Give and Take

A Revolutionary Approach to Success

By Adam Grant

It turns out that success has far less to do with how smart you are but depends heavily on how you approach your interactions with other people.

The majority of people develop a primary reciprocity style that they keep. Givers, takers or matches.

Takers:

Takers have a distinct signature: they like to get more than they give. They tilt reciprocity in their own favour, putting their own heads ahead of others.?

Givers:

Givers tilt reciprocity in the other direction, preferring to give more than they get. Whereas takers tend to be self-focused, evaluating what other people can offer them, givers are other-focused, paying more attention to what other people need from them.?

The worst performers and the best performers are givers as giving is especially risky when dealing with takers,?

Givers succeed in a way that creates a ripple effect, enhancing the success of people around them.

Networks Advantage

Networks come with three major advantages:?

1. private information?
2. diverse skills
3. power

By developing a strong network, people can gain invaluable access to knowledge, expertise and influence.

Spotting the Taker in a Giver’s Clothes

This Dutch phrase captures this duality beautifully: “kissing up, kicking down.”

What Goes Around Comes Around

Nearly all societies around the world, in which people typically subscribe to a norm of reciprocity:

Reciprocity however comes with two downsides:?

1. that people on the receiving end often feel like they’re being manipulated
2. If you give with an expectation of receiving, quid pro quo, you will have a much narrower network

The disadvantages of strict reciprocity accrue over time, is that they can limit both the quantity and quality of the networks developed

Energy flow

In a range of organizations, employees rated their interactions with one another on a scale from strongly de-energizing to strongly energizing. The researchers created an energy network map, which looked like a model of a galaxy. The takers were black holes.

Network value for everyone

We need a shift in fundamental ideas about how we build our networks and who should benefit from them. You should see networks as a vehicle for creating value for everyone, not just claiming it for ourselves.

5-Minute Favour

This is a new spin on reciprocity. In traditional old-school reciprocity, people operated like matchers, trading value back and forth with one another. We helped the people who helped us, and we gave to the people from whom we wanted something in return. But today, givers are able to spark a more powerful form of reciprocity. Instead of trading value, the aim is to add value. A simple rule: the five-minute favour. “You should be willing to do something that will take you five minutes or less for anybody.”

Every time you generously share your expertise or connections, you’re investing in encouraging the people in your network to act like givers.

Add value, don’t trade value:

This increases the odds that the people in your network will seek to add value rather than trade value, opening the door for you and others to gain benefits from people they’ve never helped— or even met. By creating a norm of adding value, you transform giving from a zero-sum loss to a win-win gain.?

When takers build networks, they try to claim as much value as possible for themselves from a fixed pie.

It becomes contagious: Giving, especially when it’s distinctive and consistent, establishes a pattern that shifts other people’s reciprocity styles within a group. It turns out that giving can be contagious.

Givers develop prestige:

Givers develop prestige in four domains of influence:

Presenting, selling, persuading, and negotiating.?

Because they value the perspectives and interests of others, givers are more inclined toward asking questions than offering answers, talking tentatively rather than boldly, and admitting their weaknesses rather than displaying their strengths.?

To effectively influence people, we need to convert the respect that we earn into a reason for our audiences to change their attitudes and behaviours. Nowhere is this clearer than in sales.

Givers ask questions:

It’s the givers, by virtue of their interest in getting to know us, who ask us the questions that enable us to experience the joy of learning from ourselves. And by giving us the floor, givers are actually learning about us and from us, which helps them figure out how to sell us things we already value.

Successful givers:

Givers end up exhausted and unproductive. Since the strategies that catapult givers to the top are distinct from those that sink givers to the bottom, it’s critical to understand what differentiates successful givers from failed givers.

Successful givers aren’t just more other-oriented than their peers; they are also more self-interested. Successful givers, it turns out, are just as ambitious as takers and matchers.

Selfless givers are people with high other-interest and low self-interest. They give their time and energy without regard for their own needs, and they pay a price for that.

Successful givers are otherish: they care about benefiting others, but they also have ambitious goals for advancing their own interests. Selfless giving, in the absence of self-preservation instincts, easily becomes overwhelming.?

Being otherish means being willing to give more than you receive, but still keeping your own interests in sight, using them as a guide for choosing when, where, how, and to whom you give.

Avoiding givers burnout:?

It has less to do with the amount of giving and more with the amount of feedback about the impact of that giving. Givers don’t burn out when they devote too much time and energy to giving. They burn out when they’re working with people in need but are unable to help effectively.

Genuine givers:

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.

We tend to stereotype agreeable people as givers, and disagreeable people as takers.

The ability to recognize agreeable takers as fakers is what protects givers against being exploited.

Research suggests that in general, givers are more accurate judges of others than matchers and takers.?

Takers and matchers may be most likely to give when they feel they can advance others’ interests and their own at the same time.

When people share an identity with another person, giving to that person takes on an otherish quality. If we help people who belong to our group, we’re also helping ourselves, as we’re making the group better off.

For matchers, because there’s no way to pay it back, paying it forward is the next best thing— especially since they’re helping people just like themselves.

Charles Darwin once wrote that a tribe with many people acting like givers, who “were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”

Workplaces and schools are often designed to be zero-sum environments, with forced rankings and required grading curves that pit group members against one another in win-lose contests.?

Reputational benefit:

Takers know that in a public setting, they’ll gain reputational benefits for being generous in sharing their knowledge, resources, and connections. If they don’t contribute, they look stingy and selfish, and they won’t get much help with their own requests.

Successful givers:?

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.

Summary:

An excellent explanation of how we are wired to be either givers, takers or matchers and the effect this will have on our long-term success.?

1 Key Takeaway/Insight:

Successful givers get to the top without cutting others down, finding ways of expanding the pie that benefit themselves and the people around them

Rating: 9 out of 10

Author:?Adam Grant

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