaniel Bulkley[5] helps explain the distinction. They tested this in a study of how generosity spreads through groups. They compared two mechanisms: helping because others are watching and your reputation will benefit and helping because you were once helped. Reputation-based generosity generated a stronger initial response but diminished quickly. The paying-it-forward mechanism developed more gradually and endured longer.
The implication for leaders is not that recognition is always wrong. Public recognition has an important place in organisations. It is that generosity can lose some of its cultural force when it is performed mainly to create status, loyalty or a claim on the recipient.
In other words, my silence was not a gap in the exchange between us. The silence was the exchange itself. It left him free to decide, one day, whether he would do the same for someone else.
Kindness under performance pressure
Quiet generosity builds culture, but it does not replace accountability. I ran businesses with full P&L ownership in multinational companies for years, and was judged on performance every month, as I should have been. The question is not whether a leader suspends the rules of performance, but whether their pattern of behaviour creates an organisation where people do not feel they must keep a ledger with one another.
That is the way psychological safety may be experienced from the inside. People bring bad news early because they are not calculating what it will cost them. They ask for help before a problem becomes expensive. They help each other across functions without first checking whether the favour will be recorded and repaid. Psychological safety improves performance not by making people comfortable but by making them willing to learn in front of one another.[6]
There is also an important boundary here that matters. Grant’s data show[7] that people with a giving orientation can sit at both the bottom and the top of the performance distribution. The ones at the bottom may give without limits, become overextended or allow others to exploit them. High-performing givers combine generosity with boundaries, judgement and expectations.
Kindness, therefore, is not niceness. A kind leader still says no, sets demanding targets and addresses persistent underperformance decisively. Kindness shows in how a person is treated during a difficult conversation. It does not show in what the numbers are permitted to say.
Making paying it forward take hold
If leaders want to build a culture of paying it forward as the organisation’s underlying mechanism that lasts, they can take three practical steps.
The first is to spend some time helping people who cannot readily return the favour: a colleague in another function, a junior professional in another company as a mentor or a stranger who has asked for an hour. Help within the reporting line is necessary but it is also expected. Generosity beyond immediate reciprocal benefit is what shows that the norm is real.
The second is to ensure the helpful act remains private from the rest of the organisation. A quiet introduction, a useful conversation or private sponsorship often has more cultural value than a public display of benevolence. When leaders repeatedly announce their own generosity, people may infer that help is being offered in exchange for reputation, gratitude or loyalty.
The third is to make asking for help a routine rather than an exception. Paying-it-forward cultures are built through repeated leadership choices: whether to respond to a request with curiosity or accusation, coaching or scorekeeping. When leaders make those moments safe, risks surface earlier. A simple mechanism is opening a weekly team meeting with a single, unrecorded request for help, answered by whoever is able[8]. It removes the friction of asking and prevents anyone from tracking who owes whom.
Conclusion: The Deeper Value of Kindness
I do not know whether the consultant’s business succeeded. Nor do I know whether, some years from now, someone with no track record and nothing obvious to offer will sit across from him. However, if that moment comes, I hope he gives them an hour and an introduction and, if asked why, leaves enough unsaid for the help to remain a choice rather than become a debt.
For leaders, that is the deeper value of kindness: not a transaction that earns loyalty, but a practice that makes trust, candour and mutual help easier to sustain.
