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Dormant ties are the neglected value in our networks, and givers have a distinctive edge over takers and matchers in unlocking this value. For takers, reactivating dormant ties is a challenge. If the dormant ties are fellow takers, they’ll be suspicious and self-protective, withholding novel information. If the dormant ties are matchers, they may be motivated to punish takers, as we saw in the ultimatum game.
According to networking experts, reconnecting is a totally different experience for givers, especially in a wired world. Givers have a track record of generously sharing their knowledge, teaching us their skills, and helping us find jobs without worrying about what’s in it for them, so we’re glad to help them when they get back in touch with us.
today, givers like Adam Rifkin are able to spark a more powerful form of reciprocity. Instead of trading value, Rifkin aims to add value. His giving is governed by a simple rule: the five-minute favor. “You should be willing to do something that will take you five minutes or less for anybody.”
When takers build networks, they try to claim as much value as possible for themselves from a fixed pie. When givers like Rifkin build networks, they expand the pie so that everyone can get a larger slice.
It turns out that giving can be contagious. In one study, contagion experts James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis found that giving spreads rapidly and widely across social networks.
“He has such a great reputation; people know he’s a good guy. That’s a dividend that gets paid because of who he is.”
“I’ll sum up the key to success in one word: generosity,” writes Keith Ferrazzi. “If your interactions are ruled by generosity, your rewards will follow suit.”
Ivan Misner, the founder and chairman of BNI, the world’s largest business networking organization, needs just two words to describe his guiding philosophy: “Givers gain.”
It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others. —John Andrew Holmes, former U.S. representative and senator
Geniuses tend to be takers: to promote their own interests, they “drain intelligence, energy, and capability” from others. Genius makers tend to be givers: they use their “intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities” of other people, Wiseman writes, such that “lightbulbs go off over people’s heads, ideas flow, and problems get solved.”
George Meyer’s success highlights that givers can be every bit as creative as takers.
The research on creative architects suggests that takers often have the confidence to generate original ideas that buck traditions and fight uphill battles to champion these ideas.
Even in seemingly independent jobs that rely on raw brainpower, our success depends more on others than we realize.
Even though they were supposed to be individual stars, their performance wasn’t portable. When star analysts moved to a different firm, their performance dropped, and it stayed lower for at least five years. In the first year after the move, the star analysts were 5 percent less likely to be ranked first, 6 percent less likely to be ranked second, 1 percent less likely to be ranked third, and 6 percent more likely to be unranked. Even five years after the move, the stars were 5 percent less likely to be ranked first and 8 percent more likely to be unranked.
On average, firms lost about $24 million by hiring star analysts. Contrary to the beliefs of Fraenkel and other industry insiders, Groysberg and his colleagues conclude that “hiring stars is advantageous neither to stars themselves, in terms of their performance, nor to hiring companies in terms of their market value.”
The star investment analysts and the cardiac surgeons depended heavily on collaborators who knew them well or had strong skills of their own.
“I believe that collaboration is such a beautiful thing, especially in comedy,” Meyer told me. “In a community of funny people, you can get that rare synergy, jokes you never could have come up with on your own.”
We tend to privilege the lone genius who generates ideas that enthrall us, or change our world. According to research by a trio of Stanford psychologists, Americans see independence as a symbol of strength, viewing interdependence as a sign of weakness.
Givers reject the notion that interdependence is weak. Givers are more likely to see interdependence as a source of strength, a way to harness the skills of multiple people for a greater good.
This is a defining feature of how givers collaborate: they take on the tasks that are in the group’s best interest, not necessarily their own personal interests. This makes their groups better off: studies show that on average, from sales teams to paper mill crews to restaurants, the more giving group members do, the higher the quantity and quality of their groups’ products and services.
Expedition behavior involves putting the group’s goals and mission first, and showing the same amount of concern for others as you do for yourself.
Jeff Ashby, a NASA space shuttle commander who has flown more than four hundred orbits around Earth, says that “expedition behavior—being selfless, generous, and putting the team ahead of yourself—is what helps us succeed in space more than anything else.” John Kanengieter, who directs leadership at NOLS, adds that expedition behavior is “not a zero-sum game: when you give it away, you gain more in response.”
When givers put a group’s interests ahead of their own, they signal that their primary goal is to benefit the group. As a result, givers earn the respect of their collaborators.
Meyer summarizes his code of honor as “(1) Show up. (2) Work hard. (3) Be kind. (4) Take the high road.”
In a classic article, the psychologist Edwin Hollander argued that when people act generously in groups, they earn idiosyncrasy credits—positive impressions that accumulate in the minds of group members.
“At a very early point, they realized that George was too important to let out of the room,” Jon Vitti told the Harvard Crimson.
Tim Long adds that “there’s something magical about getting the reputation as someone who cares about others more than yourself. It redounds to your benefit in countless ways.”
If you’re a taker, your driving motivation is to make sure you get more than you give, which means you’re carefully counting every contribution that you make. It’s all too easy to believe that you’ve done the lion’s share of the work, overlooking what your colleagues contribute.
In one study, psychologist Michael McCall asked people to fill out a survey measuring whether they were givers or takers, and to make decisions in pairs about the importance of different items for surviving in the desert. He randomly told half of the pairs that they failed and the other half that they succeeded. The takers blamed their partners for failures and claimed credit for successes. The givers shouldered the blame for failures and gave their partners more credit for successes.
At the end of the day, even if he was trashing their work, they knew he cared about them as people. Carolyn Omine comments that “George does not mince words; he’ll come right out and tell you if he thinks the joke you pitched is dumb, but you never feel he’s saying you’re dumb.” Tim Long told me that when you give Meyer a script to read, “It’s as if you just handed him a baby, and it’s his responsibility to tell you if your baby’s sick. He really cares about great writing—and about you.”
Even though they had felt the cold ten minutes earlier, once they weren’t cold anymore, they could no longer imagine it. This is a perspective gap: when we’re not experiencing a psychologically or physically intense state, we dramatically underestimate how much it will affect us.
Like Meyer, successful givers shift their frames of reference to the recipient’s perspective. For most people, this isn’t the natural starting point. Consider the common dilemma of giving a gift for a wedding or a new baby’s arrival. When the recipient has created a registry, do you pick something from the registry or send a unique gift?
This capacity to see the world from another person’s perspective develops very early in life.
He was undoubtedly a genius, but he wasn’t a genius maker. When Wright succeeded, it didn’t multiply the success of other architects; it usually came at their expense.
George Meyer’s success had the opposite effect on his collaborators: it rippled, cascaded, and spread to the people around him. Meyer’s colleagues call him a genius, but it’s striking that he has also been a genius maker. By helping his fellow writers on The Simpsons, George Meyer made them more effective at their jobs, multiplying their collective effectiveness. “He made me a better writer, inspiring me to think outside the box,” Don Payne comments.
Meyer’s willingness to volunteer for unpopular tasks, help other people improve their jokes, and work long hours to achieve high collective standards rubbed off on his colleagues. “He makes everyone try harder,” Jon Vitti told a Harvard Crimson reporter, who exclaimed that “Meyer’s presence spurs other Simpsons writers to be funnier,” extolling Meyer’s gift for “inspiring greatness in those around him.”
When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be. —attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer, physicist, biologist, and artist
The study was designed to find out what happened to students when teachers believed they had high potential. Rosenthal randomly selected 20 percent of the students in each classroom to be labeled as bloomers, and the other 80 percent were a control group. The bloomers weren’t any smarter than their peers—the difference “was in the mind of the teacher.”
“Self-fulfilling prophecies in the classroom are real.”
The platoon leaders who held high expectations of their trainees provided more help, career advice, and feedback to their trainees. When their trainees made mistakes, instead of assuming that they lacked ability, the platoon leaders saw opportunities for teaching and learning. The supportive behaviors of the platoon leaders boosted the confidence and ability of the trainees, enabling and encouraging them to achieve higher performance.
Some managers and teachers have already internalized this message. They see people as bloomers naturally, without ever being told. This is rarely the case for takers, who tend to place little trust in other people. Because they assume that most people are takers, they hold relatively low expectations for the potential of their peers and subordinates. Research shows that takers harbor doubts about others’ intentions, so they monitor vigilantly for information that others might harm them, treating others with suspicion and distrust. These low expectations trigger a vicious cycle, constraining
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By default, givers start by viewing people as bloomers. This is exactly what has enabled C. J. Skender to develop so many star students. He isn’t unusual in recognizing talented people; he simply starts by seeing everyone as talented and tries to bring out the best in them. In Skender’s mind, every student who walks into his classroom is a diamond in the rough—able and willing to be mined, cut, and polished. He sees potential where others don’t, which has set in motion a series of self-fulfilling prophecies.
Success doesn’t measure a human being, effort does.
To groom world-class athletes and musicians, experts looked for people with the right raw abilities, and then sought to motivate them. If you want to find people who can dunk like Michael Jordan or play piano like Beethoven, it’s only natural to start by screening candidates for leaping ability and an ear for music. But in recent years, psychologists have come to believe that this approach may be backward. In the 1960s, a pioneering psychologist named Raymond Cattell developed an investment theory of intelligence. He proposed that interest is what drives people to invest their time and energy
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“you can’t take motivation for granted.”
Of course, natural talent also matters, but once you have a pool of candidates above the threshold of necessary potential, grit is a major factor that predicts how close they get to achieving their potential. This is why givers focus on gritty people: it’s where givers have the greatest return on their investment, the most meaningful and lasting impact.
extensive research led by Staw shows that once people make an initial investment of time, energy, or resources, when it goes sour, they’re at risk for increasing their investment. Gamblers in the hole believe that if they just play one more hand of poker, they’ll be able to recover their losses or even win big. Struggling entrepreneurs think that if they just give their start-ups a little more sweat, they can turn it around. When an investment doesn’t pay off, even if the expected value is negative, we invest more.
In response to ego threat, people invest more, hoping to turn the project into a success so they can prove to others—and themselves—that they were right all along.
Other studies show that people actually make more accurate and creative decisions when they’re choosing on behalf of others than themselves.
In my own research, I’ve found that because of their dedication to others, givers are willing to work harder and longer than takers and matchers. Even when practice is no longer enjoyable, givers continue exerting effort out of a sense of responsibility to their team.
