Give And Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success By Adam Grant

Although 2013 is still young, I predict that Give and Take, by Wharton professor Adam Grant, has a great chance of being the best book I’ve read all year, for three reasons: it’s inspirational, it’s instructional, and it’s solidly research-based.

The premise of the book is quite simple: the world comprises three types of people: givers, takers and matchers. Which type tends to be most successful? Although we’ve all been raised on the homily that it’s better to give than to receive, the bad news is that the left side of most bell curves is populated by givers, those who contribute more to others than they expect in return. Quite simply, they do less for themselves, people take advantage of them, and they are prone to burnout.

But the real surprise is that the right side of bell curves is also a givers’ neighborhood. Combining extensive research with inspiring examples, Grant shows us how and why successful givers do well for themselves at the same time that they contribute so much to others. Successful givers approach four principal aspects of relationships differently. The four aspects are networking, collaborating, developing talent and communicating.

Successful givers are excellent networkers, but so are a lot of takers and matchers. The difference is that successful givers proactively do things without expectation of return, creating goodwill and possibly setting an example that may be contagious. One of the excellent tips in this chapter is the suggestion to revive dormant connections. The benefit is that when most people tap into their network for help, their strong ties are trusting and disposed to help, but their weak ties have more diverse information. People you haven’t talked to in a long time combine the assets of strong ties and weak ties.

Givers are also excellent collaborators, quick to help others in a team environment and without spending too much time worrying about who gets credit. They tend to demonstrate what the National Outdoor Leadership School calls expedition behavior, putting the needs of the mission and the team ahead of your own. In the long run, this behavior increases their prestige and the willingness of others to help them when they need it.

Givers are also excellent at spotting talent, because they’re not worried about creating rivals who may outshine them. Also, because they tend to assume competence and talent on the part of others, they may be generating self-fulfilling prophecies. I found this chapter to be rather long on anecdote and thin on evidence, but the next chapter made up for it.

For me the meatiest chapter covered the successful practices that givers follow in communicating with others, in presenting, selling, and negotiating. Successful givers ask more meaningful questions and have an effective mix of confidence and humility in their advocacy. They also tend to be good at perspective-taking, which is the cognitive equivalent of empathy: instead of feeling what the other person is feeling, they are adept at thinking what they’re thinking. In studies, people with high empathy do worse in creating value, because they are more apt to give the other person what they want. Those high in perspective taking are better at coming up with creative ideas to give both sides more of what they want.

The second section of the book is for those who are too giving, and tend to fall at the bottom of the success distribution because they get taken advantage of and exhaust their energies serving others rather than themselves. The key insight is that self-interest and other-interest are not opposite points on a single line; they are separate axes on a graph. Those who give too much have a high score for other-interest, and a low score for self-interest. Successful givers are at the top right of the graph, combining a high other-focus with high self-interest. As a result, they are in better control of their giving, seeing it as a positive choice rather than an obligation, and being more proactive in allocating their giving time and energy.

If you get inspired by Grant’s book, what you’ll really want to know is how to become a more successful giver. The Catch-22 is that giving has to be sincere it it’s to work, and if you try to make it strategic it’s not sincere. I do think, however, that if you begin changing your behavior for strategic purposes, and start doing more for others, two positive things may happen. First, regardless of the motive, you’re contributing to the sum total of benefit and happiness. Even more important is that your attitude may begin to catch up with your actions. The mind does not like cognitive dissonance, so if we’re acting in a giving manner we will begin to see ourselves more as givers, leading to a virtuous circle. The book finishes with ten suggestions for becoming more of a giver–I’ll keep you posted on how it works.

The one weakness in the book is that in some of the chapters, as mentioned above, there was less evidence than it seemed on first reading. You get pulled in to the inspiring stories, but on closer reading you don’t find enough evidence to be able to make up your mind whether those examples are the rule or the exception.

Despite this, the message in Grant’s book is so powerful that I give it five stars. But it’s not a gift–it’s truly earned. The book itself is a gift to anyone who reads it, and to countless others who may be on the receiving end of their stepped-up giving.

Disclaimer: I may be subject to some confirmation bias, because although I don’t know Adam Grant personally, I found out about the book through the very complimentary article profiling him in the New York Times Magazine. (Of course, that’s one way highly successful givers work their magic..)

Boas reflexões.

Takeaways from reading the book:
– Page 14: Former President of the USA, Abraham Lincoln, was a giver.
– Page 21: Among the values takers favor are power, dominance, control, and winning.
– Page 21: Among the values that givers favor are helpfulness, social justice, and compassion.
– Page 116: When givers receive negative feedback, they accept a blow to their pride and reputations in the short term in order to make better choices in the long term.
– Page 130: To establish dominance, takers specialize in powerful communication: They speak forcefully, raise their voices to assert their authority, express certainty to project confidence, promote their accomplishments, and sell with conviction and pride. Takers display strength by spreading their arms in dominant poses, raising their eyebrows in challenge, commanding as much physical space as possible, conveying anger and issuing threats when necessary.
– Page 151: Appearing vulnerable does not bother givers. They worry far less than takers about protecting their egos and projecting certainty. When givers ask for advice, it is because they are genuinely interested in learning from others.

This book talks about `givers’, `takers’ and `matchers’. Givers are rare and they help others instinctively, frequently at cost to themselves. Their open-handed generosity makes the world better. Takers tilt the reciprocity balance toward themselves and put their own interest above that of everyone else. Matchers try to balance giving and taking and expect direct reciprocity when they help others.

Now, in a competitive world takers should rise to the top, right? Givers are so busy helping others that their own work suffers. And, indeed, many surveys find that those at the bottom of the heap have higher `giving’ scores than those above them who tend to be takers and matchers.

Proof that `good guys finish last’, right?

Hold your horses. It turns out that those at the very top also have higher giving scores than the average of those below them. In other words givers dominate at both the top and bottom.
Why this is so and what do the givers on top do differently from those at the bottom is what the book is all about. It also reinforces a thesis I strongly hold. If you want to get ahead, then help as many others as you can without keeping score.

Givers on the top are `otherish’, meaning that they do not deplete themselves and quickly learn to give the most to other givers. It’s a little bit like the admonition you hear from a flight attendant every time you board a plane – in case of a decompression, first put the mask on yourself and then try to help others. They differ from matchers because they do not try to balance their giving and taking.

There are host of super stories throughout. The opening vignette is about a venture capitalist who agreed to fund an entrepreneur but gave him all the time in the world and placed no restrictions on his offer. The entrepreneur went elsewhere.

But he was so impressed by the way the venture capitalist handled himself that he went back to give him a part of the deal and then became a fervent advocate and helped him get many other clients. That is the way it works.

In a popular course I teach called Creativity and Personal Mastery there is an exercise called The Other-Centered Universe in which participants set out to help someone with no strings attached. Their reward is the privilege of being able to help. They are not even allowed to expect a `thank you’. If they get one, that is a bonus. If they regret not getting one, they violated the spirit of the exercise. Participants report that they feel extraordinarily good after doing this exercise.

Now Grant provides `proof’ that behaving in such a manner not only makes you feel good but also likely places you on a fast track to success.

His examples touch many industries and occupations. Politics is largely absent with the exception of a shining example of a politician who achieved truly great things as a by product of his unstinting giving. Many of his former opponents became his supporters or, at least, helped him at crucial junctures.

That politician is Abraham Lincoln – certainly a person worthy of emulation.

Now, it is readily obvious that the world will be a vastly better place if there were many more givers than takers. Can you imagine what would happen if politicians in our troubled areas – such as the Middle East – became genuine givers sincerely interested in the well-being of their political adversaries?

Great thought, but unlikely to happen, right?

Is it possible to `convert’ a taker to a `giver.’ I know it is because, in my course, it happens repeatedly. Every participant comments on how giving everyone else is. I now know why this happens. Takers are highly sensitive to the context in which they operate. When they are in a situation where the `norm’ is giving, then that part of them surfaces and they often give much more than they take and also much more than they would have normally given. They cleverly figure out that if they are perceived as givers, others will give more to them and they want that.

So a national conversation about givers and takers could get everyone sensitized to such behavior and have persons evaluating one another in terms of their `giving’ and `taking’ behavior. When such a conversation is taking place, takers tend to become givers.

Initially takers become givers because they are sensitive to reputation and do not want to be labeled as takers. But, eventually, when they have done it long enough, they become genuine givers.

And, with the high profile Adam Grant has, this book could just start such a national conversation. And when takers become givers, all of us will benefit and the world will change for the better.

One caveat, the indexing is terrible. When you read it, have your highlighter in hand and a pen. Mark sections you want to return to and persons who you would like to know more about. Many mentioned in the book such as Scott Gerber, Jonathan Haidt and Sameer Jain do not make it to the index.

Finally, there are stunning insights in the book that you can use immediately for great personal benefit. For example, Grant reports on a study that showed men consistently outdoing women in a negotiating game. A simple shift had the women running rings around the men.

This is a technique that I have used and teach and it absolutely works. It is not gender specific – a later story shows how a man used it to gain a substantial salary increase.

So what is this method? Get the book to find out. I will tell you this much – the answer is on page 205.