Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

Adam Grant is the Saul P. Steinberg Professor of Management at Wharton Business School, where he also serves as a professor of psychology. He holds a PhD in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan and a BA from Harvard. He's also been a successful advertising salesman in the publishing industry, a professional magician, and a junior Olympic diver. It's quite a résumé!

His research focuses on generosity, motivation, and the importance of meaningful work. It's a growing area, to judge from his success. He's been voted Wharton's most popular professor seven years in a row.

This book is aimed at anyone who wants to achieve success, but who may not have the upfront, confrontational personality traditionally associated with it. The book also offers useful insight for managers looking to build collaborative, trusting teams. And it may even provide food for thought for more dominant personalities who'd like to try a different approach.

So, keep listening to hear how givers build powerful networks, how they influence others without dominating the conversation, and how an "otherish" approach helps them avoid generosity burnout.

The book is divided into nine chapters, each one offering insights on an aspect of reciprocity. An afterword tells us how to apply these principles in our own lives and careers.

Reciprocity is the key to understanding the importance of givers. It's the extent to which we exchange value with other people, and the measure of how, and how much, we give and take in all our relationships – personal and professional.

According to Grant, there are three main reciprocity styles: taker, matcher and giver.

Takers view the world as a set of limited resources for which they must compete. They tend to view any negotiation as a zero-sum game, with a winner and a loser, and put their own interests ahead of others'.

They need to be better than the competition, and present themselves as such, emphasizing self-promotion. Some takers hide their true natures to gain advantage. Grant describes these people as "fake takers," or simply fakers.

Matchers have a less selfish worldview than takers. They'll likely be happy to do someone a good turn, as long as there's some kind of payoff for them. In striking a balance between give and take, they demonstrate a strong sense of fairness, underpinned by equally strong self-serving instincts. Most people are instinctive matchers.

Givers, by contrast, are generous without expecting anything in return. They focus primarily on the needs of others without considering what it might cost them. That doesn't mean givers are unambitious. They just have a different, more collective view of what success is.

Grant says very few people fall into just one category. During a single workday, each of us may behave at different times like a taker, a matcher, and a giver. It depends on the circumstances: someone who acts like a taker when negotiating a long-overdue salary raise may also share their expertise freely with a co-worker and expect nothing in return.

However, most of us do tend toward one style above the others. So, how can adopting or enhancing a giving style help us be more successful?

Well, one of the keys to success is building effective networks, and givers are great at this. Good networks are vital to most of us, whether they consist of formal business contacts or our friends and relatives. In the age of social media they're also easier to establish than they've ever been before. And they're more visible, too.

But what makes a network effective? And how do givers develop better networks than takers?

Takers and matchers often seek to establish networks by offering something to a would-be contact – but usually, with strings attached. They expect the favor to be returned, preferably with interest.

This can cause the contact to feel indebted to the taker. The resulting relationship is less likely to be trusting, and therefore not as strong.

Givers don't behave like that. They give their knowledge and know-how for nothing. As a result, they build networks with no strings, where their contacts trust them to play fair. And in those networks, people are much more likely to reciprocate because they want to, with no expectation of gain.

The same principle of reciprocity is valuable in collaborative working. In general, people overestimate their own contribution to collaborative work, mainly because they're more focused on their own effort and may not notice other people's. It's a phenomenon called responsibility bias.

Takers readily fall into responsibility bias. They also regard themselves as independent of the collective effort, while being keen to take the credit for any success. In their defense, they're sometimes right; many genuine visionaries, such as the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, have demonstrated strong taker tendencies.

The giver style is different. By offering support, coaching, and credit, givers build a genuine team dynamic based on shared responsibility, and shared success. And giving can be contagious. Research shows that when one or more members of a team has a consistently giving style, others start to behave the same way, developing a culture of generosity.

So, why are givers more likely to succeed in bridging gaps, building networks, and sharing credit? Grant explains the psychology, with another swipe at takers.

Experiments show that when people aren't actually experiencing a physical or emotional state, they underestimate its importance. Say that one of your team members suffered a recent bereavement. You might offer sympathy, but your natural tendency would be to underestimate its effect, unless you've had the recent experience of grief yourself.

This difference in perception is called the perspective gap. Takers can't cross it easily. Their default setting is to think about how they feel, not others. Givers can, and do, bridge the gap: they reach out to others, show empathy and make connections. It's a particularly beneficial skill in collaborative, creative work, and it's highly valuable in many other situations.

Take the search for new talent, for example. Organizations from sports teams to global corporations spend millions of dollars searching for the right people. But they usually go about it in the wrong way. They interview, collect data, and set grueling selection tests, and their main focus is on natural ability.

Grant says it's better to focus on potential as much as ability, and that's what givers do: they see potential in everyone. A survey of high-achieving musicians discovered that almost all of them had teachers who worked hard with them, and showed empathy. These teachers rewarded their successes, sympathized with their struggles, and understood their motivation to do well.

Of course, not everyone is going to be a virtuoso musician – and that's OK. Givers will invest time and effort in coaching someone, and if it doesn't work out, they'll acknowledge this, and then help the learner onto a more suitable path.

By contrast, Grant says takers are more likely to cling to a failing protégé, because the protégé's failure reflects badly on them. Reputation matters to them, and there's more on this later.

Whatever their circumstances, givers need to find a way to make themselves heard, or their efforts and achievements won't get noticed. Conventional wisdom says that the most effective communicators are dominant and forceful, delivering a clear message with little room for discussion. When they negotiate, they do it to win.

But according to Grant, conventional wisdom is wrong. The key to successful communication is what he calls powerless communication; rather than making strong declarations, successful communicators ask questions. They try to put themselves in the shoes of the people they're communicating with.

This kind of communication is at the heart of good customer service, for example. In that situation you need to prioritize listening over getting your point across. Givers tend to be good at active listening, and can use it effectively in roles such as selling, too.

In discussing the importance of maintaining motivation, Grant coins the term "otherish." Otherish givers have both a strong concern for others' interests and a strong degree of self-interest. This sounds strange, but it's quite possible.

Self-interest and concern for others are not opposite ends of a spectrum. For instance, if a colleague asks you for help when you're working to meet a deadline, you can offer to help her in your lunch break, after you've sent off your completed project.

Otherish giving differs from matching. Matchers, though fair-minded, expect a return from every act of giving. Otherish givers don't ask for anything in return, but they don't allow themselves to become overstretched by their naturally generous style.

And becoming overstretched is a big issue for some givers. There's a limit to how much you can give before you start to do yourself psychological harm. Generosity burnout is a real possibility for some.

So, what's to be done?

Givers are most likely to remain motivated when they can actually see the good their efforts are achieving. It's not that they need something specific in return, like matchers. They just need the stimulation of seeing those they've helped succeed.

Grant gives this example. A fundraising team seeking donations from college alumni was experiencing poor motivation and weak results. When the manager invited a scholarship student to explain the positive difference donors had made in his life, the team's motivation, and results, soared.

Even so, there's always the risk that givers will be seen as pushovers. Worse, that they'll be treated as doormats, to be taken advantage of by their seemingly more savvy peers.

Grant shares a story from early in his career, when he was trying to sell advertising space in travel books. At first, his clients bullied him into giving discounts. He saw their point of view, and caved in. But when he realized that his colleagues were also depending on him, he refocused his giving effort toward his own team.

This enabled him to push back against clients' demands, in a very otherish way. He put himself in his clients' shoes, and came up with imaginative promotional inducements to retain their goodwill. As a result, he achieved record sales. And this was during the collapse of the internet bubble at the turn of the millennium, when advertising revenue generally was in decline.

So much for natural givers! They have many surprising advantages, as long as they remember to look after their own welfare and interests too.

But what about everyone else? Will matchers always be looking to get something in return for their giving? Are takers doomed always to be selfish, dominant and uncollaborative? Maybe not.

Grant conducted an experiment called the Reciprocity Ring. He asked all the students in a class to make one request for help with a project, a goal, or even a childhood dream. He then asked the rest of the students to volunteer their services as they saw fit. Despite some initial skepticism, the project took off, and students began helping their classmates without expecting rewards.

The results were as you might expect. The students profiled as givers gave more help than those identified as matchers or takers. But not by much. When the giving was public, takers were almost as likely as givers to volunteer help.

Grant put this down to reputation. Takers naturally hold back from giving in private contexts, but when their participation is public, they can see that being part of the ring benefits their reputation.

So, what do we think of "Give and Take"? Well, it's a passionately argued manifesto for the importance of giving in the workplace. The writing is brisk, concise and clear, and Grant tells some great stories. He's good at setting up his readers' expectations of an outcome, only to undercut it with a surprising reveal. Maybe he's still a magician at heart.

On the downside, much of the research in the book will sound familiar to anyone who's read widely in this area. Grant leans heavily on a number of classic studies. In that light, the claim that the book is groundbreaking doesn't quite stack up.

Even so, "Give and Take" is a thought-provoking book that lays out the benefits of giving, and makes the psychology that lies behind it understandable, even to lay readers.

"Give and Take" by Adam Grant is published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.