Don’t worry if you haven’t watched
the latest season of Scandal yet. You
don’t need your umbrella, because it won’t be raining spoilers today. You are an awesome person though, so you should get ready for some knowledge.
Most of us have heard of the rule of reciprocity. In business, it is a powerful tool. If you know somebody and help them out, they can help you out in the future. We can call in favors with the rule, or lose out on it if we don’t answer someone else’s call. Yet, it’s not always clear when we might be using it the wrong way. This rule does not work if others think we’re using it dishonestly, or if we let others take advantage of us with it. Therefore, we have to know when to call in favors without coming off as manipulative.
What better place to test this than the rough-and-tumble world of Washington, D.C., especially in everyone’s favorite show Scandal? Let’s look to Olivia Pope and Associates (and associates) to see what to do and what not to do.
With hundreds of reliable contacts across the world, Olivia Pope fixes people’s problems and helps them grow personally. They help her with her problems, and also occasionally save her from danger. Olivia has mastered the rule of reciprocity. Someone wants to be rescued from a dictator? Done. She wants help from that same person finding evidence for a case? Done. But is one favor in return for something like that really too much to ask?
This is the key.
The favor we’re asking for has to be no more than equal to the favor we gave, and vice versa.
Take the example of Olivia’s dad Rowan, though. Here is what not to do. He builds people up so that they work for him, and can get a new identity. Yet, when they try to leave, he pressures them into staying, making them feel like they have no other choice. He gives other people skills, then uses it to make them do multiple things they normally would never have done. There is a disconnect between the favors that were done and the favors that were returned. Also, a favor was used as leverage. Helping someone out should not be a chess move. It should be an act that has the potential to help each person grow in the long run.
That being said, we shouldn’t be like David Rosen and let others take advantage of your generosity. Time and time again, he has to stop what he’s doing and help Olivia, or Jake, or Abby, someone. Then, even he’s noticed that he’s had to sacrifice his career as an attorney, his credibility, and even his safety by sweeping something under the rug, or launching an investigation into dangerous people. It is good to make ourselves available to others, but we need to make sure we state that both sides are helping the other grow.
So of course one could say that by the very nature of Scandal, these examples are a bit intense for what we’re talking about. Yes they are, but the logic behind them applies everywhere. In the business world, we can all take a lesson for the next time we ask our tech friend for a free software upgrade in exchange for that time we gave them free marketing advice for their company. When we consider giving our colleague the promotional booth at the upcoming expo, we could remember the time they let us host a networking event at their executive suite building. Conversely, we can decide whether we want to ask a potential buyer to pay for a product even though we offered to perform a no-strings-attached favor just a few minutes ago. As we can see, the reciprocity rule is a powerful tool, no matter which side of it we are on. However, with great power comes great responsibility.
Article by: Musa Bassey, Editor-In-Chief of Small Business View
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