Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

by Adam M. Grant

Takers score high in self-interest and low in other-interest: they aim to maximize their own success without much concern for other people. By contrast, givers always score high on other-interest, but they vary in self-interest. There are two types of givers, and they have dramatically different success rates.

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 it. Selfless giving is a form of pathological altruism,

“an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of ...

“there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest, and caring for others,” and people are most successful when they are driven by a “hybrid engine” of the two. If takers are selfish and failed givers are selfless, successful givers are otherish: they care about benefiting others, but they also have ambitious goals for advancing their own interests.

Being otherish is very different from matching. Matchers expect something back from each person they help. Otherish givers help with no strings attached; they’re just careful not to overextend themselves along the way.

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.

the perception of impact serves as a buffer against stress, enabling employees to avoid burnout and maintain their motivation and performance.

A sense of lasting impact protected against stress, preventing exhaustion.

Attaching a single patient’s photo to a CT exam increased diagnostic accuracy by 46 percent. And roughly 80 percent of the key diagnostic findings came only when the radiologists saw the patient’s photo.

Along with reducing burnout among givers, a firsthand connection to impact can tilt people of all reciprocity styles in the giver direction. When people know how their work makes a difference, they feel energized to contribute more.

when people give continually without concern for their own well-being, they’re at risk for poor mental and physical health.* Yet when they give in a more otherish fashion, demonstrating substantial concern for themselves as well as others, they no longer experience health costs.

This is the 100-hour rule of volunteering. It appears to be the range where giving is maximally energizing and minimally draining. A hundred hours a year breaks down to just two hours a week.

giving has an energizing effect only if it’s an enjoyable, meaningful choice rather than undertaken out of duty and obligation.

Selfless givers “feel uncomfortable receiving support,” write Helgeson and colleague Heidi Fritz. Selfless givers are determined to be in the helper role, so they’re reluctant to burden or inconvenience others.

selfless givers receive far less support than otherish givers, which proves psychologically and physically costly.

a lack of social support is linked to burnout.”

Otherish givers build up a support network that they can access for help when they need it. This, along with chunking giving so that it’s energizing, is what makes otherish givers less vulnerable to burnout than selfless givers.

although matchers and takers appear to be less vulnerable to burnout than selfless givers, the greatest resilience may belong to otherish givers.

Over time, giving may build willpower like weight lifting builds muscles. Of course, we all know that when muscles are overused, they fatigue and sometimes even tear—this is what happens to selfless givers.

Most people think they’d be happier spending the money on themselves, but the opposite is true. If you spend the money on yourself, your happiness doesn’t change. But if you spend the money on others, you actually report becoming significantly happier. This is otherish giving: you get to choose who you help, and it benefits you by improving your mood. Economists call it the warm glow of giving, and psychologists call it the helper’s high. Recent neuroscience evidence shows that giving actually activates the reward and meaning centers in our brains, which send us pleasure and purpose signals when we act for the benefit of others. These benefits are not limited to giving money; they also show up for giving time.

These energizing effects help to explain why otherish givers are fortified against burnout: through giving, they build up reserves of happiness and meaning that takers and matchers are less able to access. 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.

Otherish givers may appear less altruistic than selfless givers, but their resilience against burnout enables them to contribute more.

three major traps that plague many givers, male and female, in their dealings with other people: being too trusting, too empathetic, and too timid.

Sincerity Screening: Trusting Most of the People Most of the Time

Trust is one reason that givers are so susceptible to the doormat effect: they tend to see the best in everyone, so they operate on the mistaken assumption that everyone is trustworthy.

To avoid getting scammed or exploited, it’s critical to distinguish the genuine givers from the takers and fakers. Successful givers need to know who’s likely to manipulate them so that they can protect themselves. Do we actually know takers when we see them?

To judge givers, we often rely on personality cues, but it turns out these cues can be misleading.

agreeable people tend to appear cooperative and polite—they seek harmony with others, coming across as warm, nice, and welcoming. Disagreeable people tend to be more competitive, critical, and tough—they’re more comfortable with conflict, coming across as skeptical and challenging.*

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

“Whether you’re nice or not nice is separate from whether you’re self-focused or other-focused. They’re independent, not opposites.”

there are disagreeable givers: people who are rough and tough in demeanor, but ultimately generous with their time, expertise, and connections.

One minute, he was giving me a tough time because his expectations weren’t being met. The next day, he was helping me figure out what I wanted to do next in my career,

The other counterintuitive combination of appearances and motives is the agreeable taker, otherwise known as a faker.

these people come across as pleasant and charming, but they’re often aiming to get much more than they give. The ability to recognize agreeable takers as fakers is ...

Geller starts by offering help to every new hire, but in his initial conversations with them, he pays attention to who seems to be a giver versus a taker.

Some folks approach the conversation in terms of learning. Others come in and say, ‘I want to get promoted to senior consultant. What should I do?’” Geller assumes these consultants are takers. “They focus on telling me what they’re doing, with a thirty-minute agenda of things they want to update me on, because they want to make me aware. They’re not really asking insightful questions; it’s very superficial. We don’t get deep enough for it to be really helpful for them.”

Generous Tit for Tat: The Adaptable Giver

when we empathize at the bargaining table, focusing on our counterparts’ emotions and feelings puts us at risk of giving away too much.* But when we engage in perspective taking, considering our counterparts’ thoughts and interests, we’re more likely to find ways to make deals that satisfy our counterparts without sacrificing our own interests.

Peter was able to see the world through a taker’s eyes and adjust his strategy accordingly.

how givers avoid getting burned: they become matchers in their exchanges with takers. It’s wise to start out as a giver, since research shows that trust is hard to build but easy to destroy. But once a counterpart is clearly acting like a taker, it makes sense for givers to flex their reciprocity styles and shift to a matching strategy—as

Game theorists call this tit for tat, and it’s a pure matcher strategy: start out cooperating, and stay cooperative unless your counterpart competes. When your counterpart competes, match the behavior by competing too. This is a wildly effective form of matching that has won many game theory tournaments. But tit for tat suffers from “a fatal flaw,” writes Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak, of “not being forgiving enough to stomach the occasional mishap.” Nowak has found that it can be more advantageous to alternate between giving and matching. In generous tit for tat, the rule is “never forget a good turn, but occasionally forgive a bad one.” You start out cooperating and continue cooperating until your counterpart competes. When your counterpart competes, instead of always responding competitively, generous tit for tat usually means competing two thirds of the time, acting cooperatively in response to one of every three defections. “Generous tit for tat can easily wipe out tit for tat and defend itself against being exploited by defectors,” Nowak writes. Generous tit for tat achieves a powerful balance of rewarding giving and discouraging taking, without being overly punitive.

Generous tit for tat is an otherish strategy. Whereas selfless givers make the mistake of trusting others all the time, otherish givers start out with trust as the default assumption, but they’re willing to adjust their reciprocity styles in exchanges with someone who appears to be a taker by action or reputation. Being otherish means that givers keep their own interests in the rearview mirror, taking care to trust but verify. When dealing with takers, shifting into matcher mode is a self-protective strategy. But one out of every three times, it may be wise to shift back into giver mode, granting so-called takers the opportunity to redeem themselves.

In addition to creating opportunities for Geller to give, the monthly meetings offer the side benefit of helping him understand who might be a taker. “Part of the value of the ongoing dialogue is you can tell pretty quickly who’s faking it, because the good conversations and relationships build upon each other,” Geller explains. “It’s easy to fake it every six months, but not on a regular basis. That’s part of why I encourage people to schedule that time. It’s part of how you sort out who’s genuine while making the biggest impact.”

Assertiveness and the Advocacy Paradox

the gender gap, it turns out, wasn’t quite due to a glass ceiling. Men and women received similar starting offers, and the discrepancy emerged by the time they signed their final offers. Upon closer inspection, Babcock discovered a dramatic difference between men and women in the willingness to ask for more money. More than half of the men—57 percent—tried to negotiate their starting salaries, compared with only 7 percent of the women.

one of the main reasons that women tend to negotiate less assertively than men is that they worry about violating social expectations that they’ll be warm and kind.*

All it took was to tell them they were playing a different role. Instead of imagining that they were the employee, the female executives were asked to imagine that they were the employee’s mentor. Now the women were agents advocating for someone else.

Whereas women may be uniquely worried that assertiveness will violate gender norms, givers of both sexes worry about violating their own reciprocity preferences. If they push too hard, they’ll feel like takers, rather than givers. But when givers are advocating for someone else, pushing is closely aligned with their values of protecting and promoting the interests of others: givers can chalk it up to caring. And by offering relational accounts, givers do more than just think of themselves as agents advocating for others; they present themselves as agents advocating for others, which is a powerful way to maintain their self-images and social images as givers.

To decline requests from clients that fell outside the scope of a project, she used a combination of advocacy and relational accounts. Starting with advocacy, Bauer began to think about herself as an agent for the consultants on her team. “Givers have a protective side. In negotiating with a client, I feel a lot of responsibility for my team, and it makes me more willing to draw a hard line.”

“When a client makes an unreasonable request, I explain that it’s going to stretch my team, or kill them working crazy hours. The client knows I will bend over backward to do what’s right for them, so when I do push back, it has a lot more impact: there’s a good reason for it.”