When times are tight people tighten their belts and go into survival mode. This can manifest itself in all sorts of different ways from the managers who hold onto information because it might give them an edge over another to the teams who won’t collaborate because they believe that they can do it better on their own.

Personally I believe that a survival mode is the road to mediocrity and mediocrity doesn’t survive in an economic downturn. Instead, let us look at generosity as a way of generating excellence.

You have come across this type of team before, you know, the one where the team members never seem to know what is going on. The manager is the gatekeeper, the custodian and the all-powerful. Sending information to that group is like sending it into a big black hole. If you ask anyone from the team whether they know about the deadline, the sports day or the profit levels, they will just give you a blank look and shrug their shoulders. It just doesn’t seem to be effective does it?

So why do some managers do this? It is almost as if the information is like gold that has to hoarded. Some of the possible reasons for this type of behaviour do include straight incompetence and poor time management but sometimes a greater lack of confidence lurks behind the smoke screen of ‘I haven’t got time’.

Today we talk about living in an information age. Anything we want to know can often be found out at the touch of a button if we know where to look. The Internet, Facebook, Twitter, newsletters, RSS feeds, 24hr Sky & CNN can overwhelm us with more detail than we care to know. Technically, if there is so much information, it shouldn’t be so valuable. But part of living in the information age is being able to access the right information at the right time and that means that that there is still value attached to the information that flows inside an organisation.

When times are tough it is particularly tempting for people to look for competitive advantage through the information they have; company announcements, networks, availability of jobs etc. And to be fair, this will probably be a successful short-term strategy for those who choose it. I’d like to suggest that there is a better way and that is to be generous. Be generous with your information, your time and your knowledge. If you are a manager, you will create excellence by being generous and the long-term impact of this approach will far outweigh the short-term gain of not being generous.

The best ‘real life’ example I know of is in the creation of open source software. Thousands of developers worldwide who invest their time and knowledge to create something excellent for everyone to use that no one pays for! This is true generosity at work! Even at a local level generosity is at work where a multi-party government has brought benefits to the community (ok so not all the parties were feeling generous all the time, but it is still working!)

Who knows what the generous manager could achieve with their team if they chose to share their information, their experience and their time? Just think what could be possible if an expert team chose to share and collaborate with another? What choice will you make?