Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

by Adam M. Grant

“Being a giver is not good for a 100-yard dash, but it’s valuable in a marathon.”

People who prefer to give or match often feel pressured to lean in the taker direction when they perceive a workplace as zero-sum.

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.”

David Hornik recognizes the costs of operating like a giver. “Some people think I’m delusional. They believe the way you achieve is by being a taker,” he says. If he were more of a taker, he probably wouldn’t accept unsolicited

pitches, respond personally to e-mails, share information with competitors on his blog, or invite his rivals to benefit from The Lobby conference. He would protect his time, guard his knowledge, and leverage his connections more carefully. And if he were more of a matcher, he would have asked for quid pro quo with the venture capitalist who attended The Lobby but didn’t invite Hornik to his own conference. But Hornik pays more attention to what other people need than to what he gets from them. Hornik has been extremely successful as a venture capitalist while living by his values, and he’s widely respected for his generosity. “It’s a win-win,” Hornik reflects. “I get to create an environment where other people can get deals and build relationships, and I live in the world I want to live in.” His experience reinforces that giving not only is professionally risky; it can also be professionally rewarding.

“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?’” This may strike some as a way to overinvest in others, but as Adam Rifkin once learned to great effect, we can’t always predict who can help us.

One of Rifkin’s maxims is “I believe in the strength of weak ties.” It’s in homage to a classic study by the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter. Strong ties are our close friends and colleagues, the people we really trust. Weak ties are our acquaintances, the people we know casually. Testing the common assumption that we get the most help from our strong ties, Granovetter surveyed people in professional, technical, and managerial professions who had recently changed jobs. Nearly 17 percent heard about the job from a strong tie. Their friends and trusted colleagues gave them plenty of leads. But surprisingly, people were significantly more likely to benefit from weak ties. Almost 28 percent heard about the job from a weak tie. 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.

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.”

Dormant ties offer the access to novel information that weak ties afford, but without the discomfort. As Levin and colleagues explain, “reconnecting a dormant relationship is not like starting a relationship from scratch. When people reconnect, they still have feelings of trust.” An executive divulged that “I feel comfortable . . . I didn’t need to guess what his intentions were . . . there was mutual trust that we built years ago that made our conversation today smoother.” Reactivating a dormant tie actually required a shorter conversation, since there was already some common ground. The executives didn’t need to invest in building a relationship from the start with their dormant ties, as they would with weak ties.

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 people feel grateful for Rifkin’s help, like Stephanie, they’re more likely to pay it forward. “I have always been a very genuine and kind-hearted person,” Stephanie says, “but I had tried to hide it and be more competitive so that I could get ahead. The important lesson I learned from Adam is that you can be a genuinely kind-hearted person and still get ahead in the world.”

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.

Giving, especially when it’s distinctive and consistent, establishes a pattern that shifts other people’s reciprocity styles within a group. 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. When one person made the choice to contribute to a group at a personal cost over a series of rounds, other group members were more likely to contribute in future rounds, even when interacting with people who weren’t present for the original act. “This influence persists for multiple periods and spreads up to three degrees of separation (from person to person to person to person),” Fowler and Christakis find, such that “each additional contribution a subject makes . . . in the first period is tripled over the course of the experiment by other subjects who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more as a consequence.”

the most productive were those who gave often—and gave more than they received. These were the true givers, and they had the highest productivity and the highest status: they were revered by their peers.

“I’ll sum up the key to success in one word: generosity,”

There’s a name for Meyer’s actions: in the world of mountaineering, it’s called expedition behavior. The term was coined by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), which has provided wilderness education to

thousands of people, including crews of NASA astronauts. 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 line with Meyer’s experience, research shows that givers get extra credit when they offer ideas that challenge the status quo.

“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.”

Just as matchers grant a bonus to givers in collaborations, they impose a tax on takers.

In the Simpsons rewrite room, being more forgiving of others than of himself helped Meyer get the best ideas out of others. “I tried to create a climate in the room where everybody feels that they can contribute, that it’s okay to fall on your face many, many times,” he says. This is known as psychological safety—the belief that you can take a risk without being penalized or punished.

Don Payne recalls that when he and fellow writer John Frink joined The Simpsons, they were intimidated by the talented veterans on the show, but Meyer made it safe to present their ideas. “George was incredibly supportive, and took us under his wing. He made it very easy to join in and participate, encouraged us to pitch and didn’t denigrate us. He listened, and asked for our opinions.”

“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.”

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.

On the other hand, researcher Jim Berry and I discovered that in creative work, givers are motivated to benefit others, so they find ways to put themselves in other people’s shoes.

Recognizing that he couldn’t literally feel what they were feeling, he found a close substitute: he reflected on what it felt like to receive feedback and have his work revised when he was in their positions.

This ability to imagine other people’s perspectives, rather than getting stuck in our own perspectives, is a signature skill of successful givers in collaborations.

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 students labeled as bloomers didn’t actually score higher on the Harvard intelligence test. Rosenthal chose them at random. The study was designed to find out what happened to students when teachers believed they had high potential.

Evidence shows that leaders’ beliefs can catalyze self-fulfilling prophecies in many settings beyond the military.

But the matcher’s mistake lies in waiting for signs of high potential. Since matchers tend to play it safe, they often wait to offer support until they’ve seen evidence of promise.

“The primary purpose has already been served by your preparation for this exam” . . . Success doesn’t measure a human being, effort does.

Despite the popularity of this model, givers recognize that it is fatally flawed in one respect. The identification of talent may be the wrong place to start. For many years, psychologists believed that in any domain, success depended on talent first and motivation second. To groom world-class athletes and musicians, experts looked for people with the right raw abilities, and then sought to motivate them.

investment theory of intelligence. He proposed that interest is what drives people to invest their time and energy in developing particular skills and bases of knowledge. Today, we have compelling evidence that interest precedes the development of talent. It turns out that motivation is the reason that people develop talent in the first place.

As Malcolm Gladwell showed us in Outliers, research led by psychologist Anders Ericsson reveals that attaining expertise in a domain typically requires ten thousand hours of deliberate practice. But what motivates people to practice at such length in the first place?

True to his compulsive nature and eclectic taste, he punctuates his courses with entertaining routines to keep his students engaged, playing four songs at the start of each class and tossing candy bars to the first students who shout out the correct answers to music trivia. This is how a poster of a rapper ended up on his wall. “If you want to engage your audience, if you really want to grab their attention, you have to know the world they live in, the music they listen to, the movies they watch,” he explains. “To most of these kids, accounting is like a root canal. But when they hear me quote Usher or Cee Lo Green, they say to themselves, ‘Whoa, did that fat old white-haired guy just say what I thought he said?’ And then you’ve got ’em.”

escalation of commitment to a losing course of action. Over the past four decades, 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.

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.

To figure out why and when escalation of commitment happens, researchers at Michigan State University analyzed 166 different studies. Sunk costs do have a small effect—decision makers are biased in favor of their previous investments—but three other factors are more powerful. One is anticipated regret: will I be sorry that I didn’t give this another chance? The second is project completion: if I keep investing, I can finish the proje...

Because escalating his or her commitment allows the decision maker to keep the prospect of failure hidden, such behavior is personally rational” from the perspective of a taker.

Other studies show that people actually make more accurate and creative decisions when they’re choosing on behalf of others than themselves.

In escalation situations, takers often struggle to face the reality that an initial choice has gone bad. Takers tend to “discount social information and performance feedback that does not support their favorable view of themselves,” write Meglino and Korsgaard, whereas givers “may be more apt to accept and act on social information without carefully evaluating the personal consequences.” Givers focus more on the interpersonal and organizational consequences of their decisions, accepting a blow to their pride and reputations in the short term in order to make better choices in the long term.

Inman’s experience, coupled with research evidence, reveals that givers don’t excel only at recognizing and developing talent; they’re also surprisingly good at moving on when their bets don’t work out.

“If you choose to champion great talent, you will be picking one of the most altruistic things a person can do,” writes George Anders. “In any given year, quick-hit operators may make more money and win more recognition, at least briefly. Over time, though, that dynamic reverses.”

With the Air Force colonels, though, I was worried about credibility, and I only had four hours—instead of my usual four months—to establish it. Deviating from my typical vulnerable style, I adopted a dominant tone in describing my qualifications. But the more I tried to dominate, the more the colonels resisted. I failed to win their respect, and I felt disappointed and embarrassed. I had another session with Air Force colonels coming up on my schedule, so I decided to try a different opening. Instead of talking confidently about my credentials, I opened with a more powerless, self-deprecating remark: “I know what some of you are thinking right now: ‘What can I possibly learn from a professor who’s twelve years old?’” There was a split second of awkward silence, and I held my breath. Then the room erupted with bursts of laughter. A colonel named Hawk piped up: “Come on, that’s way off base. I’m pretty sure you’re thirteen.” From there, I proceeded to deliver a near carbon copy of my first presentation—after all, the information I had to deliver on motivation hadn’t changed. But afterward, when I looked at the feedback, it differed night and day from my previous session: “Spoke with personal experience. He was the right age! High energy; clearly successful already.” “Adam was obviously knowledgeable regarding the topic and this translated into his passion and interest. This allowed him to be very effective. One word—EXCELLENT!” “Although junior in experience, he dealt with ...

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.

But there’s a twist: expressing vulnerability is only effective if the audience receives other signals establishing the speaker’s competence.

When the average candidate was clumsy, audiences liked him even less. But when the expert was clumsy, audiences liked him even more. 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.*

By asking questions and listening to the answers, Grumbles showed his customers that he cared about their interests. This built prestige: customers respected and admired the concern that he showed. After one of his early sales calls, a customer took him aside to tell him he was a “great conversationalist.” Grumbles laughs: “I’d hardly said a thing!”