We all have moments of giving and taking. Your style is how you treat most of the people most of the time, your default....
RANT
We all have moments of giving and taking. Your style is how you treat most of the people most of the time, your default.
Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It’s all about what can you do for me. The opposite is a giver. It’s somebody who approaches most interactions by asking, “What can I do for you?” Of course, not all takers are narcissists. Some are just givers who got burned one too many times.
Organisational psychologist Adam Grant conducted a survey of over 30,000 people across industries around the world’s cultures and found that most people are right in the middle between giving and taking. They choose this third style called “matching.”
If you’re a matcher, you try to keep an even balance of give and take: quid pro quo – I’ll do something for you if you do something for me. And that seems like a safe way to live your life. But is it the most effective and productive way to live your life?
The result of the study showed that, unexpectedly, the worst performers in any job were the givers. The engineers who got the least work done were the ones who did more favours than they got back. They were so busy doing other people’s jobs, they literally ran out of time and energy to get their own work completed. In medical school, the lowest grades belong to the students who agree most strongly with statements like, “I love helping others.” And then in sales, too, the lowest revenue accrued in the most generous salespeople.
There’s a twist here; givers are often sacrificing themselves, but they make their organisations better. We have a huge body of evidence – the more often people are helping and sharing their knowledge and providing mentoring, the better organisations do on every metric we can measure: higher profits, customer satisfaction, employee retention, even lower operating expenses.
If givers are the worst performers, who are the best performers? The good news is it’s not the takers. Takers tend to rise quickly but also fall quickly in most jobs. And they fall at the hands of matchers. If you’re a matcher, you believe in “An eye for an eye” – a just world. And so when you meet a taker, you feel like it’s your mission in life to just punish the hell out of that person.
And so the logical conclusion is it must be the matchers who are the best performers. But they’re not. In every job, in every organisation in the study, the best results belonged to the givers again.
Givers go to both extremes. They are overrepresented at the bottom and at the top of every success metric that can be tracked. Which raises the question: How do we create a world where more of these givers get to excel? Not just in businesses, but also in nonprofits, schools – even governments.
The first thing that’s really critical is to recognise that givers are your most valuable people and if they’re not careful, they burn out. So you have to protect the givers in your midst.
Adam Rifkin, a very successful serial entrepreneur, said “You don’t have to be Mother Teresa or Gandhi to be a giver. You just have to find small ways to add large value to other people’s lives.” That could be as simple as making an introduction between two people who could benefit from knowing each other. It could be sharing your knowledge or giving a little bit of feedback. Or it might be even something as basic as saying, “You know, I’m going to try and figure out if I can recognise somebody whose work has gone unnoticed.” And those five-minute favours are really critical to helping givers set boundaries and protect themselves.
The second thing that matters if you want to build a culture where givers succeed, is you actually need a culture where help-seeking is the norm; where people ask a lot.
Successful givers recognise that it’s okay to be a receiver, too. If you run an organisation, make it easier for people to ask for help. Help-seeking isn’t important just for protecting the success and the well-being of givers. It’s also critical to getting more people to act like givers, because the data shows that somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of all giving in organisations starts with a request. But a lot of people don’t ask. They don’t want to look incompetent, they don’t know where to turn, they don’t want to burden others. Yet if nobody ever asks for help, you have a lot of frustrated givers in your organization who would love to step up and contribute, if they only knew who could benefit and how.
If you want to build a culture of successful givers, be thoughtful about who you let onto your team. Effective hiring and screening and team building is not about bringing in the givers; it’s about weeding out the takers. If you can do that well, you’ll be left with givers and matchers. The givers will be generous because they don’t have to worry about the consequences. And the beauty of the matchers is that they follow the norm.
So how do you catch a taker before it’s too late? We’re actually pretty bad at figuring out who’s a taker, especially on first impressions. There’s a personality trait that throws us off. It’s called agreeableness, one of the major dimensions of personality across cultures. Agreeable people are warm and friendly. How could I ever say I’m any one thing when I’m constantly adapting to try to please other people? Disagreeable people do less of it. They’re more critical, skeptical, challenging, and far more likely than their peers to go to law school.
The agreeableness-disagreeableness is your outer veneer: How pleasant is it to interact with you? Whereas giving and taking are more of your inner motives: What are your values? What are your intentions toward others?
If you really want to judge people accurately, you have to draw a two-by-two. The agreeable givers are easy to spot: they say yes to everything. The disagreeable takers are also recognised quickly. The third combination is of disagreeable givers, people who are gruff and tough on the surface but underneath have others’ best interests at heart.
Disagreeable givers are the most undervalued people in our organisations, because they’re the ones who give the critical feedback that no one wants to hear but everyone needs to hear. We need to do a much better job valuing these people as opposed to writing them off early.
The fourth and last combination is the deadly one – the agreeable taker, also known as the faker. This is the person who’s nice to your face, and then will stab you right in the back.
One way to catch these people in the interview process is to ask the question, “Can you give me the names of four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved?” The takers will give you four names, and they will all be more influential than them. Givers are more likely to name people who are below them in a hierarchy, who can do them no good.
So if we do all this, if we can weed takers out of organisations, if we can make it safe to ask for help, if we can protect givers from burnout and make it okay for them to be ambitious in pursuing their own goals as well as trying to help other people, we can actually change the way that people define success. Instead of saying it’s all about winning a competition, people will realise success is really more about contribution.
Compiled by HH
