by Adam Grant
These energizing effects help to explain why otherish givers are fortified against burnout: through giving, they build up reserves of happiness and meaning that takers and matchers are less able to access. Selfless givers use up these reserves, exhausting themselves and often dropping to the bottom of the success ladder. By giving in ways that are energizing rather than exhausting, otherish givers are more likely to rise to the top. In two studies of employees in a wide range of jobs and organizations, psychologist David Mayer and I found that otherish employees made more sustainable contributions than the selfless givers, takers, or matchers. Employees who reported strong concern for benefiting others and creating a positive image for themselves were rated by supervisors as being the most helpful and taking the most initiative.
Ironically, because concern for their own interests sustains their energy, otherish givers actually give more than selfless givers. This is what the late Herbert Simon, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, observed in the quote that opened this chapter. Otherish givers may appear less altruistic than selfless givers, but their resilience against burnout enables them to contribute more.
7
Chump Change
Overcoming the Doormat Effect
No good deed goes unpunished.
—attributed to Clare Boothe Luce, editor, playwright, and U.S. congresswoman
Lillian Bauer was a brilliant, hardworking manager at an elite consulting firm. She was recruited out of Harvard, and after leaving the firm to complete her MBA, her consulting firm lured her back. She was widely seen as a rising star, and she was on track to make partner far ahead of schedule, until word began to spread that she was too generous. Her promotion to partner was delayed for six months, and she received very direct feedback that she needed to say no more often to clients and colleagues. After a full year, she still had not made it.
Bauer was passionate about making a difference. She devoted several years to a nonprofit organization helping women launch and grow businesses. There, she introduced a microloan program, opening doors for low-income women to start their own companies. In one case, a woman needed a loan to open a salon, but was turned down by two banks. Bauer worked with her to strengthen her business plan and financial statements, and both banks ended up offering her loans at highly competitive rates. As a consultant, Bauer spent countless hours mentoring new employees, giving career advice to associates, and even helping junior colleagues strengthen their applications to business school. “I really want to help. If an hour of my time saves people ten hours or gives them an opportunity they otherwise wouldn’t have, it’s easy to make the tradeoff and give another hour of my time.”
Bauer was extremely talented and driven, but she took giving so far that it was compromising her reputation and her productivity. “She never said no to anything,” explained one consulting colleague. “She was so generous and giving with her time that she fell into the trap of being more of a pushover. It really delayed her promotion to partner.” In a performance review, Bauer was told that she needed to be more selfish: she lacked the assertive edge that was expected of a consulting partner. She spent too much time developing those around her, and she was so committed to helping clients that she bent over backward to meet their requests. It was known that Bauer “wasn’t as forceful in pushing clients as people felt she needed to be to make that partner hurdle, in those key moments where clients needed to hear a harsh message, or clients had been pushing an agenda in the wrong direction.” For Bauer, being a giver became a career-limiting move.
In a study that mirrors Bauer’s experience, management professors Diane Bergeron, Abbie Shipp, Ben Rosen, and Stacie Furst studied more than 3,600 consultants in a large professional services firm. The researchers coded giving behavior from company records of the weekly time that each consultant spent helping new hires, mentoring more junior consultants, and sharing knowledge or expertise with peers. After a year of tracking these giving behaviors every week, the researchers obtained data on each consultant’s salary, advancement speed, and promotions.
The givers did worse on all three metrics. They had significantly lower salary increases, slower advancement, and lower promotion rates. The givers averaged 9 percent salary increases, compared with 10.5 percent and 11.5 percent for the takers and matchers, respectively. Less than 65 percent of the givers were promoted to a manager role, compared with 83 percent and 82 percent for the takers and matchers, respectively. And the givers who did get promoted had to wait longer, averaging twenty-six months to promotion, compared with less than twenty-four months for takers and matchers. This was a familiar pattern to Bauer: “If I err on one side, it’s probably being too generous: putting others first, before myself.”
Hundreds of miles east at Deloitte Consulting in New York City, Jason Geller was also on the fast track to partner. When he first started in consulting, Deloitte was just moving to e-mail and did not have a formalized knowledge management process—there was no system for storing and retrieving information that consultants gathered on specific industries and clients. Geller took the initiative to collect and share information. When he heard about a project, he would ask the team for its output. He kept a stack of articles on his nightstand, reading them in bed, and when he came across an interesting article, he would file it away. He conducted research on what Deloitte’s competitors were doing. “I was a little bit of a geek.”
Deloitte’s knowledge management system became Jason Geller’s brain, and his hard drive. His colleagues began calling it the J-Net, the Jason Network. When they had questions or needed information, he was the go-to guy. It was easier to ask him than to search for themselves, and he was always willing to share the knowledge from his brain or his growing database. No one asked him to create the J-Net; he just did it because it seemed like the right thing to do.
Since graduating from Cornell, Geller had spent his entire career at Deloitte, doing an MBA at Columbia along the way. He was grateful for the support that his mentors provided to him. A matcher would have paid it back, looking for ways to return the favor to his mentors. But as a giver, like Lillian Bauer, Geller wanted to pay it forward. “It becomes the natural way of doing things. You see that the folks who are successful are the ones who help others. I naturally fell into the practice of helping others. I saw that others created those opportunities for me, and I now work very hard to create them for other people.” Geller made a standing offer to every new employee: he would help and mentor them in any way that he could.
The typical path to partner at Deloitte takes between twelve and fifteen years. Geller made it far ahead of schedule, in just nine years. At just thirty years old, he became one of the youngest partners in Deloitte history. Today, Geller is a partner in Deloitte’s human capital consulting practice, where the business he leads globally and in the United States has been ranked number one in the marketplace. Yet a colleague describes him as a guy “who frequently shuns the spotlight in favor of his colleagues.” As Deloitte’s global and U.S. HR transformation practice leader, Geller has taken the J-Net to a new level and is a strong advocate for Deloitte’s formal global knowledge management processes and technologies. With a mix of admiration and incredulity, one analyst notes that “although he is incredibly busy, he holds regular meetings with analysts so he can help them through any issues they may be facing at the time.” Geller is reluctant to take credit for his accomplishments, but after some prodding, acknowledges that “being generous is what has made me successful here.”
Although Lillian Bauer and Jason Geller are both givers, they found themselves on very different trajectories. Why did giving stall her career, while accelerating his?
The intuitive answer has to do with gender, but that’s not the key differentiator—at least not in the conventional sense. Lillian Bauer fell into three major traps that plague many givers, male and female, in their dealings with other people: being too trusting, too empathetic, and too timid. In this cha
pter, my goal is to show you how successful givers like Jason Geller avoid these risks, and how givers like Lillian learn to overcome them by acting less selfless and more otherish. Becoming a doormat is the giver’s worst nightmare, and I’ll make the case that an otherish approach enables givers to escape the trap of being too trusting by becoming highly flexible and adaptable in their reciprocity styles. I’ll also argue that an otherish style helps givers sidestep the land mines of being too empathetic and too timid by repurposing some skills that come naturally to them.
Sincerity Screening: Trusting Most of the People Most of the Time
In the opening chapter, we met an Australian financial adviser named Peter Audet, whose giver style paid off when he took a drive to visit a scrap metal client. But long before that, before he figured out how to be more otherish than selfless, Peter was ripped off by several takers. At twenty-two, he started his career as a financial adviser at a cutthroat company. It was his responsibility to aggressively build an insurance division for a business that primarily served retirement clients. Peter was working weekends to generate six-figure annual revenues, but received a tiny fraction of the revenues, taking home minimum wage of $400 per week. He stayed for nearly three years, and it was the most miserable time of his life. “My boss was greedy. He never recognized what you did, only what he could get from you.” In appreciation of Peter’s services, one of his insurance clients sent him a beautiful Christmas basket. His boss, a wealthy man who drove to work in a Mercedes-Benz, saw the basket and immediately took it home for himself: “I’m the boss, and it’s mine.”
Peter felt like he was drowning, and decided to strike off on his own as a financial adviser. In his first year alone, he quadrupled his salary. But five years later, he was manipulated by another taker. A friendly colleague, Brad, was not doing well at work. Brad landed another position that would start the following week, and he asked Peter for a favor. Would he buy Brad’s clients on two days’ notice so that Brad could afford to leave? As a giver, Peter trusted Brad and agreed on the spot. He purchased Brad’s clients and began forging relationships with them, helping to solve their financial problems.
After a few months, Peter started to lose some of his clients. Strangely, they were all former clients of Brad’s. It turned out that Brad was back in the business as a financial adviser, and he had called every one of the clients who he had sold to Peter. He just wanted to let them know he was back, and they were welcome to switch over to work with him again. Brad stole many of the clients back without paying Peter a dime for them. Peter lost around $10,000 in business.
Had Peter been able to identify Brad from the start as a taker, he might never have gone down that road. Trust is one reason that givers are so susceptible to the doormat effect: they tend to see the best in everyone, so they operate on the mistaken assumption that everyone is trustworthy. In one study, researchers tracked whether Americans had been victims of crimes such as fraud, con games, and identity theft. The givers were twice as likely to be victimized as the takers, often as a direct result of trusting takers. One giver was generous enough to cosign for a friend’s car loan, and over a five-year period, the friend opened three credit cards in his identity, stealing more than $2,000.
To avoid getting scammed or exploited, it’s critical to distinguish the genuine givers from the takers and fakers. Successful givers need to know who’s likely to manipulate them so that they can protect themselves. Do we actually know takers when we see them? Many people think they can judge givers and takers in the blink of an eye. But in reality, they’re wildly inaccurate. Blink again.
I don’t mean to imply that we fail across the board in thin slicing. As Malcolm Gladwell revealed in Blink, many of our snap judgments of people are strikingly accurate. At a glance, we can often spot a passionate teacher, an extraverted salesperson, or a married couple in contempt. But we struggle mightily when guessing who’s a genuine giver.
In one study, economists asked a group of Harvard students to predict the giving and taking behaviors of their close friends and of complete strangers. The friends and strangers received fifty tokens worth between ten and thirty cents each, and were asked to divide the tokens between themselves and the Harvard students. The Harvard students did no better in predicting how much their friends would give than they did in predicting the behavior of complete strangers. “They correctly expect that friends pass more tokens than strangers,” the researchers write, “but they do not expect more tokens from generous friends compared to selfish friends.” This is a crucial mistake, because the giving friends end up contributing quite a bit more than the takers.
When we try to zero in on a person’s reciprocity signal, it’s easy to be thrown off by plenty of noise. To judge givers, we often rely on personality cues, but it turns out these cues can be misleading. In half a century of research, psychologists have discovered a fundamental personality trait that distinguishes how people tend to appear in their social interactions. It’s called agreeableness, and it’s why Peter Audet was fooled by Brad. Like Brad, agreeable people tend to appear cooperative and polite—they seek harmony with others, coming across as warm, nice, and welcoming. Disagreeable people tend to be more competitive, critical, and tough—they’re more comfortable with conflict, coming across as skeptical and challenging.*
We tend to stereotype agreeable people as givers, and disagreeable people as takers. When a new contact appears affable, it’s natural to conclude that he has good intentions. If he comes across as cold or confrontational, this seems like a sign that he doesn’t care about what’s in our best interests.* But in making these judgments, we’re paying too much attention to the shell of a person’s demeanor, overlooking the pearl—or clam—inside the shell. Giving and taking are based on our motives and values, and they’re choices that we make regardless of whether our personalities trend agreeable or disagreeable. As Danny Shader, the serial entrepreneur from the opening chapter who initially walked away from David Hornik’s term sheet, explains, “Whether you’re nice or not nice is separate from whether you’re self-focused or other-focused. They’re independent, not opposites.” When you combine outer appearances and inner intentions, agreeable givers and disagreeable takers are only two of the four combinations that exist in the world.
We often overlook that there are disagreeable givers: people who are rough and tough in demeanor, but ultimately generous with their time, expertise, and connections. As an example, Shader mentions the late Mike Homer, who ran marketing at Netscape. “He could be crusty as hell on the outside, but on the inside he was pure gold. When push came to shove, he always did the right thing, and he was incredibly loyal.” Greg Sands, a Homer disciple and the managing director of a private equity firm, agrees. “Your fundamental concern is whether people are givers or takers, but you’ve got this other axis, which is are they nice about it—is their fundamental demeanor welcoming? Homer had a hard edge. When he was locked onto a path, something that got in the way of that objective would just get swept away. But he had a big heart, and he wanted to be helpful. He was definitely off the charts on both” giving and disagreeableness. Another one of Homer’s former employees said that Homer “seemed like a taker, because he had incredibly high expectations and demands. But at the end of the day, he really cared about the people. One minute, he was giving me a tough time because his expectations weren’t being met. The next day, he was helping me figure out what I wanted to do next in my career, what was the right next job for me.”
The other counterintuitive combination of appearances and motives is the agreeable taker, otherwise known as a faker. Like Ken Lay at Enron, these people come across as pleasant and charming, but they’re often aiming to get much more than they give. The ability to recognize agreeable takers as fakers is what protects givers against being exploited.
Although they don’t always put their skills to good use, givers have an instinctive advantage in sincerity screening. Research suggests that
in general, givers are more accurate judges of others than matchers and takers. Givers are more attentive to others’ behaviors and more attuned to their thoughts and feelings, which makes it possible to pick up more clues—such as describing successes with first-person singular pronouns, like I and me instead of us and we. Givers also gain a sincerity screening advantage from habitually trusting others, which creates opportunities to see the wide range of behaviors of which other people are capable. Sometimes, givers get burned by takers. In other situations, givers find that their generosity is reciprocated or even exceeded. Over time, givers become sensitive to individual differences and shades of gray between the black-and-white boxes of agreeable and disagreeable.
But givers become doormats when they fail to use this fine-tuned knowledge of differences between veneers and motives. The inclination to give first and ask questions later often comes at the expense of sincerity screening. In consulting, Lillian Bauer made a habit of clearing her schedule for virtually anyone who asked, regardless of who they were. When a client asked for a supplementary analysis, even if it wasn’t technically part of the project, she would do it, wanting to please the client. When a junior analyst needed advice, she would immediately open up time in her calendar, sacrificing her personal time.