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According to conventional wisdom, highly successful people have three things in common: motivation, ability, and opportunity. If we want to succeed, we need a combination of hard work, talent, and luck.
success depends heavily on how we approach our interactions with other people. Every time we interact with another person at work, we have a choice to make: do we try to claim as much value as we can, or contribute value without worrying about what we receive in return?
givers and takers differ in their attitudes and actions toward other people. If you’re a taker, you help others strategically, when the benefits to you outweigh the personal costs. If you’re a giver, you might use a different cost-benefit analysis: you help whenever the benefits to others exceed the personal costs.
According to research led by Yale psychologist Margaret Clark, most people act like givers in close relationships. In marriages and friendships, we contribute whenever we can without keeping score.
But evidence shows that at work, the vast majority of people develop a primary reciprocity style, which captures how they approach most of the people most of the time. And this primary style can play as much of a role in our success as hard work, talent, and luck.
Research demonstrates that givers sink to the bottom of the success ladder. Across a wide range of important occupations, givers are at a disadvantage: they make others better off but sacrifice their own success in the process.
The worst performers and the best performers are givers; takers and matchers are more likely to land in the middle.
Givers dominate the bottom and the top of the success ladder. Across occupations, if you examine the link between reciprocity styles and success, the givers are more likely to become champs—not only chumps.
Givers succeed in a way that creates a ripple effect, enhancing the success of people around them.
It takes time for givers to build goodwill and trust, but eventually, they establish reputations and relationships that enhance their success.
Chip Conley, the renowned entrepreneur who founded Joie de Vivre Hotels, explains, “Being a giver is not good for a 100-yard dash, but it’s valuable in a marathon.”
people work in interconnected jobs providing services to others. In the 1980s, the service sector made up about half of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP). By 1995, the service sector was responsible for nearly two thirds of world GDP. Today, more than 80 percent of Americans work in service jobs.
Steve Jones, the award-winning former CEO of one of the largest banks in Australia, wanted to know what made financial advisers successful. His team studied key factors such as financial expertise and effort. But “the single most influential factor,” Jones told me, “was whether a financial adviser had the client’s best interests at heart, above the company’s and even his own. It was one of my three top priorities to get that value instilled, and demonstrate that it’s in everybody’s best interests to treat clients that way.”
The fear of exploitation by takers is so pervasive, writes the Cornell economist Robert Frank, that “by encouraging us to expect the worst in others it brings out the worst in us: dreading the role of the chump, we are often loath to heed our nobler instincts.”
Hornik said that “above all, I want to demonstrate that success doesn’t have to come at someone else’s expense.”
Hornik pays more attention to what other people need than to what he gets from them.
successful givers have unique approaches to interactions in four key domains: networking, collaborating, evaluating, and influencing.
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. —Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner
We can debate about how much Lay truly knew about Enron’s illegal activities, but it’s difficult to deny that he was a taker. Although Lay may have looked like a giver to many observers, he was a faker: a taker in disguise. Lay felt entitled to use Enron’s resources for personal gain.
For centuries, we have recognized the importance of networking. According to Brian Uzzi, a management professor at Northwestern University, networks come with three major advantages: private information, diverse skills, and power.
Ultimately, I want to argue that while givers and takers may have equally large networks, givers are able to produce far more lasting value through their networks, and in ways that might not seem obvious.
“It seems counterintuitive, but the more altruistic your attitude, the more benefits you will gain from the relationship,” writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. “If you set out to help others,” he explains, “you will rapidly reinforce your own reputation and expand your universe of possibilities.”
There’s a Dutch phrase that captures this duality beautifully: “kissing up, kicking down.”
When takers deal with powerful people, they become convincing fakers. Takers want to be admired by influential superiors, so they go out of their way to charm and flatter. As a result, powerful people tend to form glowing first impressions of takers.
As Samuel Johnson purportedly wrote, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”
Takers may rise by kissing up, but they often fall by kicking down.
Why do we punish takers for being unfair? It’s not spite. We’re not getting revenge on takers for trying to take advantage of us. It’s about justice. If you’re a matcher, you’ll also punish takers for acting unfairly toward other people. Gretchen Rubin calls matchers the “karma police.” In another study spearheaded by Kahneman, people had a choice between splitting $12 evenly with a taker who had made an unfair proposal in the past or splitting $10 evenly with a matcher who had made a fair proposal in the past. More than 80 percent of the people preferred to split $10 evenly with the matcher,
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Wayne Baker, a University of Michigan sociologist and networking expert, explains, “If we create networks with the sole intention of getting something, we won’t succeed. We can’t pursue the benefits of networks; the benefits ensue from investments in meaningful activities and relationships.”
They found several clues of takers lekking at the top. One signal appeared in CEO interviews. Since takers tend to be self-absorbed, they’re more likely to use first-person singular pronouns like I, me, mine, my, and myself—versus first-person plural pronouns like we, us, our, ours, and ourselves.
In the computer industry, when talking about the company, on average, 21 percent of CEOs’ first-person pronouns were in the singular. For the extreme takers, 39 percent of their first-person pronouns were in the singular. Of every ten words that the taker CEOs uttered referencing themselves, four were about themselves alone and no one else.
Self-glorifying images, self-absorbed conversations, and sizable pay gaps can send accurate, reliable signals that someone is a taker.
“Social networks have always existed,” write psychologists Benjamin Crosier, Gregory Webster, and Haley Dillon. “It is only recently that the Internet has provided a venue for their electronic explosion. . . . From mundane communication to meeting the love of one’s life to inciting political revolutions, network ties are the conduits by which information and resources are spread.”
Now, it’s much harder for takers to get away with being fakers, fooling people into thinking they’re givers. On the Internet, we can now track down reputational information about our contacts by accessing public databases and discovering shared connections. And we no longer need a company’s annual report to catch a taker, because lekking in its many sizes and forms abounds in social network profiles.
Lee explains. “You can understand someone’s reputation at a peer level pretty quickly.” When your relationships and reputations are visible to the world, it’s harder to achieve sustainable success as a taker.
“I get roped into giving free advice to other entrepreneurs, which is usually worth less than they pay for it,” he muses, but “helping others is my favorite thing to do.”
“You never know where somebody’s going to end up. It’s not just about building your reputation; it really is about being there for other people.”
Shambora, who now works at Facebook, says that Rifkin is “the consummate networker, and he didn’t get that way by being some sort of climber, or calculated. People go to Adam because they know his heart is in the right place.”
Rifkin’s networking style, which exemplifies how givers tend to approach networks, stands in stark contrast to the way that takers and matchers tend to build and extract value from their connections. The fact that Rifkin gives a lot more than he receives is a key point: takers and matchers also give in the context of networks, but they tend to give strategically, with an expected personal return that exceeds or equals their contributions. When takers and matchers network, they tend to focus on who can help them in the near future, and this dictates what, where, and how they give. Their actions
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legislative agenda.” Reciprocity is a powerful norm, but it comes with two downsides, both of which contribute to the cautiousness with which many of us approach networking. The first downside is that people on the receiving end often feel like they’re being manipulated.
Matchers tend to build smaller networks than either givers, who seek actively to help a wider range of people, or takers, who often find themselves expanding their networks to compensate for bridges burned in previous transactions.
Many matchers operate based on the attitude of “I’ll do something for you, if you’ll do something for me,” writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, so they “limit themselves to deals in which their immediate benefit is at least as great as the benefits for others . . . If you insist on a quid pro quo every time you help others, you will have a much narrower network.”
When matchers give with the expectation of receiving, they direct their giving toward people w...
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Both disadvantages ultimately arise out of a shortsightedness about networks, in that takers and matchers make hard-and-fast assumptions about just who will be able to provide the most benefit in exchange. At its core, the giver approach extends a broader reach, and in doing so enlarges the range of potential payoffs, even though those payoffs are not the motivating engine.
“When you meet people,” says former Apple evangelist and Silicon Valley legend Guy Kawasaki, regardless of who they are, “you should be asking yourself, ‘How can I help the other person?’”
Rifkin’s experiences foreshadow how givers have the advantage of accessing the full breadth of their networks.
Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information. Our strong ties tend to travel in the same social circles and know about the same opportunities as we do. Weak ties are more likely to open up access to a different network, facilitating the discovery of original leads.
By the second meeting, Spencer was introducing Rifkin to a venture capitalist. “A completely random set of events that happened in 1994 led to reengaging with him over e-mail in 1999, which led to my company getting founded in 2000,” Rifkin recalls. “Givers get lucky.”
Thirty years ago, the sociologist Fred Goldner wrote about what it means to experience the opposite of paranoia: pronoia. According to the distinguished psychologist Brian Little, pronoia is “the delusional belief that other people are plotting your well-being, or saying nice things about you behind your back.”
His secret was deceptively simple: he asked thoughtful questions and listened with remarkable patience.
Each time he gave, he created a new connection. But is it really possible to keep up with all of these contacts?
