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55 min read · 11,426 words- 0:02 – 1:02
Welcome and speaker introduction: Adam Grant and “Give and Take”
- SPSpeaker
Good morning. My name is Alana Weiss, and today it is my pleasure to welcome Adam Grant to the Leading@Google series. Adam Grant is the youngest tenured professor and single highest-rated teacher at the Wharton School. He is a former record-setting advertising director, junior Olympic springboard diver, and professional magician. He has been honored as Business Week's Favorite Professor, one of Business Week's favorite professors, and one of the world's top 40 business professors under 40. Adam is a regular contributor to Google's People & Innovation Lab, and he also has consulted with clients ranging from the NFL to Goldman Sachs to the United Nations. He holds a PhD in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan and a BA from Harvard University. Today, Adam will share from his new book, Give and Take. Please join me in welcoming Adam Grant.
- SPSpeaker
[clapping]
- 1:02 – 2:43
A missing ingredient in success: how interaction styles shape outcomes
- AGAdam Grant
Good morning. Thank you guys so much for having me. I'm truly delighted to be here. It's always an honor and a treat to speak to Googlers, and also to see lots of friendly faces in the audience, and I'm going to try to turn all of those friendly faces in a more negative direction in the next few minutes.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Um, the place I wanna start is I wanna talk for maybe 35 or 40 minutes or so. We'll have lots of interactive discussion throughout, and then hopefully open it up then for some questions and more discussion. But the, the place to begin really is to say that I'm interested in success, and what makes some people in organizations incredibly productive and effective and why other people perhaps are less so. And at the end of the day, what I wanna know is how can every person in this room own a face that looks like this?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
And I know some of you are thinking right now, well, I already own that face. And the question is, well, how could you own it more often? Or how could you spread it to the other people around you? And as an organizational psychologist, when I started doing research in this area about 10 years ago, I found that there were three ways to get to this face. Hard work, talent, and luck. If you wanna be effective in any domain or any profession or any field, you have to develop a strong work ethic, you have to really be mastery or expertise oriented so that you develop true skills and, as Malcolm Gladwell told us in Outliers, you have to find yourself in the right place at the right time. And I think that's all true. But for me, it was missing a really important part of success. In this connected world that we all live in, our interactions with others. Most of you work in teams, many of you have clients, some of you have more managers than you would like, perhaps. And the question is, how does the way that you interact with those people every day shape the results that you achieve, the promotions that you gain, and ultimately, perhaps also the meaning and the happiness that you attain? So
- 2:43 – 4:52
Three reciprocity styles: takers, givers, and matchers
- AGAdam Grant
when I was trying to, to get to the bottom of this, I came across a really inspiring quote. It was from Robert Benchley. And Benchley said, "There are only two kinds of people in the world, those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't."
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] And I thought that was a really profound way of, of criticizing, you know, those of us in the psychology world who like to oversimplify all of the richness and complexity of human beings. And I told myself that if I ever wrote a book, I would never dumb down all of the, the complexity of people into just two categories. Which is why today I'm proud to announce to you that if you wanna capture everything important about interpersonal interaction in organizations, you need not two, but three categories.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] No, actually, in, in all seriousness, there's a good amount of evidence across industries and across cultures that there are three fundamental motives that people bring to their interactions. I call them reciprocity styles. Basically trying to capture the way that you approach your interactions with other people into exchanging value. On one end of the reciprocity spectrum, we have the takers. The people that we all love to hate, who try to get as much as possible from others and try to shirk having to contribute back, and often specialize in things like relentless self-promotion, hogging credit, and maybe stepping on a few people on their way to the top. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, we have these very, very strange characters that I call givers. And for some odd reason, they actually enjoy helping others. Not necessarily philanthropists or volunteers, but rather the kinds of people who do a lot of knowledge sharing, who are always introducing people and making connections, who may step up to provide mentoring. Now, very few of us fall purely in the taker or giver category. Most people, it turns out, if you look at the data, are what I call matchers. And a matcher is somebody who tries to keep an even balance of give and take. Quid pro quo. Tit for tat. If I do you a favor, I expect you to do me one in return. And that seems like a safe and reasonable way to live your professional life. But my question is, is it the best way to live your professional life? Is being a matcher, which most people choose to do, actually the best path to success? I'm gonna try to shed some light on that today. But before we do that, let's dive into the takers a little bit and say, how
- 4:52 – 10:33
Spotting takers: why snap judgments fail and what cues can (sometimes) help
- AGAdam Grant
would you recognize a taker, even if you didn't know that person? So I prepared a little test, first of all, for you to figure out if you yourself are a taker. If you could take a moment and take the test, I'll tell you whether you passed.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Now, I hope this is the only thing I will say today that is not based on data or evidence, but I sincerely believe that the longer it takes you to laugh, the worse your score is on the taker spectrum.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] Um, obviously there are a couple different paths to becoming a taker. One is to be a narcissist. To be insecure, to believe that you have to be superior to others to be successful and, and carry around this assumption that the world is zero-sum. A second path to becoming a taker, which I wanna talk a little bit about today, is having been taken advantage of one too many times as a matcher or a giver, and believing if I don't put myself first in this dog-eat-dog competitive world, nobody will. There's a third path to becoming a taker, which I'm not gonna talk about today. It's called being a psychopath.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] So all right. How do you spot a taker? How do you recognize one? There's an actual study by Chatterjee and Hambrick showing that you can tell whether a CEO is a taker just by looking at that person's photograph in a company's annual report. Here are photos of two CEOs. I would argue that one is a taker, one's a giver. These guys both built very successful companies. Both interestingly in the 1970s worked in the Nixon administration, which I believe is where one learned some of his taking habits.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
And the question is, these photos were taken right from their c- their annual reports, can you tell which of the two of them is the taker just by looking at their faces or their clothing? Take a second to study them, and then I'm gonna ask you to weigh in with your votes, and then justify your bets. [whistles]
- SPSpeaker
[laughs] Yeah.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] So as of 2013, most Wharton undergrads don't recognize that music.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Uh, which I find to be a great tragedy. [laughs] Like, is that the Twilight Zone?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs] Yeah.
- AGAdam Grant
No. All right, how many people think the guy on your right is the taker? How many of you don't know which one is the guy on your right? No, okay.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] How many... Show your hands again. The guy on your right, the taker. Show your hands high. We wanna know who you are. Okay. Why?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Why do you think he's the taker? Yes.
- SPSpeaker
Oh, um, his eyes look less kind.
- AGAdam Grant
His eyes-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
So you can see kindness in the eyes?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs] I'm going with what I have. [laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Who are you and where can I learn that skill?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
So I, I'm told that that may be a built-in feature to the Google Glasses, but-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
What, what about the eyes signals kindness to you?
- SPSpeaker
Um, I, I don't... I'm also completely basing this off, like, my, my instinct.
- 10:33 – 15:23
Ken Lay vs. Jon Huntsman Sr.: takers can be “fakers,” and prominence signals ego
- AGAdam Grant
Uh, all right. So those are a couple cues. I am sorry to report that the man on the right I would say is the giver. So some of you will be feeling bad about yourselves right now. Please don't. [laughs] I will make the rest of you feel bad about yourselves in a moment.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
The guy on the right, some of you may have heard of him. His name is Jon Huntsman Sr. Uh, he built the building that I teach in at Wharton. He's one of 19 people on earth who have given away over a billion dollars, seemingly pretty generous. He also had a son recently who may have been a presidential candidate. If you've read his book, Winners Never Cheat, he has some incredible stories of going out of his way to give to others, including after the financial markets crashed, he couldn't fulfill all of his charitable commitments, so he took out a personal loan to deliver on his promises to help various causes. There's also a st- a couple stories actually of, of him being in big merger nego- uh, acquisition negotiations and ending up feeling like the CEO at the other side of the table was in a really bad situation, had just lost his wife due to cancer. Cancer unfortunately has, has affected a lot of the Huntsman family, and Huntsman basically signed a deal instead of claiming an extra $200 million, uh, because he empathized with the other guy. So I think he's a, a pretty powerful example of a giver. The man on the left I would say was the taker. Did anybody recognize him?
- SPSpeaker
Ken Lay.
- AGAdam Grant
Okay, those of you who recognized him, that's cheating. You can't use actual information about him.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
You're supposed to use the photo and the clothes. But yeah, Ken Lay. What do you know about Ken Lay?
- SPSpeaker
Enron. Enron.
- AGAdam Grant
Enron, yeah, one of the primary villains in that scandal. If you've seen or read The Smartest Guys in the Room, you've been exposed to many, many examples of him having been a taker. Now, the question is, how did you know if you didn't recognize him that he was a taker? And I'm sad to report that there is nothing in either of these two photos that says anything about givers and takers. I'd just like to see what people are willing to read into meaningless photographs.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] No, in, in all seriousness, I, I show you these photos for two reasons. One, to remind you that when we judge is somebody a giver or a taker, are they generous and helpful, or are they selfish? We tend to rely a lot on intuition, on snap judgments, on the thin slices that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in Blink. The problem is, these are often wildly inaccurate because somebody's outer veneer, are they friendly, are they warm, are they welcoming, are they polite, is totally different from their inner motives. And Ken Lay is a great example of this, right? He wasn't just a taker, he was a faker, i.e., a taker disguised as a giver. He donated 1% of Enron's annual profits to charity. He went out of his way to do what translates from Dutch to kissing up, kicking down. Takers are really good fakers when dealing with superiors. They wanna put their best feet forward. They wanna make a good impression on powerful people. But it's hard to maintain that masquerade in every interaction. And so even if, if his bosses were fooled, oftentimes his peers and his subordinates saw right through him. But I believe we didn't have to go to his peers and subordinates to find out that he was a taker. I think we could have looked at the 1997 Enron annual report, four years before the company collapsed, and spot a cue that Ken Lay was a taker. Let me show you these photos in context. Here's Huntsman's photo from his company's 2006 annual report. What do you think Ken Lay's photo looked like?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Some people are saying it's a little bigger. That would be a dramatic understatement because if you look at the Enron 1997 annual report, you will notice that his head is an entire page.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Now, [laughs] lest you think this is just a, a sort of a fun, unusual example, an outlier, when Chatterjee and Hambrick did their research, they got data on over 100 computer companies. They got Wall Street analysts who knew the CEOs of each of those companies to rate how much of a taker is each of those CEOs, how egotistical, how selfish, how narcissistic. And then they looked for cues that correlated with the Wall Street analysts' ratings, and they found three cues that actually correlated .86, a whopping correlation in the social sciences, with the ratings given by the analysts, and one of them was the prominence of the CEO's photo in the annual report. The taker CEOs actually had larger photos. They were more likely to be pictured alone as well, which sent a clear message, right? "I am the most important person in this company. It is all about me." Second cue, compensation. The average computer industry CEO made about two to two and a half times the annual salary of the next highest paid executive in that company. The average taker CEO had a multiple of what greater than the next highest paid executive in the company?
- SPSpeaker
40.
- AGAdam Grant
40. [laughs] I'm not even, I'm not even sure if that's financially possible.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] It, it, it was a multiple of seven. So taker CEOs got paid about seven times more than anybody else in their company. Third cue was in their speech. Not just larger photos, not just bigger relative pay. What two words do taker CEOs use more than the others?
- SPSpeaker
I and me.
- 15:23 – 20:56
Who ends up at the bottom—and the top: the surprising “giver” pattern
- AGAdam Grant
I and me, bingo, when talking about the company as opposed to us and we. So those are a couple ways that you could recognize a taker. What I wanna do, though, is I wanna ask, okay, what happens to takers? Do they rise? Do they fall? How does their success compare to givers and matchers? And when I started trying to ask this question, I began at the bottom of success, asking which group is worst off. Who gets the worst results? Is it the takers, the givers, or the matchers? And I looked at research in three domains. First, engineers. Gotta have engineers. Stanford's Frank Flynn did this great study where he got engineers to rate each other on how many favors they did versus how many they got, and then tracked their productivity and the number of errors they made. And then medical students.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Philip Levinson and his colleagues got every medical student in Belgium over a seven-year period to fill out surveys about how much they liked helping others, and then tracked their grades. And then Dane Barnes and I actually studied salespeople, and we were interested, [clears throat] excuse me, in revenue. So who are the highest producing salespeople who bring in the most revenue every year? Across these three groups, the same results came out. The engineers, the medical students, and the salespeople, there was one group, either the takers, the givers, or the matchers, who was consistently worse off when it came to productivity, errors, grades, and revenue. Get a show of hands to see where your intuitions and assumptions lie. How many people think it was the takers at the bottom most often? All right, we have some optimists in the room. How many people think it was the matchers? Okay, a lot of you. Now, this is an odd thing to vote for because statistically, if most people are matchers, it would very, actually be quite hard for most people to be at the bottom of any metric. What about the givers? How many people think the givers are at the bottom? All right, those of you with your hands up, you would be correct. If you look at the engineers, the engineers with the worst productivity and the most mistakes were those who did a lot more favors than they got back. They were so busy helping their colleagues, they couldn't get their work done efficiently or effectively. Medical students, the students with the worst grades in year one of medical school were the ones who agreed most strongly with statements like, "I love helping others." Now, if you carry that to its logical extreme-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] The doctor that you trust is somebody who never wanted to help anyone.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Salespeople, Dane and I found that the salespeople with the lowest revenue were the ones also who are passionately motivated to help their colleagues and help their customers. And I had one salespeople put it to me pretty blunt- bluntly. He said, "Look, you know, I really wanna help my customers, which means I will never sell them a product." [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
So, so I found this to be interesting. I also found it, for those of you who are givers, to be a little bit sad. How many of you would self-identify more as a giver than a, a matcher or a taker? Okay, how many of you self-identify as a giver but didn't wanna raise your hand because you feel like that violates humility?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] All right, those are the real givers in the room.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] So I did think this was sad, though, uh, for those people who are givers. And so then I wanted to know who's at the top. If the givers are at the bottom- Then who's most likely to have the highest productivity, the fewest mistakes, the best grades, and ultimately the most revenue in sales? Get a show of hands on this one as well. How many people think the takers were most likely at the top? How many people think the matchers were most likely at the top, ignoring my warning that the most common can't be over-represented [laughs] in, in one part of the spectrum? Uh, how many people didn't raise their hands for either the takers or the matchers just now? Okay, good. Now we have everyone involved.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
All right. [laughs] Maybe you didn't raise your hand because you already anticipated the thing that took me 10 years to figure out, which is it's the givers again. The givers are not only over-represented at the bottom, they're also more common at the top. The engineers, not only with the worst results, but also the best results, are the ones who do a lot more favors than they get back. The takers and the matchers, more likely to be in the middle when it comes to their productivity and their error rates. Medical students with the best grades, not just in year one, but over a seven-year period, are also the ones who say, "I love helping others." And by the way, the medical students seem to get better over time when they're givers because you move from basically having to study information independently to collaborating with fellow physicians and also having to work closely with patients, and givers tend to really shine in interdependent work. Whereas they may struggle a little bit more in independent work. In sales, Dana and I found that giver salespeople who really loved helping colleagues and customers actually brought in about fifty percent more annual revenue than the takers and the matchers. So for me, that posed two questions. One was, what do successful givers do that the rest of us takers and matchers might wanna learn? And I think this is an exciting question because these reciprocity styles are not hardwired. They're not fixed. In fact, they're choices we make in every single interaction. As a thought experiment, think about the next person that you meet. And you could say, I'm gonna ask myself, do I wanna just try to help this person with no strings attached? Do I wanna try to get something from this person? Or do I wanna make an even trade? And the more you make those choices, the more obviously you define yourself by one style or another. But because it's a choice, it's something we can all change. And maybe there are ways that successful givers operate that would be interesting and productive for takers and matchers. Second question that I was curious about is what happens to those givers at the bottom? And if you would like to be a helpful person or a generous person, what are the traps that you might fall into, and how do you avoid them? Took me a couple hundred pages to try to answer those questions. I'm not gonna put you all through that this morning, but what I wanna do is just give you a couple highlights of some of the things that I learned that are described in more detail in the book. Overall,
- 20:56 – 27:07
Collaboration advantage: expedition behavior and earning group trust (George Meyer)
- AGAdam Grant
the, the thing that I was really interested in is, is how do givers actually who succeed relate to the people in their organizations or outside of them? And so I end up looking at how do givers build networks? How do they collaborate? How do they develop talent in other people? How do they communicate and influence and negotiate? And I'll just give you a couple of, of stories and data points from a few of those perspectives, uh, and then, uh, we can open it up for questions. So collaboration, how do givers succeed in collaboration? Anybody recognize this man? He's known as the genius behind the most successful television show in history.
- SPSpeaker
[muffled]
- AGAdam Grant
No, but it's a good guess. Probably you've never heard of him. I hadn't heard of him either when I came across his story. Although I later found out that he invented a word that was uttered by my college roommate every day for four years, um, which made me a little bit unhappy. But this man is known as the genius behind a, a really amazing television show. And he had a pretty checkered past. Uh, he was an undergraduate, and he ended up deciding that he was going to sell a refrigerator, and he sold it to a freshman, and he took the money, and he never delivered the refrigerator. And he almost got kicked out of college for that, and then he almost got kicked out again when he smashed his dorm room window with an electric guitar. And his one sort of crowning moment in life was when he was, uh, to that point at least, elected the, the president of the Harvard Lampoon. But then he was actually-- There was an attempted overthrow, a coup, by his peers because he was, quote, "not responsible enough." And he ended up finishing college. He decided that he was going to make a living by betting on dog racing, greyhound tracks. And he spent two weeks holed in the library trying to develop a mathematic, scientific way of beating the system. Unfortunately, he ran out of money a few days later and had to move in with his parents. So bad start to his career. But somehow he managed to get a job writing for a little show called Saturday Night Live in the 1980s. And one point in his Saturday Night Live career, his name is George Meyer, by the way, George had a decision to make. He had two different guests that were coming onto the show. One of them, the Material Girl, in the height of her fame, in her prime. The other, we will say perhaps a less desirable candidate to write a sketch for, Jimmy Breslin. And George was trying to figure out, okay, we need sketches for both of these people. They're gonna be coming on the show. And everybody's flocking to write for Madonna. Nobody wants to write for Jimmy Breslin. They don't think he's very fun or entertaining. And George says, "You know what? One of the best ways to be successful if you're working in a team or a group is to try to make other people successful. If Saturday Night Live is better, then I'm gonna be better off too because I'm a part of that." And so he engages in, uh, what gets called at The National Outdoor Leadership School expedition behavior. Basically saying, if you're gonna go and climb a mountain, trying to put the mission ahead of your own personal interests and desires. And he says, "You know what? I'm gonna submit a few sketches for Madonna, but I'm gonna do my best work for Jimmy Breslin. And that's really where my work is needed because so few people are wanting to contribute good ideas there." And George ends up writing this amazing skit. It's called Bond Villains on a talk show. And you get to see basically Breslin playing a Bond villain, and they're comparing strategies for attacking Bond. And that ends up basically inspiring Mike Myers to do the Austin Powers movies, which was kind of a cool thing to see happen. Well, if you look at what happened to George next, he ended up moving out to Colorado. He was working on a Letterman script. It didn't pan out. And he decided he wanted to do his own comedy. And he knew he couldn't do it alone, so he reaches out to a bunch of his Saturday Night Live buddies. And he was really torn about how to do this because, for a lot of people, George is a really funny guy and he would be a threat, right? You're working in this zero sum sort of competitive world of comedy. There are only so many jobs, and George is afraid that, you know, if he reaches out to people, they're not gonna help him because if he succeeds, that means they're gonna fail. But one of the things that happened when George engaged in this kind of expedition behavior is he showed that he was the kind of person who cared about the group. He cared about other people's interests, and as a result, instead of gunning for him, people wanted to support him. He kind of established himself as a giver, and as a result, people were kind of rooting for him when he was doing work, and they wanted to feel like this is the kind of guy who deserved to succeed. Part of the reason for that is most people are matchers, and if you are a matcher, you believe in a just world. You think what goes around ought to come around, and that means when you see a taker acting selfishly, you want to punish that person. Usually, that means Rob Biller shows at Stanford gossiping, sharing negative reputational information so that takers cannot get away with exploiting other people. Just as you can't stand to see a taker be selfish and get away with it, you also, if you are a matcher, don't like to see generous people fail. And so when somebody's a giver and really helpful, you will often go on a mission to plot that person's wellbeing, and I think that's exactly what happened to George Meyer. All these colleagues came out of the woodwork and they said, "Yeah, we'll contribute." George wanted to write this little magazine called Army Man. It was gonna be a parody of the US military, and he reached out to all these colleagues, and they just gave away some of their best comedy to him for free. Uh, one of them was a guy named Jack Handey, and he wrote one of his earliest Deep Thoughts pieces two years before it ever appeared on the show for George and his little Army Man magazine. George puts out the magazine. It has all this great comedy in it. It catches the attention of a guy by the name of Sam Simon, and Sam is just about to start a little TV show called The Simpsons. George ends up getting invited because of this comedy he was able to do to The Simpsons, where he becomes an executive producer, wins a bunch of Emmys, ends up contributing to a movie that grossed half a billion dollars, and has a pretty good, successful career. What's interesting, though, is that he contributed over 300 Simpsons episodes, and he only took credit as a writer on 12 of them. And I think this was part of his giver style. But I think one of the things that Rob Willer points out in his research is groups reward individual sacrifice, and this is one of the ways that givers succeed in collaboration, looking for the unpopular tasks and volunteering for them and showing that they actually care about the best interests of the group. And then when it comes time to determine who should lead, who deserves opportunities, those are the people who get rewarded
- 27:07 – 29:17
Why givers look “too good” (and misunderstood): the Seinfeld clip
- AGAdam Grant
and trusted and respected. So that's one example of the kind of thing that we see givers do successfully in collaboration. Now, some people will look at this and say, "This is crazy. This is not something that I would recommend to somebody that I cared about." And if this video clip works, I wanna show you my first introduction to how most people view givers.
- SPSpeaker
Huh, still a 31 waist? Yep, since college. Hey, Lena Small's on this list. Lena Small? Yeah. She's a girl I was gonna call for a date. She was unlisted, and now here's her number. Oh, you're not gonna cop a girl's phone number off an AIDS charity list. Elaine, you should admire me. I'm aspiring to date a giving person.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
But you're a taking person. That's why I should date a giving person. If I date a taking person, everyone's taking, taking, taking.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
No one's giving. It's bedlam.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
So George. Yeah. Guess what? Lena found out how I got her number.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Really? How'd she do that? Oh, a friend of a friend of Susan's. My Susan? Why'd you tell her?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
I got to. Jerry, it's a couple rule. We have to tell each other everything. Well, you know what this means, don't ya? What? You're cut off. You're out of the loop.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
You're cut, you're cutting me off? No, no, no, Jerry, don't cut me off. You leave me no choice. You're the media now, as far as I'm concerned. Oh, Jerry, come on, please. It won't happen again. If you were in the mafia, would you tell her every time you killed someone?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Hey, a hit is a totally different story.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
I don't know, George. So Lena was upset, huh? You know what? That was the amazing thing. What, it didn't bother her? No, she said it was fine. Hmm. Something very strange about this girl. What? She's too good. Too good?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
I mean, she's giving and caring and genuinely concerned about the welfare of others. I can't be with someone like that.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
I see what you mean. I-
- 29:17 – 35:16
Communication and influence: humility, vulnerability, and the “pratfall effect”
- AGAdam Grant
I think that's h- how a lot of people view givers, right? It's a sign of weakness, but I actually think it can be a source of strength, and one of the, the more interesting ways that plays out is to look at how givers actually communicate. I had a chance to get a personal taste of this. Uh, a few years ago, shortly after I finished my doctorate, I was asked to teach a group of Air Force colonels, and I was supposed to teach them how to lead and motivate. I was in my mid-20s, and most of them were in their mid-50s. Um, they were just like the guys out of Top Gun. Most of them had flown thousands of hours and had these really pretty badass nicknames, [laughs] like Stealth and Gunner and Iceman.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
And I, I walked in, and I knew that I needed to establish my credentials, right? Here was this kid half their age, and so I started talking a little bit about my expertise, my experience, why I could maybe share some knowledge that would be helpful to them. And it was a four-hour experience, and I got the feedback from the teaching forums, and it was pretty darn painful. Some of the comments have really burned themselves into my brain, but the one that stuck out the, that really stuck out the most was, quote, "More knowledge in the audience than on the podium." I was like, that is very sad. Thank you. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Uh, the others were nicer, but they said similar things. You know, one person said, "Gosh, the professors get younger every year. How could they possibly know anything about leadership when they've never led, let alone had a real job?" And I was like, okay. So part of the, part of what I realized there was that I was communicating a little bit more like a taker does. Takers try to get respect by gaining dominance. They try to be as confident as possible. They try to make sure there are not any chinks in their armor, and they wanna make sure, as a result, that people see them very positively. And that style didn't feel very comfortable for me. As a professor at least, I felt like my job was always to listen to students, to learn from them, and then try to figure out what I knew that might be helpful. And so I had another session with a, a different group of Air Force colonels scheduled before they decided to fire me altogether, and this time I decided that instead of going with the really powerful, confident approach, I would do something a little bit more powerless. And I opened up by saying, "Okay, guys, I know what some of you are thinking right now. What can I possibly learn from a professor who's 12 years old?" [laughs] And there was this dead silence, and one of the guys I was pretty sure started to reach for his gun.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] And then they all started laughing and, and one of them said, "Oh, there's no way you're 12. I'm sure you're at least 13."
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
And, you know, that, that sort of became a running joke for the next four hours, and I noticed that, that I had really bonded with the audience. I think part of it was because I had called out the elephant in the room. But afterward when I read the feedback, it was night and day. You know, a lot of them said, you know, "Gosh, it was a breath of fresh air to have a young professor who could talk about the millennial generation." And I think that a lot of it, I delivered the exact same material, a lot of it was the vulnerability and humility to say, "Look, I don't have all the answers, and I may not be able to teach you guys anything." And if you look at the data on this, givers are a lot more comfortable doing that than takers. Takers do not want to expose their weaknesses, whereas givers are willing to communicate in a much more authentic and honest, maybe even self-deprecating way, in order to form a genuine connection with the people that they're trying to connect with. And I think there's a great example of this that dates back to the mid-1800s. Uh, somebody that you may have heard of, Abe Lincoln, was in a debate, and his opponent called him two-faced. And, you know, I, I think a lot of takers would've been offended b- by that. I think that Lin- Lincoln was a really extraordinary example of a giver, who was always looking for other people's best interests and how to pursue and support them. And he didn't even really skip a beat, and he said, "You call me two-faced. If I had another face, do you really think I would wear this one?"
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] And it's, it's a great example of the kind of vulnerability and humility, right, that establishes a connection. I think that Lincoln was really clever about it too. You know, he knew that his appearance was something easy to laugh at, but also that it was not going to call into question his competence. And so it was something that he could easily be a little bit vulnerable about. There's a classic study that shows why this works. Elliot Aronson in the 1960s, uh, asked people to listen to tapes of quiz bowl experts. Uh, some of them were extremely knowledgeable, others didn't really have the answers to the trivia questions that were being posed to them. And you're listening to this tape, you hear this candidate answering all these questions right, and then some of the candidates, the tape just ends, and then others spill some coffee on themselves, and you hear the cup crash, and the person's like, "Oh, my gosh, I'm so clumsy." And you actually, it turns out, like and respect the quiz bowl expert more when he spills coffee on himself. So Aronson and his colleagues call this the pratfall effect, and they say, look, we actually identify with people more when they're human. But interestingly, that didn't, it doesn't work if the person is not quiz bowl competent. So if you got most of the questions wrong and you spilled coffee on yourself, you just look like an idiot.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] But, uh, but I think that this is, this is a lot of what happens when givers communicate, and there's some really good research by Alison Fragale at University of North Carolina, who shows that we tend to think that powerful speech, the confident, the assertive, the dominant, is going to earn us status and trust and respect. But that that's only true if you're really working independently, separately. If you have to collaborate, you have to work in a team, or you have to have clients, you will actually get more trust if you use a lot of ums, and uhs, and ifs, and hesitations, and taglines and qualifiers. Because what happens is when you speak in a more tentative, soft-spoken way, people tend to assume that you have their best interests at heart. And guess what? In a collaboration, we care at least as much about whether you care about my best interests as whether you're competent and capable and assertive. And again, I think this is something that often works really well for givers as they communicate, right? This willingness to defer to other people, to show an interest in other people's opinions while they're, they're talking. Those are a couple of things on communication I thought were interesting. One other thing I wanted to highlight, burnout.
- 35:16 – 38:48
Giver burnout: impact (not effort) and “chunking” helping into blocks
- AGAdam Grant
Teacher burnout, common problem. This is Conor Callahan. She was a Teach For America teacher who probably experienced the worst burnout I've ever seen in a classroom. She was at Over- Overbrook High School in Philadelphia, where the graduation rate is abysmally low, the crime rate is extremely high. There are students who actually only come to school two or three days a year, and she was just exhausted by these students who wouldn't listen. And somehow she managed to turn that around and actually end up getting a national teaching award and stay longer with Teach For America than any of the people in her cohort. And when I started to interview her about why, she said some things that I thought tracked really well with some recent data. The first thing she said was, at the height of her burnout, she was getting up at six AM, she was working till one AM usually. She's having to do grading on the weekends. Instead of giving less, she gave more. She started a nonprofit organization called Minds Matter Philadelphia, where she was tutoring kids on the weekends. And I was like, how could you possibly burn out less by giving more? That, I think, defies every principle of physics and chemistry I've ever learned. And she said, "Well, you know, part of what happened was in my everyday job, I don't feel like I necessarily make a dent. I don't think I have an impact. Whereas when I'm working with these kids on the weekends, these are high-achieving, low-income kids, and I feel like I spend four or five hours with them, and I'm actually helping them get into college. And it renews my hope that my regular teaching job can have an impact." And I think it reveals one of the really interesting principles of giver burnout. Givers don't, don't burn out just because they're working too hard or giving too much. They burn out when they don't get to feel that they're making the difference that they set out to make. And I think that, that Conray's idea of starting this nonprofit was a really interesting way of not only seeing more of her impact by trying to help people who are really dedicated to school, but also just created sort of a fresh experience of being in a different setting and being able to renew a little bit of her energy. The other thing she did that I think was really clever was she chunked her giving into blocks as opposed to sprinkling it out across the day. There's an experiment by Sonja Lyubomirsky that looks at random acts of kindness, and you are either randomly assigned to do one random act of kindness every day for a week, or five random acts of kindness in one day each week. And most people assume that you should do them every day, and that way you feel like you're helpful every day, and that will boost your happiness. But Sonja finds the opposite, that doing five random acts of kindness in one day actually leads to greater happiness than doing one each day for five days. We can speculate about why that is. I think this research is, is relatively new, but one of Sonja's dominant explanations is that you feel like you are actually having an impact when you do five acts of meaningful helping a day. They add up, right? Whereas when you sprinkle them around, it's sort of a drop in the bucket, and it doesn't make you feel like you're truly making a difference. I think that that's a, a really interesting practice, right? So there's one Fortune 500 company that actually goes out of its way to set f- quiet time windows. This is Leslie Perlow's research at Harvard Business School to say, if you're an engineer, you're constantly interrupting and getting interrupted by your colleagues, and it's really hard to get your own work done. So what if Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Friday mornings from nine to twelve, there were no interruptions, and you could get your own work done. And then you have these windows set aside where you can be helpful and support others. When Leslie did that, this particular company had sixty-six percent of engineers show above average productivity. And at the end of the day, they launched their product, which was a laser printer, on time for only the second time in division history. And I think this again illustrates some things that givers can do to avoid burnout, right? Don't help all the people all the time with all the requests. Don't drop everything to support the people around you, but rather say, "I'm gonna reserve windows
- 38:48 – 40:21
What else the book covers: networking, spotting talent, decision traps, and doormat risk
- AGAdam Grant
where I'm gonna be helpful to the people around me, and then also I'm gonna have times that I block out for my own individual work." Those are some of the things that I want to talk about. Just a few other things you might find in the book if you are curious. How do givers build networks, and how do those look different from takers and matchers? How does Fortune's best networker, the guy, not the cat-
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- AGAdam Grant
... claim that he built an extraordinary network, some of you may know this man, just through random acts of kindness, and does it actually work? Leadership. How does this guy, CJ Skender, an accounting professor, because he's a giver, know that this woman, Beth Trainum, whose own mother told her she couldn't add or tell time, would one day become a national gold medalist in accounting? And how did he know that this guy, Reggie Love, who was written off by many as an athlete, would one day become President Obama's body man? What do givers know about spotting talent in others that takers and matchers miss out on? Decision making. Why does a basketball executive named Stu Inman pass up the chance to choose Michael Jordan and end up getting a draft bust, Sam Bowie, and then hang on to Sam Bowie for four years instead of cutting his losses? What does it take to get other people to a-avoid the trap that psychologists call escalation of commitment to a losing course of action and instead say, "You know what? It's over, man. Just let her go"?
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- AGAdam Grant
I know sometimes that one hits a little too close to home.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- 40:21 – 43:51
Turning norms toward giving: the Reciprocity Ring and audience examples
- AGAdam Grant
And then how do you avoid being treated as a doormat if you're a giver? What prevents you from becoming a pushover? How do you deal with a taker and still maintain your sense of concern for others and generosity? But my favorite question: Is it possible to turn a taker into a giver? Maybe not in all of their interactions, right? But can we nudge people more in the giving direction in our relationships with them? Maybe. One of my favorite ways to do that, some of you have been part of already, it's called the Reciprocity Ring, invented by Wayne Baker at the University of Michigan and Cheryl Baker at Qmax Networks. The idea is you gather a group of ten or twenty or thirty people, and you ask them all to make a request, something meaningful, personal, or professional that they want but can't get on their own. And then you ask everybody else in the group just to try to use their knowledge and their networks to make the request happen. And some pretty amazing things happen when everybody adopts a norm of giving and says, "We're just gonna all try to support each other." A couple examples. Earlier this year, a woman came in and said, "My hero is a man who's a blogger, but he's also a minimalist, and he's impossible to contact because he likes a simple life. I've wanted for six years to meet him, and one, thank him, and two, ask him how I can help him. But I don't know how to get in touch with him. Can anybody help me?" And one person in this room says, "Yeah, you know what? I know a blogger who knows him," and they've been introduced, and they're meeting up for dinner next week, and very excited to see how it goes. I think it probably wouldn't have happened unless she had access to this network of people who in that moment were willing to act like givers. And guess what? Because the requests are visible, it's really hard to be a taker. 'Cause when you make that ask, if you don't help other people, nobody wants to support you. There are a few people in this room who were present for this particular request in my classroom when a student named Michelle said she had a friend who had her growth stunted as a child, and she could never find the right clothing. Could anybody help her? And another student, Jessica, raised her hand, and she said, "Yeah, I have an uncle in the garment business, and I'm happy to reach out to him." And three months later, custom clothing arrived on her doorstep. And for the first time in the life of, of Hope, Michelle's friend, she actually had clothing that fit her right. My favorite request, though, of all time was a student named Alex, who came in one day, we were running one of these Reciprocity Ring exercises, and he said, "I think the closest thing to nirvana in life is riding a roller coaster, and I came to Wharton because I one day would love to run a place like Six Flags, but strangely, Six Flags has not recruited the Wharton School of Business."
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- AGAdam Grant
"So could anybody help me figure out how to break into the industry?" Another student, Andrew, raises his hand and says, "Yeah, I think my dad knows the ex-CEO. I'm happy to get you guys in touch." Two weeks later, they have a, a stellar conversation, and Alex comes into class the next day. I'm so excited to find out about it. "So Alex, how'd it go?" And Alex was like, "I learned something really important from that conversation. I will never want to work in that industry, ever." [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
And I was like, "Okay, at least you were able to rule that out." And because of that, I am proud to say that today, at this very moment, Alex is living his dream, happily employed as a management consultant.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] Uh, anyway, I'm happy to talk further. Uh, if you check out the Give and Take site, you can rate yourself on a survey and figure out, do you tend to think most like a giver, a taker, or a matcher? Although you all know too much now, so your ratings will be fatally flawed. There's also a 360 assessment. You can anonymously ask anybody who knows you to rate you, and then basically find out, do I see myself the same way other people see me? And then there's also a nominate a giver feature, sort of like a bigger version of the way that, that peer and spot bonuses often work, where you can write a little paragraph
- 43:51 – 54:18
Q&A and closing: gender, intelligence, culture, and organizational impact; recognizing givers
- AGAdam Grant
to recognize somebody that you think has been really generous. And we're gonna basically recognize one a week based on voting for the best example of a successful giver. All right, happy to open it up for questions. Who's the first victim? Tina, is there a difference between men and women?
- SPSpeaker
In general.
- AGAdam Grant
In general or in give and take?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs] Give and take.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah. Um, I, I really, I really try to avoid this question because I wanted to write about people, not sort of divide the world by genders. But the data on this, I, I think are pretty interesting. So Alice Eagle and her colleagues have meta-analyzed about three decades of studies looking at are men or women more likely to help others. And they find that the answer is no, they're actually equally likely to be helpful, but that they specialize in helping in different domains. So women tend to do more helping behaviors in close relationships. They spend more time helping their friends, their family members, and their close colleagues. Whereas men are more likely, it seems from the data, to help strangers, especially in emergency situations, which I think has an int- interesting macho implication, right? Oh, I must be tough and rescue someone now. Grr.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Um, but, uh, but I think, I think a lot of people stereotype women as being more likely to be givers because a lot of the most important giving that happens in the world is the close relationship-based giving, and I would love to see more men acting like women.
- SPSpeaker
So you said that for givers that are at the bottom and the, and the top, has that been filtered out by intelligence level? So I'm wondering-
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... if you get to a point where things become too easy, so you start helping people if you're at the top-
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... versus for some people-
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... it might be that you just help because you know that's something you can do.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah. So intelligence is a really interesting question. In my data, intelligence are close to orthogonal. Uh, intelligence measures are to give and take. So you can find, you know, very, very bright givers, very bright takers. There is some evidence, Russell James, an economist, has actually shown the smarter you are, the more you give to charity, even after controlling for your education levels, your socioeconomic status. Um, and the idea is basically that if you're, you know, incredibly high in intellectual horsepower, um, it's easier for you to appreciate all the different ways that you could be benefiting others in the long run. Um, I think, you know, there, there's a lot of debate about it, but there's another study by Millet and DeWitt that actually shows that when you give people an intelligence test and then you ask them to play a prisoner's dilemma game where they have to keep money for themselves or give it to others, the smarter you are, the more you give to others. Um, that being said, the correlations are so small that I don't think they're, they're practically that meaningful. Um, in the studies that Dane and I did of salespeople, we actually controlled for intelligence and found that even after taking that out of the equation, the, the giver factor was basically a very strong predictor of both hitting the bottom and the top of sales revenue. The other intelligence data point that I've seen is, uh, there's a great study by Kim and Glomb called Git Smarty Pants, which sm- shows that the smarter you are, the more likely you are to be bullied by your colleagues who are jealous, unless you're a giver. And that goes back to the point, right? We want to take down really bright, successful takers, but we want to support and lift up the bright, successful givers. Next question.
- SPSpeaker
Um, hi, Adam. Thanks a lot for the session. It was really interesting. Uh, going back to the point of showing vulnerability publicly, um, I was wondering if that changes from culture to culture. Because in certain cultures, I have the feeling that, uh, the more senior you are or the more professional you are-
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... vulnerabil- public vulnerability might be seen as something, uh, quite negative, actually.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah. I, I think there's a huge cross-cultural difference there. Uh, one of the best ways, I think, to think about that is to go back to Hofstede's classic research on power distance and say that in, in cultures where people accept, basically ste- steep hierarchies as appropriate and correct, it's a little bit riskier to open up and be vulnerable. I also think, though, that that was maybe the situations where it's most powerful and disarming for somebody that you expect to, you know, to have this incredibly polished presentation style to actually open up and say, "Look, I'm just human, too." Um, Aronson's research actually showed that it will depend on the audience, though, how people react to it. So the people who like those who sort of spill coffee on themselves or stumble the most are those with average self-esteem. Those are the people who see themselves as human, and they like other people to be human. Whereas if you have really high self-esteem, you tend to want other people to, to appear, you know, really confident. If you have low self-esteem, uh, you just don't like other people.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
So [laughs] no, that, that may be a slight caricature of the data.
- SPSpeaker
Hey, Adam. Katie Everett. I'm a fellow Harvard Diver. Hi. I am wondering, um, I have my daughter here today, Grace, who's five. It's Take Your Child to Work Day, and I, um, I love your work and have been thinking about how do you foster this kind of mindset in your children? I'm just wondering if you have any insights into, into how to do something like that.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah. First of all, I think it should be called Give Your Child to Work Day, not take. No. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
I was working on that all night. Um-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] No, I think that it, it, it's a really interesting question. Um, as an organizational psychologist rather than a developmental psychologist, it really stretches far beyond my areas of expertise. So I'm, I'm more of a consumer in this area than, I think, a, a producer. But I, I've had a lot of fun reading some of the research on, you know, like what causes some people to grow into givers. And I'll, I'll just highlight a couple of patterns. I'm happy to share, share more details if anybody wants to read the studies. Um, one is parenting styles are obviously huge. Um, if you are a role model as a parent, as a giver, obviously your children are more likely to follow suit. Also, parents, uh, there's some really cool data showing that parents who end up basically, uh, giving their children a lot of freedom are more likely to encourage their children to become givers. Whereas those who restrict freedom then essentially raise kids who want to restrict the, the freedom of the other people around them, uh, which is sort of, I think, a little bit more of a taker move. Um, the other really interesting data point on this is siblings. Uh, so this is Paul Van Lange's research. What Paul shows is that a lot of people think firstborns are more likely to be givers because you get a lot of responsibility training if you have younger siblings. You have to share, and care, and feed, and babysit. And it's actually the opposite in a weird sense, which is just don't be the last born.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] As long as you have at least one younger sibling, and then the more of them you have, the more of this responsibility training you get, and the more you tend to gravitate in the giver direction. One other sibling pattern [laughs] I think is really interesting is Van Lange shows that people who do a lot of generous giving are twice as likely to have sisters as brothers. And you know, you could ask, well, back to Tina's question, why, you know, why do sivir- sisters turn us into givers? And there's a debate about that. I don't want to speculate too far. But two of the popular explanations are, one, um, women basically earlier on start giving, and so that rubs off on their siblings. And then two, there's some data, Jonathan Haidt argues that girl babies are literally cuter than boy babies.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
Episode duration: 54:20
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