Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

by Adam M. Grant

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. The story of Danny Shader and David Hornik highlights a fourth ingredient, one that’s critical but often neglected: 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?

As the venture capitalist Randy Komisar remarks, “It’s easier to win if everybody wants you to win. If you don’t make enemies out there, it’s easier to succeed.”

When we initially concluded that Lincoln and Hornik lost, we hadn’t stretched the time horizons out far enough. It takes time for givers to build goodwill and trust, but eventually, they establish reputations and relationships that enhance their success.

“My default is to give,” she says. “I’m not looking for quid pro quo; I’m looking to make a difference and have an impact, and I focus on the people who can benefit from my help the most.”

“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.”

As Samuel Johnson purportedly wrote, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”

In networks, new research shows that when people get burned by takers, they punish them by sharing reputational information. “Gossip represents a widespread, efficient, and low-cost form of punishment,” write the social scientists Matthew Feinberg, Joey Cheng, and Robb Willer. When reputational information suggests that someone has taker tendencies, we can withhold trust and avoid being exploited.

The givers had the highest status, outdoing the matchers and takers. The more generous they were, the more respect and prestige they earned from their colleagues. Through giving more than they got, givers signaled their unique skills, demonstrated their value, and displayed their good intentions.

By giving often, engineers built up more trust and attracted more valuable help from across their work groups—not just from the people they helped.

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. But it’s not just their groups that get rewarded: like Adam Rifkin, successful givers expand the pie in ways that benefit themselves as well as their groups. Extensive research reveals that people who give their time and knowledge regularly to help their colleagues end up earning more raises and promotions in a wide range of settings, from banks to manufacturing companies. “On The Simpsons, I think George surrendered himself to the show,” Tim Long says. “Intuitively, he understood that the best thing for him was for the show to be as good as possible.”

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.

In one study, University of Minnesota researchers Eugene Kim and Theresa Glomb found that highly talented people tend to make others jealous, placing themselves at risk of being disliked, resented, ostracized, and undermined. But if these talented people are also givers, they no longer have a target on their backs. Instead, givers are appreciated for their contributions to the group.

“A lot of people feel they’re diminished if there are too many names on a script, like everybody’s trying to share a dog bowl,” Meyer says. “But that’s not really the way it works. The thing about credit is that it’s not zero-sum. There’s room for everybody, and you’ll shine if other people are shining.”

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. For instance, evidence shows that physicians consistently think their patients are feeling less pain than they actually are. Without being in a state of pain themselves, physicians can’t fully realize what it’s like to be in that state.

When you start out, you see other people as obstacles to your success. But that means your world will be full of obstacles, which is bad. In the early years, when some of my colleagues and friends—even close friends—would have a rip-roaring success of some kind, it was hard for me. I would feel jealousy, that their success somehow was a reproach to me. When you start your career, naturally you’re mainly interested in advancing yourself and promoting yourself. But as Meyer worked on television shows, he began to run into the same people over and over. It was a small world, and a connected one. “I realized it’s a very small pond. There are only a few hundred people at any one time writing television comedy for a living,” Meyer says. “It’s a good idea not to alienate these guys, and most of the jobs you get are more or less through word of mouth, or a recommendation. It’s really important to have a good reputation. I quickly learned to see other comedy writers as allies.” Meyer began to root for other people to succeed. “It’s not a zero-sum game. So if you hear that somebody got a pilot picked up, or one of their shows went to series, in a way that’s really good, because comedy is doing better.”

Your husband, family, and friends love you because of the beautiful person you have made yourself—not because of a performance on an examination. Remember that . . . Focus on November. Concentrate on practice . . . I want what’s best for you. You WILL get through this thing, Marie. I write on my tests, “The primary purpose has already been served by your preparation for this exam” . . . Success doesn’t measure a human being, effort does.

Economists explain this behavior using a concept known as the “sunk cost fallacy”: when estimating the value of a future investment, we have trouble ignoring what we’ve already invested in the past.

Other studies show that people actually make more accurate and creative decisions when they’re choosing on behalf of others than themselves. When people make decisions in a self-focused state, they’re more likely to be biased by ego threat and often agonize over trying to find a choice that’s ideal in all possible dimensions. When people focus on others, as givers do naturally, they’re less likely to worry about egos and miniscule details; they look at the big picture and prioritize what matters most to others.

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.

Takers tend to worry that revealing weaknesses will compromise their dominance and authority. 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.

In Fragale’s study, people were much more receptive to this version. Powerless speech signals that Jamie is a giver. By talking tentatively, Jamie shows a willingness to defer to you, or at least take your opinion into consideration. Fragale finds that even when Jamie delivers the exact same message in the exact same tone both times, adding markers of tentative talk such as hedges, tag questions, and intensifiers earns greater respect and influence. This is why the creative director was so open to Don Lane’s idea: Lane signaled that he wasn’t trying to threaten the director’s authority. It was clear to the creative director that Lane was just trying to share a good idea, and the director knew a good idea when he saw it.*

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

Appearing vulnerable doesn’t bother givers, who worry far less about protecting their egos and projecting certainty. When givers ask for advice, it’s because they’re genuinely interested in learning from others. Matchers hold back on advice seeking for a different reason: they might owe something in return.

When we give our time, energy, knowledge, or resources to help others, we strive to maintain a belief that they’re worthy and deserving of our help. 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.

According to biographer Walter Isaacson, 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.”

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.

Making Impact prevent burnout

When people know how their work makes a difference, they feel energized to contribute more.

Studies led by Columbia psychologist Adam Galinsky show that 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.

But 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. The men were more than eight times as likely to negotiate as the women. The students who did negotiate (mostly men) improved their salaries by an average of 7.4 percent, enough to account for the gender gap.

Research shows that 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. Interestingly, they didn’t set higher goals, but they were willing to push harder to achieve their goals, which led them to better outcomes.

This is what I find most magnetic about successful givers: they 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. As Simon Sinek writes, “Givers advance the world. Takers advance themselves and hold the world back.”

To help people craft their jobs, Justin, Amy, and Jane have developed a tool called the Job Crafting Exercise. It’s what we used to conduct the Google workshops, and it involves creating a “before sketch” of how you currently allocate your time and energy, and then developing a visual “after diagram” of how you’d like to modify your job. The booklets can be ordered online (www.jobcrafting.org) and completed in teams or individually to help friends and colleagues make meaningful modifications to their jobs.