Too little
The disappearing contribution
“Call it a refinement from the team; no need to say whose.”
Rivalry turns a useful contribution into something to conceal.
Magnanimity
Recognize a legitimate opponent's contribution without needing to diminish your own.
Freedom from petty resentment when another's standing challenges one's pride.
Magnanimity frees judgment from petty resentment when another person’s standing challenges one’s pride. In public work, a rival can make a useful contribution without diminishing the value of yours. Recognizing that contribution keeps the common purpose larger than the contest for credit. It does not require admiration of everything the person believes or does.
Magnanimity gives cooperation that can survive a rival’s good idea
An opposition member’s amendment gives your council’s service plan a scheduled review: residents will hear what worked, what failed and what needs to change. It is a useful addition to the proposal you sponsored. In your public explanation, the review date receives a whole slide and its author receives an invisible acknowledgment. You add the name and describe the contribution plainly, without a compensating account of your own brilliance. The lectern remains exactly the same height. Your standing has survived another person being useful.
Finding the balance in Magnanimity
The sponsor of a council proposal must publicly credit an opposition member’s useful review amendment.
A fitting response
Credit in proportion
“The opposition member’s amendment gives this service a useful review date.”
The contribution is acknowledged without surrendering other disagreements.
Pursued too far
The grand gesture
“Give them all the credit so everyone can admire my generosity.”
A performance of largeness misrepresents the work and recenters the speaker.
If the amendment has a serious drawback, name it. Magnanimity removes petty resentment from judgment; it does not remove judgment.
What Magnanimity makes possible
Good ideas can travel across disagreement, and contributors have a reason to keep offering them. A public account can show how a proposal improved instead of presenting one person as its sole source. The resulting pride can attach to a useful shared achievement rather than to the absence of visible rivals.
Magnanimity in ordinary life
A meeting recap
Name the person whose suggestion solved the problem, even if your own suggestion was not used.
A changed plan
Thank someone for a correction without adding a sentence that takes the compliment back.
Nearby virtues, different work
Fairness
Fairness weighs the proposal impartially. Magnanimity addresses the wounded pride that can make another person’s success hard to acknowledge.
Generosity
Generosity gives something of value. Magnanimity releases the petty rivalry that can make due credit feel like a personal loss.
Magnanimity and its counterfeits
Patronizing praise
A compliment that presents the rival as fortunate to receive your approval counterfeits Magnanimity. Describe the actual contribution without arranging a hierarchy of worth.
The credit spectacle
Overstating someone’s contribution to exhibit your own nobility is a counterfeit of Magnanimity. Accurate acknowledgment serves the work and the contributor.
How to cultivate Magnanimity
Notice the impulse to minimize a useful contribution because of who made it.
Describe what the idea improved before thinking about credit to yourself.
Let an acknowledgment stand without a compensating boast.
Try it today
Give specific, proportionate credit for one useful contribution you did not make.
Questions worth returning to
- Would I praise this idea more readily if an ally had proposed it?
- Is my acknowledgment about their contribution or my image?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
Instead of shutting out what is different, we should welcome it because it is different and through its difference will make a richer content of life.
Follett values a contribution precisely because it differs from one’s own. A rival’s amendment can improve the shared plan without requiring anyone to pretend that all their disagreements have vanished.
You surely thought those acquisitions of value, for they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the spirit by which that enterprising employment has been exercised ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration.
Edmund Burke · Speech on Conciliation with America · House of Commons, 22 March 1775
Burke asks Parliament to exchange envy for esteem when considering colonial fisheries. He makes another community’s achievement a reason for recognition rather than a wound to national pride.
In 1751, Dr. Thomas Bond, a particular friend of mine, conceived the idea of establishing a hospital in Philadelphia (a very beneficent design, which has been ascrib’d to me, but was originally his), for the reception and cure of poor sick persons, whether inhabitants of the province or strangers.
Benjamin Franklin · The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin · Part III
Franklin corrects the attribution of a public benefit even while recounting his own career. Giving an amendment its true author likewise makes the public account more accurate without reducing the value of one’s own contribution.
How, again, can government, or any joint concern, be carried on in a tolerable manner by people so envious that, if one among them seems likely to succeed in any thing, those who ought to cooperate with him form a tacit combination to make him fail?
John Stuart Mill · Considerations on Representative Government · Chapter II
Mill identifies envy as an obstacle to useful cooperation. Withholding credit from a rival’s improvement may gratify that feeling, but it makes everyone’s common work harder.
Great and acknowledged force is not impaired, either in effect or in opinion, by an unwillingness to exert itself. The superior power may offer peace with honor and with safety. Such an offer from such a power will be attributed to magnanimity.
Edmund Burke · Speech on Conciliation with America · House of Commons, 22 March 1775
Burke urges Britain, as the stronger party, to initiate conciliation with the colonies. He challenges the assumption that willingness to make the first concession must diminish public standing.
The superior man does not promote a man simply on account of his words, nor does he put aside good words because of the man.
Confucius · The Analects · Book XV, chapter XXII · Translated by James Legge
This paired distinction refuses both empty eloquence and rejection by personal dislike. A useful amendment deserves recognition even when its author is the person the sponsor least wanted to thank.
While I am deeply sensible to the high compliment of a re-election, and duly grateful as I trust to Almighty God for having directed my countrymen to a right conclusion, as I think, for their own good, it adds nothing to my satisfaction that any other man may be disappointed or pained by the result.
Lincoln distinguishes satisfaction in victory from pleasure in another person’s defeat. Magnanimity lets public success remain useful without requiring the rival to be diminished.
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Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.