• Tweet

  • Mail service

  • Share

  • Save

  • Get PDF

  • Buy Copies

  • Print
Ryan McVay/Getty Images

In these difficult times, we've fabricated a number of our coronavirus manufactures complimentary for all readers. To go all of HBR's content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alarm newsletter.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel to look around and see how the Covid-19 crunch has brought out the worst in some people — from hoarding thousands of bottles of manus sanitizer to crowding confined and restaurants despite public-wellness guidelines. Just such irresponsible behavior, I believe, is more the exception than the rule. Time and again, individuals and communities have demonstrated that the worst situations tend to bring out the best in people and the organizations to which they belong. In every moment of darkness, it seems, there are endless moments of light — modest gestures of pity and connection that allow people to prove who they are, how they want to live, and what matters to them.

For her book A Paradise Built in Hell, the celebrated nonfiction writer Rebecca Solnit studied impromptu, spontaneous, bottom-upward responses to some of the world's worst natural and human being-made disasters — mortiferous earthquakes in San Francisco and Mexico Metropolis, the Halifax Explosion of 1917, the September eleven attacks. "The history of disaster," she writes, "demonstrates that most of the states are social animals, hungry for connection, also equally for purpose and meaning." A truly dire situation, as tragic as it is, "drags us into emergencies that require we act, and human action altruistically, bravely, and with initiative in order to survive or save our neighbors, no matter how we vote or what we do for a living."

Every bit I idea about Solnit'due south observations, I thought dorsum to an act of business concern heroism that brought her message to life. It happened during the depths of Hurricane Katrina, which famously ravaged New Orleans, just likewise devastated the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. For weeks and months, everyday life was a struggle — not just finding food, clothes, or diapers, but finding the money to pay for them. In that location was no electricity, then no manner for credit-card systems to piece of work. Bank branches were flooded and ATM machines were wrecked, then at that place was no way to become cash.

From this drastic state of affairs emerged an inspired response by employees at Hancock Bank, a community banking concern based in Gulfport, Mississippi, with roots back to 1899. In the days immediately after Katrina, bank employees, who had their own personal crises to deal with, scavenged the floors, drawers, and bank vaults in the twoscore or and then Hancock branches that had been obliterated by the storm, along with the waterlogged remains of local casinos. They scooped upward all the wet, muddy, filthy cash they could find, and stuffed it into plastic garbage bags. They hooked up washers and dryers to generators, fix rows of ironing boards, and gently cleaned and ironed the greenbacks — they literally laundered money!

They so prepare folding tables and tarps outside the branches and distributed greenbacks to anyone who asked for it, even though hardly anyone had an ID, since all of their possessions had been washed away. At that place were no computer systems, so employees recorded the "withdrawals" on scraps of paper with each person's proper noun, address, and Social Security number. Hancock's makeshift operation distributed more than $42 1000000 in "laundered" cash. Equally ane in-depth news account noted, it was a scene that "would brand a mob dominate proud."

In reality, this grassroots expression of ingenuity and humanity made the bank and its customers proud. Hancock got back more than than 99.5% of the greenbacks it distributed. Its deposits and assets soared: When customers went to a branch to repay the coin, or non-customers did the same, they were so grateful that they opened a new account, added to an existing business relationship, and used the bank for their adjacent machine loan or mortgage. Hancock CEO George Schloegel told an oral-history project that the attitude was, "You were there when I needed you. You're going to exist my banking concern." In the year afterward the tempest, deposits grew by $one.5 billion.

Meanwhile, Hancock'southward business organisation strategy was reinforced by these gestures of service and trust. Hancock had ever prided itself on a civilisation of planning for natural disasters, which are part of life in its part of the world. Since Katrina, though, its "last-to-close-first-to-open" philosophy has become core to its brand identity. Ten years after the tempest, bank executives were invited to open trading on the Nasdaq stock marketplace to gloat the region's resilience and the behavior of their employees during the Gulf Declension'south "darkest days."

The bottom line: Applied, useful acts of kindness are good for humanity, and proficient for business. Acts of kindness are too good for the people who do them — and the more tangible the human action, the better. Academics who study "prosocial" behavior (as opposed to "antisocial" beliefs) often note the ability of "helper's loftier," or what is less charitably called "impure altruism." The satisfaction that comes from doing things for others benefits the states as well. "It's hard to exercise something truly altruistic," argues University of Houston professor Melanie Rudd, "because we always feel skilful most ourselves after nosotros've performed that human activity of kindness."

Yes, these are scary, trying, difficult times, and they are likely to get worse before they go better. Only every bit we shake our heads at some bit of reckless beliefs featured on the news, or we throw up our hands in despair wondering how our company tin can make a difference,have a page from Rebecca Solnit'southward volume, and the lessons of Hancock Depository financial institution, and look for ways for y'all and your colleagues to do something to make things a little ameliorate.

During the course of her research, Solnit analyzed the work of Charles E. Fritz, a behemothic of mod disaster studies, a field that emerged after World War 2, and she was amazed past his views. Fritz's most "radical premise," she explained, "is that everyday life is already a disaster of sorts, one from which actual disaster liberates usa," since it gives each of u.s.a. the chance to express the best in ourselves. The "merging of individual and societal needs" during a disaster, Fritz argued, "provides a feeling of belonging and a sense of unity rarely achieved nether normal circumstances."

And then don't be agape to let bad times bring out the best in your company — and in you.

If our content helps you to contend with coronavirus and other challenges, delight consider subscribing to HBR. A subscription purchase is the all-time way to support the creation of these resources.