by Adam Grant
What changed her mind? When Sherryann first recognized her giver attributes, she was focused on the risks: people expected her to be tough and results-oriented, and might see giving as a sign of weakness. But when she started taking a close look around her company, she was struck by the realization that all of her professional role models were givers. Suddenly, her frame of reference shifted: instead of just seeing givers at the bottom, she recognized a surprising number of givers at the top. This isn’t what we usually notice when we glance up at the horizon at successful people. By and large, because of their tendencies toward powerful speech and claiming credit, successful takers tend to dominate the spotlight. But if you start paying attention to reciprocity styles in your own workplace, I have a hunch that you’ll discover plenty of givers achieving the success to which you aspire.
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Personally, the successful people whom I admire most are givers, and I feel that it’s my responsibility to try and pass along what I’ve learned from them. When I arrived at Wharton, my charge was to teach some of the world’s finest analytic minds to become better leaders, managers, and negotiators. I decided to introduce them to reciprocity styles, posing the question that animated the introduction to this book: who do you think ends up at the bottom of the success ladder?
The verdict was nearly unanimous: givers. When I asked who rises to the top, the students were evenly split between matchers and takers. So I chose to teach them something that struck them as heretical. “You might be underestimating the success of givers,” I told them. It’s true that some people who consistently help others without expecting anything in return are the ones who fall to the bottom. But this same orientation toward giving, with a few adjustments, can also enable people to rise to the top. “Focus attention and energy on making a difference in the lives of others, and success might follow as a by-product.” I knew I was fighting an uphill battle, so I decided to prove them wrong.
This book is that proof.
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Although many of us hold strong giver values, we’re often reluctant to express them at work. But the growth of teamwork, service jobs, and social media has opened up new opportunities for givers to develop relationships and reputations that accelerate and amplify their success. We’ve covered evidence that givers can rise to the top across a stunningly diverse range of occupations, from engineering to medicine to sales. And remember when Peter Audet, the Australian financial adviser, seemed to be wasting hours of his time by driving out to help a poor scrap metal worker manage his money? The client turned out to be the wealthy owner of a scrap metal business, resulting in major gains for Peter’s firm—but the story doesn’t end there.
Peter learned that the scrap metal owner was too busy running the business to take a vacation, and he wanted to help. A few months later, another client expressed that she wasn’t happy in her job as a manager at an auto body shop. Peter recommended her to the scrap metal owner, who had a need for her skills, and it turned out that she lived five minutes away from the scrap metal yard. She started work three weeks later, and the client took his wife on their first vacation in years. “Both of these clients are happy and grateful that I think about their whole lives, not just their investments,” Peter says. “The more I help out, the more successful I become. But I measure success in what it has done for the people around me. That is the real accolade.”
In the mind of a giver, the definition of success itself takes on a distinctive meaning. Whereas takers view success as attaining results that are superior to others’ and matchers see success in terms of balancing individual accomplishments with fairness to others, givers are inclined to follow Peter’s lead, characterizing success as individual achievements that have a positive impact on others. They see success in terms of making significant, lasting contributions to a broad range of people. Taking this definition of success seriously might require dramatic changes in the way that organizations hire, evaluate, reward, and promote people. It would mean paying attention not only to the productivity of individual people but also to the ripple effects of this productivity on others. If we broadened our image of success to include contributions to others along with individual accomplishments, people might be motivated to tilt their professional reciprocity styles toward giving. If success required benefiting others, it’s possible that takers and matchers would be more inclined to find otherish ways to advance personal and collective interests simultaneously.
The connection between individual and collective success underlies every story of successful givers in this book. As an entrepreneur, Adam Rifkin built his network of influential people by trying to help everyone he met, launching successful companies and enabling thousands of colleagues to find jobs, develop skills, and start productive businesses along the way. As a venture capitalist, David Hornik invested in lucrative companies and fortified his reputation by helping aspiring entrepreneurs create better pitches and gain funding for their start-ups. As a comedy writer, George Meyer earned Emmys and established a reputation as the funniest writer in Hollywood while elevating the effectiveness of and opening doors for the people who collaborated with him on Army Man and The Simpsons.
In the classroom, C. J. Skender earned dozens of teaching awards while inspiring a new generation of students, seeing their potential and motivating them to achieve this potential, and Conrey Callahan sustained her energy and was nominated for a national teaching award after she started a nonprofit to help underprivileged children prepare for college. In health care, Kildare Escoto and Nancy Phelps rose to the top of their company’s sales revenue charts by striving to help patients. In consulting, Jason Geller and Lillian Bauer made partner early by virtue of the contributions that they made through mentoring and developing others, which in turn enriched the knowledge of junior colleagues. In politics, Abraham Lincoln became president—and built a legacy as one of the greatest leaders in world history—by helping his rivals earn coveted political positions.
This is what I find most magnetic about successful givers: they get to the top without cutting others down, finding ways of expanding the pie that benefit themselves and the people around them. Whereas success is zero-sum in a group of takers, in groups of givers, it may be true that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. As Simon Sinek writes, “Givers advance the world. Takers advance themselves and hold the world back.”
Armed with this knowledge, I’ve seen some people become more strategic matchers, helping others in the hopes of developing the relationships and reputations necessary to advance their own success. Can people succeed through instrumental giving, where the primary intent is getting? At the beginning of the book, I suggested that in the long term, the answer might be no.
There’s a fine line between giving and clever matching, and this line blurs depending on whether we define reciprocity styles by the actions themselves, the motives behind them, or some combination of the two. It’s a deep philosophical question, and it’s easy to identify with a range of views on how strategic matchers should be evaluated. On the one hand, even if the motives are mixed, helping behaviors often add value to others, increasing the total amount of giving in a social system. On the other hand, as we saw with Ken Lay, our behaviors leak traces of our motives. If recipients and witnesses of our giving begin to question whether the motives are self-serving, they’re less likely to respond with gratitude or elevation. When strategic matchers engage in disingenuous efforts to help others primarily for personal gain, they may be hoisted by their own petard: fellow matchers may withhold help, spread negative reputational information, or find other ways to impose a taker tax.
To avoid these consequences, would-be matchers may be best served by giving in ways that they find enjoyable, to recipients whose well-being matters to them. That way, even if they don’t reap direct or karmic rewards, matchers will be operating in a giver’s mind-set, leading their motives to appear�
�and become—more pure. Ultimately, by repeatedly making the choice to act in the interest of others, strategic matchers may find themselves developing giver identities, resulting in a gradual drift in style toward the giving end of the reciprocity spectrum.
We spend the majority of our waking hours at work. This means that what we do at work becomes a fundamental part of who we are. If we reserve giver values for our personal lives, what will be missing in our professional lives? By shifting ever so slightly in the giver direction, we might find our waking hours marked by greater success, richer meaning, and more lasting impact.
ACTIONS FOR IMPACT
If you’re interested in applying the principles in this book to your work or your life, I’ve compiled a set of practical actions that you can take. Many of these actions are based on the strategies and habits of successful givers, and in each case, I’ve provided resources and tools for evaluating, organizing, or expanding giving. Some of the steps focus on incorporating more giving into your daily behaviors; others emphasize ways that you can fine-tune your giving, locate fellow givers, or engage others in giving.
1. Test Your Giver Quotient. We often live in a feedback vacuum, deprived of knowledge about how our actions affect others. So that you can track your impact and assess your self-awareness, I’ve designed a series of free online tools. Visit www.giveandtake.com to take a free survey that tests your giver quotient. Along with filling out your own survey, you can invite people in your network to rate your reciprocity style, and you’ll receive data on how often you’re seen as a giver, taker, and matcher.
2. Run a Reciprocity Ring. What could be achieved in your organization—and what giving norms would develop—if groups of people got together weekly for twenty minutes to make requests and help one another fulfill them? For more information on how to start a Reciprocity Ring in your organization, visit Cheryl and Wayne Baker’s company, Humax (www.humaxnetworks.com), which offers a suite of social networking tools for individuals and organizations. They’ve created materials to run a Reciprocity Ring in person and a Ripplleffect tool for running it online. People typically come together in groups of fifteen to thirty. Each person presents a request to the group members, who make contributions: they use their knowledge, resources, and connections to help fulfill the request.
3. Help Other People Craft Their Jobs—or Craft Yours to Incorporate More Giving. People often end up working on tasks that aren’t perfectly aligned with their interests and skills. A powerful way to give is to help others work on tasks that are more interesting, meaningful, or developmental. In 2011, a vice president named Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar at a large multinational retailer sent e-mails to each of his employees announcing a top-secret mission, with details to be shared on a need-to-know basis in one-on-one meetings. When employees arrived individually for the meetings, Jay unveiled the confidential project. He asked them what they would enjoy doing that might also be of interest to other people. He inquired about their hobbies and personal interests, and what they would love to spend more time doing at the company. He then sent them out into the company to pursue their mission with three rules: it has to (1) appeal to at least one other person, (2) be low or no cost, and (3) be initiated by you.
Throughout the year, Jay checked in to see how the secret missions were going. About two thirds of his employees had made some effort toward making their visions a reality, and roughly half of those employees succeeded in launching them. One of Jay’s favorite missions resulted in a book club where employees read books and discussed topics that were of personal interest and relevance to their jobs. “People had permission to do all of that stuff before I ever asked that question,” Jay reflects. “But somehow, asking that question in my role gives people permission to pursue their interests in a way they didn’t have before. It’s planting seeds, with some percentage of them turning into real initiatives.” These seeds have bloomed for many of his employees, and for Jay as well: in 2012, he was selected to become the vice president of HR for a major division of his company, where he was responsible for more than 45,000 employees. A year later, Jay became the senior vice president of human resources at Starbucks.
In the secret missions, Jay encouraged his employees to engage in job crafting, a concept introduced by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, management professors at Yale and the University of Michigan, respectively. Job crafting involves innovating around a job description, creatively adding and customizing tasks and responsibilities to match personal interests and values. A natural concern is that people might craft their jobs in ways that fail to contribute to their organizations. To address this question, Amy, Justin Berg, and I partnered with Jennifer Kurkoski and Brian Welle, who run a people and innovation lab at Google. In a study across the United States and Europe, we randomly assigned Google employees working in sales, finance, operations, accounting, marketing, and human resources to a job-crafting workshop. The employees created a map of how they’d like to modify their tasks, crafting a more ideal but still realistic vision of their jobs that aligned with their interests and values.
Six weeks later, their managers and coworkers rated them as significantly happier and more effective. Many Google employees found ways to spend more time on tasks that they found interesting or meaningful; some delegated unpleasant tasks; and others were able to customize their jobs to incorporate new knowledge and skills that they wanted to develop. All told, Google employees found their work more enjoyable and were motivated to perform better, and in some cases, these gains lasted for six months. Job crafting worked across reciprocity styles: givers, takers, and matchers all became more effective. The givers saw job crafting as an opportunity to expand their impact, so they generated ways to add more value to other people and the company, such as mentoring junior colleagues, creating better products for clients, and improving training for new hires. The matchers were grateful for the opportunity to pursue more meaningful and interesting work, and reciprocated by working harder. Even the takers recognized that to advance their own careers, they needed to craft their jobs in ways that would benefit the company as well as themselves.
To help people craft their jobs, Justin, Amy, and Jane have developed a tool called the Job Crafting Exercise. It’s what we used to conduct the Google workshops, and it involves creating a “before sketch” of how you currently allocate your time and energy, and then developing a visual “after diagram” of how you’d like to modify your job. The booklets can be ordered online (www.jobcrafting.org) and completed in teams or individually to help friends and colleagues make meaningful modifications to their jobs.
4. Start a Love Machine. In many organizations, givers go unrecognized. To combat this problem, organizations are introducing peer recognition programs to reward people for giving in ways that leaders and managers rarely see. A Mercer study found that in 2001, about 25 percent of large companies had peer recognition programs, and by 2006, this number had grown to 35 percent—including celebrated companies like Google, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos.
A fascinating approach called the Love Machine was developed at Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world Second Life. In a high-technology company, many employees aim to protect their time for themselves and guard information closely, instead of sharing their time and knowledge with colleagues. The Love Machine was designed to overcome this tendency by enabling employees to send a Love message when they appreciated help from a colleague. The Love messages were visible to others, rewarding and recognizing giving by linking it to status and reputations. One insider viewed it as a way to get “tech geeks to compete to see who could be the most helpful.” Love helped to “boost awareness of people who did tasks that were sometimes overlooked. Our support staff, for instance, often received the most Love,” says Chris Colosi, a former Linden manager. “Once you introduce a certain percentage of takers into your system, you need to think about what effect an incentive will have, but I enjoyed the idea of Love for tasks that were outsid
e of someone’s job description or requirements.”
To try out the Love Machine in your organization, look up a new electronic tool called SendLove. It’s available from LoveMachine (www.lovemachineinc.com), a new start-up that asks you to start by choosing a recognition period. Team members can send each other short messages recognizing giving, and the messages are all publicly visible.
5. Embrace the Five-Minute Favor. If you visit a 106 Miles Meetup (www.meetup.com/106miles), you might see Panda Adam Rifkin in top form. He’s a master of the five-minute favor, and you can follow Panda’s lead by asking people what they need and looking for ways to help at a minimal personal cost. Rifkin’s two favorite offers are to give honest feedback and make an introduction. For example, here’s a simple exercise to get started as a connector. Start by going through your Rolodex, LinkedIn, or Facebook network. Identify pairs of people who share an uncommon commonality. Then, pick one pair a week and introduce them by e-mail. To gather feedback on the quality of your introductions and make them even more powerful, visit https://intros.to/, an excellent resource created by givers Robyn Scott and Alex Lovell-Troy. Rifkin also recommends reconnecting with dormant ties—not to get something, but to give. Once a month, reach out to one person with whom you haven’t spoken in years. Find out what they’re working on and ask if there are ways that you can be helpful. On a related note, you can learn more about David Hornik’s approach to giving by visiting Venture Blog (www.ventureblog.com/).
6. Practice Powerless Communication, but Become an Advocate. Developing greater comfort and skill with powerless communication requires a change in habits—from talking to listening, self-promoting to advice-seeking, and advocating to inquiring. Jim Quigley, a senior partner at Deloitte who previously served as CEO, decided to work on his powerless communication. He set a goal in meetings to talk no more than 20 percent of the time. “One of my objectives is listening. Many times, you can have bigger impact if you know what to ask, rather than knowing what to say. I don’t learn anything when I’m speaking. I learn a lot when I’m listening,” Quigley told me. As he shifted from answers toward questions, Quigley found himself gaining a deeper understanding of other people’s needs. “It doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but it’s a habit, and you can form that habit.” For more on the power of powerless communication, visit the blogs by Susan Cain (www.thepowerofintroverts.com) and Jennifer Kahnweiler (www.theintrovertedleaderblog.com).