Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success

by Adam M. Grant

The other counterintuitive combination of appearances and motives is the agreeable taker, otherwise known as a faker. Like Ken Lay at Enron, these people come across as pleasant and charming, but they’re often aiming to get much more than they give. The ability to recognize agreeable takers as fakers is what protects givers against being exploited.

At Deloitte, Jason Geller intuitively adopted an approach that closely resembles sincerity screening. Geller starts by offering help to every new hire, but in his initial conversations with them, he pays attention to who seems to be a giver versus a taker.

Once givers start to use their skills in sincerity screening to identify potential takers, they know when to put up their guard.

Peter was falling into an empathy trap that’s visible in a classic negotiation study.

Peter accomplished this maneuver by getting inside Rich’s head, rather than his heart.

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. Peter never would have discovered his solution if he had continued to empathize with Rich. By shifting his focus from Rich’s feelings to his thoughts, Peter was able to see the world through a taker’s eyes and adjust his strategy accordingly.

In generous tit for tat, the rule is “never forget a good turn, but occasionally forgive a bad one.”

You start out cooperating and continue cooperating until your counterpart competes.

When your counterpart competes, instead of always responding competitively, generous tit for tat usually means competing two thirds of the time, acting cooperatively...

Generous tit for tat is an otherish strategy.

Being otherish means that givers keep their own interests in the rearview mirror, taking care to trust but verify. When dealing with takers, shifting into matcher mode is a self-protective strategy. But one out of every three times, it may be wise to shift back into giver mode, granting so-called takers the opportunity to redeem themselves.

To decline requests from clients that fell outside the scope of a project, she used a combination of advocacy and relational accounts.

The most effective negotiators were otherish: they reported high concern for their own interests and high concern for their counterparts’ interests. By looking for opportunities to benefit others and themselves, otherish givers are able to think in more complex ways and identify win-win solutions that both takers and selfless givers miss. Instead of just giving away value like selfless givers, otherish givers create value first. By the time they give slices of pie away, the entire pie is big enough that there’s plenty left to claim for themselves: they can give more and take more.

By deciding not to carry the burden alone, Bauer expanded the pie, enabling her giving to have a broader impact while protecting her own time. “If you have a natural mix of givers, takers, and matchers in your company,” Bauer says, “you can do a lot to magnify the giver tendency, suppress the more aggressive taker

tendencies, and shift the matchers toward giving. There’s an energy and a satisfaction that you get out of it. In its own way, it’s addictive.”

More recent research has shown that (a) compassion and politeness are two separate aspects of agreeableness, (b) the compassion dimension is more related to honesty and humility than to agreeableness, and (c) agreeableness can be distinguished from giver values.

Oneness is otherish. Most of the time that we give, it’s based on a cocktail of mixed motives to benefit others and ourselves.

As Simon Sinek writes, “Givers advance the world. Takers advance themselves and hold the world back.”

On the other hand, as we saw with Ken Lay, our behaviors leak traces of our motives. If recipients and witnesses of our giving begin to question whether the motives are self-serving, they’re less likely to respond with gratitude or elevation. When strategic matchers engage in disingenuous efforts to help others primarily for personal gain, they may be hoisted by their own petard: fellow matchers may withhold help, spread negative reputational information, or find other ways to impose a taker tax.

We spend the majority of our waking hours at work. This means that what we do at work becomes a fundamental part of who we are. If we reserve giver values for our personal lives, what will be missing in our professional lives? By shifting ever so slightly in the giver direction, we might find our waking hours marked by greater success, richer meaning, and more lasting impact.