GENEROSITY IS NOT A MOOD. IT IS A DISCIPLINE.

Seventh in a series at the intersection of values-based leadership, identity-centered growth, and the Seattle nonprofits doing the hardest work in our region.

What if the most underused asset in Seattle business isn't capital, and isn't AI, and isn't your network? What if it's the one thing we have quietly agreed is unprofessional to name in a business column?

I'm going to name it anyway. Love.

Stay with me, because I am not talking about a feeling and I am not about to go soft on you. I mean a decision you make on a Tuesday morning about how you will treat somebody who cannot do a thing for you. That is a practice, and this one compounds.

Ten Days

Let me put a date on it, because this happened three weeks ago.

On September 3rd I met a woman named Cyndi O'Neill-Dady at Rachael Barclay's Vantage launch party at Harbor Steps. Good room, good night. She runs Exceptional Connections, a networking organization

she has kept alive in this city for seventeen years. We talked a while and traded emails the next morning like everybody does.

Ten days later I walked into her garden party and found out she had turned her own gathering into a celebration of my birthday.

Ten days. Sit with the math there, because there isn't any. I had nothing she needed. I was a man she met at a launch party once. Nobody builds a birthday for a ten-day business contact as a strategy,

because it does not work as a strategy. It only works if you decided something about how you treat people before you met them.

Here is the part I respect most. In that same stretch, a speaking slot she had offered me fell through on her end. She told me before our scheduled call rather than letting me walk into it, and she gave me the real reason instead of a comfortable one. Delivering bad news early costs the person delivering it. The transactional move is to wait and hope the problem solves itself.

Two moments, neither with a return attached. The woman running the most relational math in this city has apparently stopped running it on people.

The Word I Actually Mean

I'm a man of faith, and the tradition I come from has a specific word for this. Agape. It is one of several Greek words for love, and it is the only one that does not depend on how you feel. Not affection, not

chemistry. A decision to act for someone's good with no clause about what returns to you.

That is the whole distinction, and it does not require you to share my faith to use it. You don't have to be religious to know the difference between being generous when you feel like it and deciding in advance who you will be when you don't. Anybody can run that discipline. Most of us never decided to.

Why the Transactional Version Stalls Out

This region is excellent at a certain kind of coffee. You know the one. Thirty minutes, warm open, and then at minute twenty-two the ask arrives right on schedule, because it was on the calendar invite the whole time.

Nothing is wrong with a clear ask. I make them. The problem is when the ask is the only thing in the account.

Transactional generosity has a low ceiling for one simple reason. People can feel the math, and what they do with that feeling is give you their professional face and nothing else. You get compliance. You

never get the referral they only make for people they trust, or the warning six weeks before the problem becomes yours.

There is also a timing problem. Generosity compounds, and compounding looks like nothing at all for a long while before it looks like everything. If you need it to pay this quarter, you will quit before the curve turns. So you have to stop running the return calculation, not because calculating is wrong, but because the calculation is what breaks the thing you are building.

Which brings me to the sentence I would put on the wall if I were running your company. Heart is not the opposite of results. It is what makes them last.

Here is how I got here. Years ago, a partner at one of the Big Four firms gave me an hour over coffee. He had no reason to. That hour is why I sit on a nonprofit board in this city today, which is why a corporate partner and two more board members came to that organization years later, none of which he could have forecast while he paid. He was not investing. He was a man who gave away hours.

Try This From Your Seat

Here's the practice for this week. No budget, no title, and it will not show up on any dashboard.

Pick three people. Do one concrete thing for each that cannot be invoiced. Not a compliment. A real

thing. Make the introduction you've been meaning to make. Put the recommendation in writing where somebody who decides will read it. Give the hour. Send the number of the person who can actually solve their problem.

Then the hard part, and this is the whole exercise. No follow-up. Do not circle back. Do not mention it later in a negotiation. Do not track it.

One filter to keep yourself honest: would you have done it for someone who can never, under any

circumstances, buy anything from you? If the answer is no, you didn't practice generosity this week. You ran a sales motion with better manners.

Then do it again next week, and the week after, and judge the results in ninety days rather than on Friday. Discipline is just the word we use for the things we keep doing before the evidence arrives.

Where This Is Already the Operating Model Here is why this column sits where it does.

The organizations I keep bringing you already run on this. After-School All-Stars Puget Sound, Rainier

Valley Leadership Academy, UNCF Seattle, Community Roots Housing, and Founders Live all make a daily decision to act for the good of people who cannot pay them back. That is not a marketing position. It is

their operating model, and they run it on budgets that would frighten you.

So if you want to practice this at a scale that matters, give those organizations your money, unrestricted if you can manage it. Give them your expertise, which is worth more on a board than another table at a gala. Give them access, which is the one nobody asks for out loudNot.

Community over competition, y'all. That phrase is not a sentiment. It's a strategy that just happens to require you to go first.

In March I'll stand in front of a room of Seattle business owners and ask them a harder version of this. If someone looked only at your calendar from the last month, what would they say you actually care about? I will report back in this column on what that room says, because I suspect the answers will be more honest than anybody plans on being at a luncheon.

Until then, pick your three people. Decide before you feel like it. Create Possibilities, Not Excuses.

Jesse Rhodes Jr.

Jesse Rhodes Jr. is a speaker, author of Leadership Unlocked: Harness the Power of Your Ambition, and strategic advisor specializing in values-based leadership. He teaches at the University of Washington Foster School of Business, serves on the UNCF Seattle Leadership Council, and chairs the board of After-School All-Stars Puget Sound. He is available for keynotes, leadership offsites, and Employee Resource

Group (ERG) events. Reach him at info@jesserhodesjr.com.