Should you be a giver or taker?
The surprising findings on how social interaction styles impact success
Hi everyone,
We are now a community of 7k+ readers! I am sorry I didn’t send the newsletter last Tuesday. I was taking a personal creative break for Eid. If you celebrated Eid this year, I hope it went well for you. Today I will try to share an amazing insight I learned from one of my favorite authors, Adam Grant, an NYT best-seller, a Wharton professor, & the author of the book where I got this, Give & Take.
In your academic or professional life, should you be a giver or a taker? Adam Grant defined 3 categories of social interactions/reciprocity styles we follow:
Takers: people who like to get more than they give, putting their own interests ahead of others’ needs, who feel they need to be better than others to succeed
Givers: people who pay more attention to what other people need from them & prefer to give more than they get, a rare category professionally
Matchers: people who strive to preserve an equal balance of giving and getting, who try to be fair; when they help others, they protect themselves by seeking reciprocity, the most common category professionally
Most people are givers in their personal lives with their loved ones. But the strategy becomes a challenging one when it comes to professional careers. Which strategy should we follow? Professionally, all three reciprocity styles have their own pros & cons. However, one of them achieves the worst results & one of them achieves the best. Can you guess which one?
According to extensive research (check the book for detailed references), Givers do the worst! Givers sink to the bottom of the success ladder across a wide range of important occupations. They make others better off but sacrifice their own success in the process.
Example: In a study with 160 professional engineers, the worst performers were also the ones who were rated as most helpful. Helping others was preventing them from getting their own work done. The same finding was common in a study of 600+ medical students in Belgium. Givers were doing the worst results.
There’s evidence that compared with takers, on average, givers earn 14% less money, have 2x the risk of becoming victims of crimes, and are judged as 22% less powerful and dominant. I know it’s kind of sad.
So, who do you think performs the best? Takers or Matchers?
Neither! The data from the same studies show Givers also perform the best.
The top performers from the engineering professionals & medical student studies were all givers! Over the course of medical school, being a giver accounts for 11% higher grades.
In sales, the top performers were givers, and they averaged 50% more annual revenue than the takers and matchers. Givers were both at the top & bottom.
So, it seems being a giver can be the worst & best strategy professionally. But whether you succeed while being a giver depends on whether you can find the right balance of giving which includes a combination of being able to say no & drawing your boundaries to ensure you don’t burnout & don’t get taken advantage of, strategies that have been elaborated in the book, with necessary nuances.
The book really changed my life & shaped how I continue to think about my career & my time. If you are someone who likes to give a lot, professionally, it can get really tough really fast as you start sinking to the bottom while burning out. It’s hard to change that behavior for someone who just likes to help people. However, the insights here can inspire you to have faith in your generosity & double down on those activities in a way where you can avoid burnout & exploitation. I hope this helped!
Stay generous,
Seeam
Fun story: I once reached out to Adam Grant to ask him how he comes up with such amazing behavioral science research ideas. He actually replied! I covered this story in a Bangla video (50k+ views) I did on one of his class/networking concepts called the reciprocity ring. It’s a pretty cool idea that’s worth checking out.
I recommend watching the Ted talk on this topic by the author himself, Adam Grant