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[Music] [Music] Adam thank you so much for joining us today thank you for having me so would
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love to talk to you about your uh book give and take uh now you write in your book that uh people differ in their
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preferences for reciprocity and you divide them into givers takers and matchers uh could you
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perhaps Begin by explaining the difference sure so I I was really struck going into this process by the fact that
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people have different motives when they walk into workplace interactions and I think you could sort of anchor this at
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you know at two extremes the takers and the givers so the takers are people who when they walk into an interaction with
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another person they're trying to get as much as possible from that person and contribute
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as little as they can in return thinking that's sort of the shortest and most
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direct path to achieving their own goals on the other end of the spectrum we have
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this strange breed of people that I call givers um not about donating money or volunteering necessarily but looking to
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help others Maybe by making an introduction or giving advice or providing mentoring or sharing knowledge
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without many strings attached and these givers actually prefer to be on the the contributing end of an interaction now I
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think very few of us are purely takers or purely givers most of us hover somewhere in between and that brings us
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really to the third group of people who are matchers um a matcher is basically somebody who tries to maintain an even
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balance of give and take so if I help you I expect you to help me in return um you know I'll sort of keep score of
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exchanges so that everything is fair and really just right now uh so so it seems
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logical enough based on what you said that research shows that in fields like engineering and medicine that give us
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end up at the bottom of the Heap because obviously if you have a if you are focused on giving more to others than
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taking back uh then then it's quite likely that you'll end up at the bottom
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of the Heap but who ends up at the top of the Heap and why yeah that that was one of the most fascinating questions
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that I got into when I started doing the research for the book is you know you look across a wide range of of
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Industries and even countries and you find these three Styles exist everywhere and indeed the the givers are over
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represented at the bottom um putting other people first they often put themselves at risk for burning out or
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being exploited by takers and so a lot of people look at that and they'll say
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well it's hard for a taker to rise consistently to the top because you know often times takers burn Bridges and so
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it must be the matchers you know who are who are more generous than takers but also protect their own interests and
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when I looked at the data I was really surprised to see that both of those answers were wrong it's actually the
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givers again givers are over represented at the top as well as the bottom of most
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success metrics um I found that in sales that the most productive sales people are actually those who put their
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customers interest first and you know I think a lot of that comes from the trust
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and the good will that they build but also the reputations that they create and I guess one of the the ways that I
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would play this out is to say the the success of givers and the the follow of takers is is often driven by matchers so
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a match is somebody who who really believes in a just world and of course a taker violates that belief in a just
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world matchers cannot see stand to see Takers get ahead you know by by taking advantage of other people and so the
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data on this suggests that that matchers will often go around trying to punish them um Often by gossiping and and
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spreading negative reputational information and just as as matchers hate seeing takers get away with exploitation
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they also hate to see people act really generously and not get rewarded for it and so matchers will often go out of
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their way to promote and help and support givers to make sure they actually do get rewarded for their
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generosity and I I think that's one of the most powerful Dynamics behind the
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rise of givers that's great and one of the things I found Most Fascinating about
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your book is the combination of of very rigorous research uh with some really compelling stories of both givers and
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takers uh and and so uh among the various stories you tell there is one about a person called Peter odet uh
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could you tell us that story and did being a giver help him or HT Hur him and what are some of the lessons to be
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learned yeah absolutely so I would I would say yes to all of the above um so so Peter adet is is one of my my
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favorite people that I met when I was doing research for the book He's a financial adviser and he's the kind of
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guy who goes out of his way to help everyone that he meets so for years he would interview job candidates and he
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would only be able to hire one and have to turn everybody else down and he would
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often give up his entire afternoon just trying to find jobs for the other people
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that he couldn't hire himself and you know really opening up his personal Network to do that um a lot of times
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this this orientation toward helping others sort of got him in trouble um in one particular case he had a a colleague
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um who ended up calling Brad in the book who essentially was was getting out of the business and he needed somebody to
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to buy his CL clients quickly and Peter said sure I'll do it and you know he
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basically paid about $10,000 for Brad's clients on the spot just to help him out
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and then a couple months later Peter started losing his clients and they disappeared and he discovered that all
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of those clients that he was losing were former clients of Brad's that he had
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bought and he did a little bit of homework and found out that Brad was back in the business and he was
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basically taking his clients back and not paying Peter a dime for them and it cost Peter a ton of money and he really
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got I think burned by a taker in that situation and yet Peter will tell you if you talk to him he's been enormously
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successful in his career um he runs a a financial advisor firm that's uh well
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well over 7 figures in terms of annual revenue and he will tell you that being a giver is how he has gotten ahead it's
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how he wins business it's why people go to him and I think what happens is often
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times givers put themselves at risk in the short run but in the long run they end up building the kind of Social
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Capital that's really important for success in a very connected world and you know you can see this play out in
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many many different situations in his career uh one of my favorites was when he actually drove out to visit a client
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in the scrap metal business who was the tiniest of clients worth very very little money and Peter's colleagues
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actually said don't bother it's a waste of your time um the drive out there
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alone is not worth your your hourly fee and Peter said you know you can't just
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ignore somebody because they're not worth your time I I really want to help in any way I can and you know the client
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turns out not to be a a scrap metal worker but the owner of a lucrative scrap metal business and he multiplies
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his fees by a factor of a 100 once he sees what a generous Guy Peter is and I think that that's one of the things that
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that we learned from Peter is that givers do in the short run sometimes lose and Peter has gotten better at
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protecting himself and and screening to say you know is this person a taker a giver or a matcher before he determines
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how much he'll help them um but at the end of the day he also ends up helping
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people who he would never expect to be able to help him back and yet sometimes they do that's very interesting that
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just an act of kindness in going out to see somebody who needed his help uh multiplied his business manif that's a
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very very really very inspiring story um how do successful givers approach networking uh and how does that their
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approach differ from say takers or matchers so takers tend to actually have incredibly broad networks in part
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because when they burn one Bridge they have to go and find new people to exploit in order to get sort of keep the
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the network going um what you find is matchers tend to have much narrower networks because they will typically
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only exchange with people who have helped them in the past or they who they expect to be able to help them in the
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future and so they end up restricting their their Universe of opportunities um givers tend to build much broader
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networks than matchers but in a very different way than takers um what givers will typically do when when they meet
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somebody new is try to figure out how can I add value to this person's life and what could I possibly contribute
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that might benefit this person um and what that typically means is they end up creating a lot of Goodwill in the
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relationships that they build that that often lies dormant until they may actually need
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it how do you spot a faker or a taker and givers clothing H that that was one of my favorite bodies of research that I
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looked into when writing the book so I think there are a couple powerful ways to to spot a taker um one let's start
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with the corner office there's a phenomenal study by chatter G and hamri that looked at over a 100 computer
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companies and actually downloaded the annual reports of each company and tried to figure figure out could you identify
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the taker CEOs without ever meeting them so they got Wall Street analysts to rate
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how much is each CEO a taker and these analysts who knew the CEOs and interacted with them you know rated the
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extent to which they were entitled and narcissistic and self-serving and the first factor that
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really correlated highly with those ratings was the Gap in compensation between the the CEO and the next highest
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paid executive so typical computer industry CEO makes about two to two and a half times as much annual compens
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ation as the next highest paid executive in that company the typical taker CEO had about seven times more annual
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compensation than the next highest paid executive in that company so literally taking more in terms of compensation the
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second cue was looking at their speech so the takers tended to use first- person singular pronouns like I and me
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as opposed to us and we when talking about the company and then the third my favorite was the takers literally felt
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it's all about me I am the most important and central figure in this company
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and when you looked at their photos in the company's annual reports they actually had larger photos and they were
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more likely to be pictured alone and I think that was a third signal so those signals don't just show up in the corner
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office right there's new research by Keith Campbell and his colleagues suggesting even you can spot these cues
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on Facebook and one of the easiest ways that you can look for a taker is to look
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for a pattern that translates from Dutch as basically kissing up kicking down so
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takers tend to be very careful at impression management and great ration when they're dealing with someone
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Superior or more influential but it's hard to keep up the facade in every interaction and so it's often peers and
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subordinates who have a more direct window into what are this person's true motives really like you know what you
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just said reminds me of a of a story I read many years ago uh when Mahatma Gandhi you know when he when he edited a
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magazine he would receive all kinds of letters and one letter was from a young young woman
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who was about to get engaged uh and uh she was going to meet her you know prospective uh fiance for the first time
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and she wanted to know how she could judge this person and the advice that Mahatma Gandhi gave her in The Columns
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of the the magazine that he edited was don't look at how he treats you look at
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how he treats his servants uh and and and I think that's very very telling in terms of because
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with with somebody whom he was trying to impress obviously he would uh you know he would be very well behaved but a true
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sign of character is how you treat people who are vulnerable I I think that's a really profound observation and
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you know I think there's a famous quote attributed to Samuel Johnson that the
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the true measure of a person is how he treats someone who can do him or her no good exactly exactly now I you also
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point out that givers and takers are very differ quite a bit in the way they approach
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collaboration uh and and sharing credit uh can you give any examples of how how this works out yeah so I think this is
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one of the most interesting Dynamics you could you could really look at so in in
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doing the research for the book I used some historical examples here that I found fascinating uh one was Frank Lloyd
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Wright who at one point discovered as an architect that his uh his draftsmen were
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essentially getting more commissions and more work than he was because essentially customers and clients found
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easier to work with and every bit as talented and he was offended by this and and felt that you know they should be
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subservient to him so he actually set a policy that they were not allowed to accept independent commissions and if
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while working in his Studio they did any work even if he never touched it his name had to be signed first and you know
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I think that obviously that cost him a lot of very very talented drafts people and if you look at his legacy he really
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mentored and championed far fewer great AR Architects than than most who achieve
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similar stature did another example that I think really stands out from history is is Jonas sulk who's really remembered
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as as a hero uh for discovering and and sort of commercializing a polio vaccine but if you look at suk's Behavior really
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closely one of the things you'll see is he never gave credit to any of the the
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people in his lab who helped him discover the vaccine and actually caused the the team to fracture and Splinter um
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so sulk never made a discovery that was nearly as as influential again and I think this is one of the costs of
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appearing like a taker in a collaboration right is slighting other people who might deserve credit what
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givers tend to do in collaboration is assume that credit is not zero some and if I give you credit for your
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contributions that doesn't necessarily take away from my contribution and that
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makes it a lot easier to keep people on board in a team over time it means typically that if you're a leader or
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manager people will follow you if you rotate to a different organization or a different job and I think that that's
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that's really powerful but often harder to do great no you also have a very interesting reason you give why s didn't
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give credit to his team uh and and and there was a certain bias at work could could you explain that that's very
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fascinating yeah so this this comes out of Social and cognitive psychology so the the immediate thinking is well you
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know if if sulk were a taker he would be motivated to put best foot forward and so he would trumpet his accomplishments
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and really dismiss those of of people around him and yet Ross and colleagues have shown consistently that these kinds
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of biases are less about our desires to paint ourselves in the most flattering light and actually more about
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information that there's a discrepancy between what we know about our own contributions and those of others so in
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suk's case he remembered the Blood The Sweat The Tears that he put in Moment by
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moment when he was working toward creating that that polio vaccine that saved thousands and possibly millions of
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lives he literally couldn't remember the contributions of his colleagues because
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he wasn't there a lot of the time right he he didn't actually experience them
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and this is really the discrepancy that exists um Eugene Caruso and his colleagues have done some really
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powerful research showing that when people are just asked to list the contributions of their team members and
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their own they're literally more able to remember their own contributions and I
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think that's one of the big factors that drives credit biases in collaboration uh one of the biggest
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challenges for any manager or even a teacher is identifying the so-called Diamonds in the Rough you know people
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who have the potential uh to to to become to do great things as they go forward uh how can you tell us a little
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bit about how a legendary teacher uh uh does this in in your book absolutely so there's an accounting professor at the
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University of North Carolina and Duke by the name of CJ skender um the man is taught over 35,000 students in his
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career he's won every teaching award on the planet and he has a remarkable gift
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for bringing out the best in his students he's had many many students win gold medals both in his State and
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nationally for their accounting achievements he's had more than three dozen students follow him to become
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professors of accounting and when you look at his approach the question is how does he do it a lot of people assume
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that he's got a great eye for talent and that he's immediately able to spot the
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quantitative Vance and then basically work with them and CJ says no it's the
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exact opposite he sees every student who walks into his classroom as a diamond in
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the rough waiting to be polished and then what he does is he tries to make his classes as interesting as possible
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to bring out the best in those students now of course it doesn't work with every
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student but what he finds over time is by making his material interesting that he does shift some people toward
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becoming more motivated and more hardworking and this is true I think of of coaches and leaders and managers
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everywhere if you look at at research by Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues of what made somebody a worldclass tennis
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player or a world-class musician or even a mathematician or a scientist of of great acclaim very rarely were those
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worldclass candidates Superior early on in their careers um they looked pretty average when you started with them but
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what they had in common was a coach a teacher or a manager who believed in them and set their aspirations very high
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and then that often created a self fulfilling prophecy by inspiring them to to engage in more deliberate practice
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and to put in the 10,000 hours that we all know are critical to achieving expertise you know one other really
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fascinating part of your book deals with what you call powerless communication what does that what does exactly what
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does that mean and how is it useful in persuading and influencing others so I'll give you my own personal example of
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this um when I was 25 and I had first started teaching I was asked to to teach a leadership and motivation course uh
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for uh for senior leaders in the US Air Force and I was about half their age and
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I had just finished my doctorate and I had relatively little experience and I felt like what I had to
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do was speak in you know the most confident possible tone to really establish my credibility and so I came
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in and I I walked through all my credentials and describe sort of what my training was and then we we went through
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the session and and afterward I got the the course feedback and you know it was pretty depressing to say the least uh
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one of the comments that that really got burned into my brain was that there was
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more knowledge uh in the audience than on the podium and there were other people who made comments like you know
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gosh the professors get younger every year and you know how could this guy really teach us to lead he's never been
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a leader and you know I sat back and thought about that and realized that perhaps the The Confident dominant
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powerful approach was not the best path to influence and I decided to open up with a slightly different approach which
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is I walked into the next class that I had to teach for that same audience in the Air Force and I said okay my name's
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Adam Grant I know what all of you are thinking right now what can I possibly learn from a professor who's 12 years
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old and then I just waited and you know after a few seconds everybody started laughing and and one of the Air Force
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Colonels said no no no no that's way off I'm sure you're at least 13
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and you know that became sort of a running joke throughout the session and I I think what I I guess what I what I
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learned from that experience was that sometimes humility and vulnerability in communication um what you might think of
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as powerless communication is actually a stronger way to connect with your audience and there's a lot of research
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on this there's a classic study by Elliot arenson on the pratfall effect where um quizbowl uh competitors are
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recorded and you get to listen to them and you hear an expert and when the expert spills coffee all over himself
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you actually like him more it humanizes him it gives you an authentic connection
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with him and I think that's a lot of the power of powerless communication uh what
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can givers do to avoid burnout and also to avoid becoming dmats it seems those are two pretty big risks for people who
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see themselves as givers yeah I think that's right I think in a way being a matcher is a safer strategy I think that
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you know knowing the givers end up at the bottom and the top means there are some risks associated with it but I
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think that those risks actually can be mitigated with with careful strategies so I think a lot of it comes down to
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setting boundaries so many givers can confused being helpful or being generous with being available for every person
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and every Quest request all the time um there other givers who confuse perhaps you know being generous with empathizing
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and dropping everything that you're doing to help others um and I think there are also plenty of givers out
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there this is something I found over and over in my research who feel like it's
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uncomfortable able or inappropriate to advocate for their own interests and I think that we need to we need to work
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with with people who sort of fall in the giving end of the spectrum to help them
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set clear boundaries and determine okay how am I going to help most of the people most of the time uh one of my
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favorite Concepts that I I came across when doing the background research for the book is is What's called the five
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minute favor uh which is basically instead of just helping everyone all the time thinking about okay can I offer
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something of unique value to this other person that will take me 5 minutes or less
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and you know I think it's it's basically about finding High benefit to others but
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low cost to the self ways of contributing you know normally people believe that the alternative to being
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selfish which is what uh you know the trait that takers usually have is being selfless but you've come up with a
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another term called uish could you explain the difference yeah so when I first started studying give and take I
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thought that that basically self-interest versus sort of selflessness were on one spectrum and
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you had takers over here who are very you know very selfish you had givers who are very selfless and it actually turns
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out if you look at the data on this that you can more effectively draw a 2 by two
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and say concern for your own interests and concern for other people's interests
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are actually independent motivations so you could score low and high on one or on both so the takers tend to be purely
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selfish um there's one group of givers who's purely selfless who constantly put
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other people's interests ahead of their own but there's this other group of
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givers that I call other who are concerned about benefiting others but they also keep their own interest in the
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rearview mirror and so they will look for ways to help others that are either low cost to themselves or even high
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benefit to themselves I.E win-win as opposed to win lose here's the irony the
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selfless givers might be more altruistic in principle right because they're they're constantly elevating other
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people's interests ahead of their own but my data and and research by lots of
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others show that they're actually less generous because they run out of energy
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they run out of time and they lose their resources because they don't basically
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take enough care of themselves the others givers are able to sustain their giving by looking for ways that giving
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can hurt them less or benefit them more so the the vulnerabilities that you identified earlier of burnout and being
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a dmat are actually uh something that affects selfless givers more than others that's right yeah selfless givers are at
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much greater risk of burnout and exploitation are the other is givers right well uh one final question Adam uh
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what practical advice apart from reading your book uh could you offer people who
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want to start applying the these principles to their own lives so I think there there's lots of advice sort of
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peppered throughout the book in different chapters but when I take a step back I think the first question is
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what is your own style um if you go to the the give and take website give take.com there's a self assessment that
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you can take there there's also a 360 assessment both available for free where
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you can get other people to rate you and I think that's really the first step is
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to hold up a mirror and figure out okay what is my default um I may act more like a taker when I'm negotiating a big
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contract I may act more like a giver when I'm in a mentoring role and I'm
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probably a matcher when a colleague from another organization approaches me for some specialized knowledge but how do I
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treat most of the people most of the time I think as the first step and then I think you know the second step is
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there are some surprising opportunities both for success and for meaning in operating like a giver and so I would
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ask okay what are the types of giving that you find most energizing or most consistent with your skills um for some
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people it's making introductions for others it's sharing credit for others
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it's stepping up as a mentor and I think finding your own sort of Giver style is
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really powerful and you know I think the the real meaning and purpose associated
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with that is that you know even if givers don't always do better than takers or matchers they manage to
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succeed in ways that make others better and lift others up instead of cutting them down and I think looking for ways
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to do that is probably the the most sustainable path to success in the long term both for individuals and
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organizations Adam thank you so much for speaking with knowledge at Wharton my pleasure thanks for having me
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