Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

by Adam M. Grant

“Everybody started to look at Kevin as a leader, because they all looked to him for direction. He gave until people couldn’t live without him.” In selecting and promoting talent, Simmons writes, “The most important quality you can show me is a commitment to giving.”

Whereas takers often strive to be the smartest people in the room, givers are more receptive to expertise from others, even if it challenges their own beliefs.

called the second-biggest NBA draft bust of the decade and one of the one hundred worst

Speak softly, but carry a big stick. —Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. president

Many people who stutter end up becoming quite successful, and it’s not always because they have conquered their stuttering. In the trade secrets trial, when Dave stammered and tripped over a couple of arguments, something strange happened. The jurors liked him.

In To Sell Is Human, Daniel Pink argues that our success depends heavily on influence skills. To convince others to buy our products, use our services, accept our ideas, and invest in us, we need to communicate in ways that persuade and motivate.

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 than boldly, admitting their weaknesses than displaying their strengths, and seeking advice than imposing their views on others.

Powerless communication had made all the difference. Instead of working to establish my credentials, I made myself vulnerable, and called out the elephant in the room. Later, I adopted the same approach when teaching Army generals and Navy flag officers, and it worked just as well.

Givers are much more comfortable expressing vulnerability: they’re interested in helping others, not gaining power over them, so they’re not afraid of exposing chinks in their armor. By making themselves vulnerable, givers can actually build prestige.

Psychologists call this the pratfall effect. Spilling a cup of coffee hurt the image of the average candidate: it was just another reason for the audience to dislike him. But the same blunder helped the expert appear human and approachable—instead of superior and distant.*

Asking questions opened the door for customers to experience what the psychologist James Pennebaker calls the joy of talking. Years ago, Pennebaker divided strangers into small groups. Imagine that you’ve just joined one of his groups, and you have fifteen minutes to talk with strangers about a topic of your choice. You might chat about your hometown, where you went to college, or your career. After the fifteen minutes are up, you rate how much you like the group. It turns out that the more you talked, the more you like the group. This isn’t surprising, since people love to talk about themselves. But let me ask you another question: How much did you learn about the group?

“Most of us find that communicating our thoughts is a supremely enjoyable learning experience.”

Even after controlling for intelligence, the givers outsold the matchers and takers. The average giver brought in over 30 percent more annual revenue than matchers and 68 percent more than takers. Even though matchers and takers together represented over 70 percent of the sellers, half of the top sellers were givers. If all opticians were givers, the average company’s annual revenue would spike from approximately $11.5 million to more than $15.1 million. Givers are the top sellers, and a key reason is powerless communication.

In one study, managers rated the giving behaviors of more than a thousand insurance salespeople. Even in insurance, the higher the salesperson’s giver score, the greater that salesperson’s revenue, policies sold, applications, sales quotas met, and commissions earned.

giving was the only characteristic to predict performance: it didn’t matter whether the salespeople were conscientious or carefree, extroverted or introverted, emotionally stable or anxious, and open-minded or traditional. The defining quality of a top pharmaceutical salesperson was being a giver. And powerless communication, marked by questions, is the defining quality of how givers sell.

Out of curiosity, are you planning to vote in the next presidential election? By asking you that one question, I’ve just increased the odds that you will actually vote by 41 percent.

Thoughtful questions pave the way for jurors to persuade themselves. According to Aronson, “in direct persuasion, the audience is constantly aware of the fact that they have been persuaded by another. Where self-persuasion occurs, people are convinced that the motivation for change has come from within.”

“Givers fear that they’ll become invisible,” Lane says. “But I’ve seen givers thrive because people like working with and trust them. Realizing this was a major turbo boost early in my career.”

Psychologists in Amsterdam have shown that although group members perceive takers as highly effective leaders, takers actually undermine group performance. Speaking dominantly convinces group members that takers are powerful, but it stifles information sharing, preventing members from communicating good ideas. “Teams love it when their leader presents a work product as a collaborative effort. That’s what inspires them to contribute,”

Talking tentatively didn’t establish dominance, but it earned plenty of prestige. Team members worked more productively when the tentative talkers showed that they were open to advice.

New research shows that advice seeking is a surprisingly effective strategy for exercising influence when we lack authority.

seeking advice is among the most effective ways to influence peers, superiors, and subordinates. Advice seeking tends to be significantly more persuasive than the taker’s preferred tactics of pressuring subordinates and ingratiating superiors. Advice seeking is also consistently more influential than the matcher’s default approach of trading favors.

Advice seeking is a form of powerless communication that combines expressing vulnerability, asking questions, and talking tentatively. When we ask others for advice, we’re posing a question that conveys uncertainty and makes us vulnerable. Instead of confidently projecting that we have all the answers, we’re admitting that others might have superior knowledge. As a result, takers and matchers tend to shy away from advice seeking. From a taker’s perspective, asking for advice means acknowledging that you don’t have all the answers. Takers may fear that seeking advice might make them look weak, dependent, or incompetent. They’re wrong: research shows that people who regularly seek advice and help from knowledgeable colleagues are actually rated more favorably by supervisors than those who never seek advice and help.

she discovered something she didn’t know before: the company’s jet had extra seats, and it traveled back and forth between her two key locations.

the second benefit of advice seeking: encouraging others to take our perspectives.

the third benefit of advice seeking kicked in: commitment.

Seeking advice is a subtle way to invite someone to make a commitment to us.

When we ask people for advice, we grant them prestige, showing that we respect and admire their insights and expertise. Since most people are matchers, they tend to respond favorably and feel motivated to support us in return.

Benjamin Franklin saw advice seeking as a form of flattery. Franklin “had a fundamental rule for winning friends,” Isaacson writes: appeal to “their pride and vanity by constantly seeking their opinion and advice, and they will admire you for your judgment and wisdom.”

Since givers are more willing to seek advice than takers and matchers, it’s likely that many of the spontaneous advice seekers in her studies were givers. They were actually interested in other people’s perspectives and recommendations, and they were rated as better listeners.

Powerless communication is the natural language of many givers, and one of the great engines behind their success. Expressing vulnerability, asking questions, talking tentatively, and seeking advice can open doors to gaining influence, but the way we direct that influence will reverberate throughout our work lives, including some we’ve already discussed, like building networks and collaborating with colleagues.

powerless communication can be far more powerful and effective than meets the ear.

The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than the unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals. —Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner in economics

Success involves more than just capitalizing on the strengths of giving; it also requires avoiding the pitfalls.

If people give too much time, they end up making sacrifices for their collaborators and network ties, at the expense of their own energy. If people give away too much credit and engage in too much powerless communication, it’s all too easy for them to become pushovers and doormats, failing to advance their own interests. The consequence: givers end up exhausted and unproductive.

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, which is defined by researcher Barbara Oakley as “an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one’s own needs,” such that in the process of trying to help others, givers end up harming themselves.

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.

Since givers tend to put others’ interests ahead of their own, they often help others at the expense of their own well-being, placing themselves at risk for burnout.

the givers lacked the rewards that mattered most to them. Whereas takers tend to care most about benefiting personally from their jobs, givers care deeply about doing jobs that benefit other people. When the callers brought in donations, most of the money went directly to student scholarships, but the callers were left in the dark: they had no idea who was receiving the money, and how it affected their lives.

After reading the letters, it took the givers just a week to catch up to the takers. The takers did show some improvement, but the givers responded most powerfully, nearly tripling in weekly calls and donations. Now, they had a stronger emotional grasp of their impact: if they brought in more money, they could help more scholarship students like Will. By spending just five minutes reading about how the job helped other people, the givers were motivated to achieve the same level of productivity as the takers. “The greatest untapped source of motivation,” writes Susan Dominus, “is a sense of service to others.”

The turnaround highlights a remarkable principle of giver 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.

In one study, a student and I found that high school teachers who perceived their jobs as stressful and demanding reported significantly greater burnout. But upon closer inspection, job stress was only linked to higher burnout for teachers who felt they didn’t make a difference. 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. The radiologists missed these important findings when the photo was absent—even if they caught them three months earlier. When the radiologists saw the patient’s photo, they felt more empathy. By encouraging empathy, the photos motivated the radiologists to conduct their diagnoses more carefully. Their reports were 29 percent longer when the CT exams included patient photos. When the radiologists saw a photo of a patient, they felt a stronger connection to the human impact of their work. A patient photo “makes each CT scan unique,” said one radiologist.

Having a greater impact is one of the reasons why, counterintuitive as it might seem, giving more can actually help givers avoid burnout.

The same strange thing happened to other participants. One woman said she was so drained that she couldn’t lift her arm to make another mark. But she then lifted her arm to adjust her hair, apparently without any difficulty or discomfort. And when participants read poems aloud until their voices were hoarse, they had no trouble complaining about the task—and when they complained, they didn’t sound hoarse anymore. According to Langer, they weren’t faking it. Rather, “the change of context brought renewed energy.”

In numerous studies, Carnegie Mellon psychologist Vicki Helgeson has found that 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.

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.

As burnout expert Christina Maslach and colleagues conclude, “there is now a consistent and strong body of evidence that a lack of social support is linked to burnout.”

“One of the most striking aspects of the human stress response is the tendency to affiliate—that is, to come together in groups to provide and receive joint protection in threatening times.”