Adam Grant, Professor - Givers, takers and matchers

>>Adam Grant: I'm an organizational psychologist. And usually that means I'm the guy who walks into organizations after three or four consultants have been fired. And at that point, what I see in organizations is just widespread paranoia. People are paranoid everywhere. How many of you are paranoid? Don't raise your hand for that, by the way. It is a rhetorical question. But the way you would know is when I asked the question, was your first response, "Oh, my God, how did he know? Where's the nearest exit? How do I escape?" And I want to talk today about what's causing paranoia in organizations and what we can do about it. There is a group of people who are responsible for the vast majority of paranoia at work. They are called takers. Takers are the kinds of people who are always trying to get as much as possible from others. They never want to give anything back unless they have to. They excel at important skills like social loafing, free riding, shirking. They are the people who raise their hands and volunteer for the interesting, visible, important projects, leave the grunt work for everyone else, and then walk away with the lion's share of credit for collective accomplishments. I love working with these people personally. And if you have ever been surrounded by takers, you will find that very quickly you become paranoid. Now, what causes somebody to become a taker? There are at least three paths according to the evidence. The first one is to be a narcissist. So you have a fragile, inflated ego and believe that if you want to win, somebody else has to lose; that if I want to succeed, other people have to fail. But there is another path to becoming a taker that is more common, which is getting burned one too many times and learning the hard way might be a little bit dangerous to be generous or even fair because the smart takers around us will find ways to exploit us. So a lot of people become takers by saying, You know what? A lot of the world is a dog-eat-dog, competitive place. And if I don't put myself first, nobody else will. There is a third path to becoming a taker that I will not be addressing today, and that's called being a psychopath. The other two, though, I want to address. So the good news is most of us are not takers. If you look at the data from U.S. to Japan, only about 8% of people when you track their behaviors relentlessly pursue self-interest without any concern for others. So what are the rest of us? On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have people that I like to call givers. And for me, a giver is not a philanthropist, not a volunteer but rather just the kind of person who enjoys helping others, and often does it with no strings attached. So you might be a giver if you are somebody who frequently provides mentoring to others, who shares knowledge, who makes introductions, or just shows up early or stays late to support the people around you. Now, many of us love this idea of being givers. It resonates with our core values. We certainly want to operate that way with our friends and families. But in professional life, we know that there are takers out there. So out of fear, most of us choose a third style. We become matchers. Matchers try to keep an even balance of give and take, quid pro quo. I will do something for you, if you do something for me. It is almost like being an accountant in all of your relationships. So tracking credits, debits, and making sure that everything is even and fair and square. And I wondered: Is that the most effective way to live your professional life? That's what I want to talk about today. Just as a preview, the answer to that question is going to be a definitive maybe. Now, I wanted to compare the success of givers, takers, and matchers. Who are the most productive? Who are the least productive? So I got data across different kinds of jobs and different measures of success: Tracking the productivity of engineers as a function of how many favors they do for their colleagues versus how many they receive in return. Looking at the grades of medical students based on how much they liking others. And then also tracking sales people. How much revenue do they accrue each year depending on the amount of time they invest in their colleagues and their customers? Now, a lot of people think that the takers finish last. And if that's you, I want to congratulate you on being a raging optimist. They don't. The data show consistently that the givers finish last in each of these jobs. The worst engineers who get the least work done and make the most errors are the ones who do more favors than they get back. They are so busy helping their colleagues do their work they run out of time and energy to get their own stuff done. In medicine -- This is going to sound like a joke but it's not. The lowest grades in medical school belong to the students who agree most strongly with statements like "I love helping others." [ Laughter ] Which suggests the doctor you ought to trust is the one who came to medical school with no desire to help anybody. And then in sales, the lowest revenue belongs to the people who spend the most time trying to help both their colleagues and their clients. I used to work in sales, and I found this a little bit puzzling. So I went to our data. I found the person with the highest giver score in this company and the lowest revenue. And I asked him: How do you explain this? Why do you suck at your job? I didn't ask it that way. [ Laughter ] But what is the cost of being a giver in sales? And he paused and he said, "Can I be honest with you?" I said, "No, as a researcher, I want you to lie to me. Yes, please be honest." He said, "Well, if I can 100% candid, I care so deeply about my customers that I would never sell them one of our crappy products." [ Laughter ] I'm now rethinking honesty as a research policy. I think this is sad news for givers, though, that helping others means you sacrifice your own success. How many of you self-identify more as givers than takers or matchers? Okay. It would have been more of you before we talked about these data. And how many of you believe you're givers but didn't raise your hand because you know that would violate the norm of modesty which givers are supposed to live by? Okay. Those are the real givers in this room. All right. The moment somebody raises their hand and says, "I'm a giver," my first reaction is no, you are a taker. [ Laughter ] Because somebody who truly cares about helping others would not go around waving a flag. They would instead spend their time trying to make other people better off. I say that to make a serious point, which is it is very hard to judge our own styles. We all have moments of giving, of taking, and of matching. Your style is how you treat most of the people most of the time. And most of us overestimate our own generosity. Some of that is ego, right? We want to see ourselves as givers. Some of that is just plain information. So when psychologists ask couples who are married to go into separate rooms and estimate the total percent of work that they are personally responsible for in their marriage, each member of the couple will add up an estimate for themselves, put them together. Three out of four couples add up to over 100%. Someone is lying, and it is usually the man. When you ask why, it turns out that on average people simply know more about their own giving than they do about their spouse's. So when asked, Well, what are all the things you contributed to your marriage? People can come up with about 11 things on average. Whereas, when they are asked about their spouse's contributions, they can only come up with eight. Right? You were there when you walked the dog and drove the kids to school and took out the garbage. By definition, you are not present for every act of giving that any other person does. So we all know more about our own generosity than others. I think it is important to gather feedback from other people, to figure out where do we stand on this spectrum. But in order to use that information, we need to know what is the most effective style. If the givers finish last, who finishes first? Let me start with the encouraging news. It's not the takers. Takers tend to rise quickly, but they also fall quickly, and they fall at the hands of matchers. Matchers, you believe in an eye for an eye, a just world, what goes around comes around. And when it doesn't, you know that it is time for you to step up and become the karma police. Matchers will actually go out of their way to make sure that takers fail because it is not fair in the eyes of a matcher to be selfish and succeed. Now, some matchers choose to do this directly. They will feed the takers in their lives false information hoping that they're going to suffer. Most matchers, though, choose a more subtle but equally deadly ancient weapon, which is called gossip. And it usually goes something like this: Don't trust this guy. He's a selfish ***. Well, most people are matchers. The vast majority of people operate somewhere in the middle of this give-and-take spectrum. So it's very hard to take advantage of one person and then start up fresh in a new relationship, because usually there's a matcher there who will spread the word and warn people about you. I've learned recently, though, that matchers are not the only people plotting the demise of takers. There's another group that hates to see takers succeed: Other takers. [ Laughter ] Think about it this way. If you play professional baseball or if you're a performance cyclist and you're a taker, you want to be the only one doping. That's how you keep your advantage. The people who blow the whistle the loudest on the cheaters, it turns out, empirically, are the biggest cheaters. [ Laughter ] So this makes it even harder for takers to sustain their success. They've got ordinary garden variety matchers undermining them, and they also have the most ruthless cutthroat of the takers plotting against them. So that leads to a logical conclusion: It must be the matchers who are the best performers. But they're not. The data show across engineering productivity, medical grades, and sales revenue, as well as every job I've ever studied, that the best results belong to the givers again. Givers are overrepresented on both ends of the spectrum. They make up more of the worst performers than they should statistically. They also make up more of the best performers than they should statistically. So I think this is a fascinating paradox. And last year, I read an amazing book called "Give and Take," which I wrote, -- [ Laughter ] -- which tried to explain this paradox. Why is it that some givers rise to the top and others sink to the bottom? What can we learn from successful givers? How do you succeed and manage to be generous at the same time? And how you do avoid being a doormat or perhaps burning out? I want to just highlight three simple lessons that we can take away from successful givers. The first thing is, you want to get the right people on the bus. A lot of givers say, I'm going to focus on protecting myself by surrounding myself only with givers. And that is a mistake. You need matchers in your life, too, who are going to guard you against the takers in the world. What successful givers are vigilant about is screening the takers out of their lives, knowing that one bad apple can spoil a barrel. But it's not so common that one good egg makes a dozen. I don't know what that means. I hope you do. But the data show that the negative impact of a taker on a team or a culture is typically double to triple the positive impact of a giver. So you want to be really vigilant about screening out the takers from your lives. How do you do this? There are a number of clues that takers tend to leak. One is they tend to kiss up and kick down. Takers are very good fakers when dealing with powerful people. But they find it's a lot of work to pretend to care about everyone they interact with. So they let their guard down a little bit with peers and subordinates who get to see their true colors. Never trust a reference from a boss. You want those references to come from lateral or below. There's also interesting data on Facebook that the narcissistic takers among us actually have more attractive profile pictures. They're not hotter than the rest of us, but there's a bigger gap between how they look in a typical photo and how good that profile picture looks. Because if you're a taker, your best foot is always put forward. Annual reports. You can spot takers by the size of a CEO's photograph in their company's annual report. Taker CEOs actually have larger pictures and they're more likely to be photographed alone, which sends a pretty good signal, I'm the most important person in this company, it's all about me. And there's a question you can ask people, too, that reveals who the takers are. It's a question that goes something like this: In your industry, what percent of people do you think steal at least $10 U.S. worth of merchandise from their employers each month? How common is it for people to steal at least $10 U.S. dollars a month? I want you to think about the answer to that question for a second. If we were really giving you this assessment, of course, we'd want to give you many questions and then see what's the consistency in the pattern of your responses. The data show that the higher your estimate that other people are thieves, the greater the chances that you are a thief. So if you find out that you've been sitting next to anyone with an estimate in the 80% range or above, check your wallets immediately. Why would this be? When we go to predict other people's behaviors, we actually project our own motivations onto them. So takers anticipate more selfish behavior from others. And that's part of how they rationalize being a taker. It's not me. Everybody else is selfish, and I am just protecting myself. So if you encounter somebody who thinks the worst of others, you might want to be a little bit more cautious with that person. Once you've screened the takers out of your life, or at least been a little bit more careful in dealing with them, what else do successful givers do? The second thing is that they redefine giving. My favorite example of this is Adam Rifkin, who was named Fortune's best networker a couple years ago for having more powerful connections on social media than anyone else. And Adam's done two really interesting things in his life. The first is that he started three successful companies, retired in his 30s, and has done pretty well. The second is that every single person who's ever known him describes him as an extraordinary giver. So how did he do both? When I asked Adam this question, he said, the simple answer is, you don't want to try to be Mother Teresa or Gandhi. Not sustainable for most of us. Instead, you want to try to do more five-minute favors, which is just a simple way of adding high value to other people's lives at a low personal cost. Adam says we don't think about the cost of giving enough. And if we can find more efficient ways to help others, we will sacrifice ourselves less often. So Adam's favorite five-minute favor is making an introduction. He's a pretty shy guy, about 12 years ago, he decided he was going to come out of his shell by making three introductions every day. And he has done that every day for the last 12 years. Over 12,000 introductions, dozens of companies started. He's also accidentally arranged a few marriages, which is kind of neat. And what Adam finds is these introductions can be life-changing for other people, but then he can move on with the rest of his day. He also finds that as he makes introductions, he starts to get a reputation as somebody who's a great connector and people stop bothering him with other requests, so that as he specializes in one efficient form of giving, he gets to dictate what kind of helping he does. And I think that's a great lesson about successful givers. They focus on reducing the cost of their giving both by doing it more efficiently and also by choosing one or two domains of helping that they enjoy and excel at, and then trying to do that, but not worry about the rest. The last lesson is, successful givers ask for help. A lot of givers are uncomfortable asking for help. They don't want to be takers. They don't want to burden other people. But if no one's willing to receive, nobody can give. And you find that the biggest difference between the givers at the top and the ones at the bottom is are they willing to ask other people for support. When successful givers ask for help, two things happen: One is they actually get the support they need. Two, they're also then in a position to direct the other givers in their lives about who could benefit from helping and how. I think this is important, because up to 90% of all acts of helping an organization start with a request. So if you don't ask, a lot of people are willing to give, but unclear about how and where to do it. So I want to close by recommending an exercise that I think can help facilitate this process. It's called the reciprocity wing. It was invented by Wayne and Sheryl baker. All you do is gather a group of people in a room this size and ask people to come up with something they want or need. Everyone in the room tries to use their knowledge or networks to make it happen. It's a great example of the power to network when people start to think like givers. I've been running this in my classes at Wharton for the last couple years, getting students in the habit of giving but also asking. I had a student named Alex who said, I haven't told many people this, but my dream is to work at Six Flags. I think riding a roller coaster is pretty much nirvana in life. But, strangely, Six Flags does recruit at the Wharton School of Business. So could anybody help me get my food in the door? Another student named Andrew raises his hand and says, I think my dad knows somebody who used to work there. Let me see if I can make the introduction. Five-minute favor happens. Two weeks later, Alex comes into class. I ask him for an update. And he said, you won't believe this. I just got off an hour-long cell phone conversation with the ex-CEO of Six Flags. Now, this is like the greatest moment of my professional life. And I asked, "Did he give you a job? Did he introduce you to other people in the industry? What happen?" And Alex says, "No, no. The guy was really helpful, and I now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I never, ever want to work in that industry." [ Laughter ] I'm, like, okay, well at least you can rule out that dream and move on to pursue others. And I'm proud to report that Alex is now gainfully employed in one of those dreams as a management consultant who one day, I hope, will fix the amusement park industry. When you do an exercise like this, you start to see that if you get more people operating like givers, it's easier to ask and that we can all get more of the help that we need, that instead of operating like matchers and only being able to go to people who have helped us in the past, we can actually reach out to anybody and expect that they might be willing to pay it forward in some way. And I think if we can create a world with more givers, we will be in a position to reverse paranoia. The exact opposite of paranoia is called pronoia, or the state of being pronoid. And it's defined by my favorite psychologist, Brian Little. It's known as the delusional belief that other people are plotting your well-being. [ Laughter ] Going around behind your back and saying exceptionally nice things about you. How dare they! Well, I think if we're going to have organizations dominated by fear, that instead of fearing that other people are out to get us, we ought to walk around in fear that other people are out to help us. And if we can create a world with more people who operate like givers, that instead of playing a big game of battleship when you're pursuing success and trying to sink all of the other boats in the sea, you can actually become the rising tide that lifts all boats. Thank you. [ Applause ]