Welcome back. I'm Fran Tarkington and we have Adam Grant here, author of the book Give and Take. Been a bestseller, is a hardback now, it's out in paperback form. Adam, what is the difference between a, as you say, a giver, a taker, and a matcher?
Well, let's start with the takers because they're easiest to recognize. Takers are people who are always trying to get as much as possible from others. Never want to give anything back unless they have to.
They're the, if you think either to the athletic field or to the business world. They're the social loafers and the free riders who are hogging kind of the interesting, the visible, the important work and then leaving all the the grunt rolls for everybody else but then they somehow get all the credit for collective achievements. That's the taker. Other end of the spectrum we have givers and a lot of people think about givers as people who are volunteers or philanthropists but I actually define it more broadly. A giver is somebody who actually enjoys helping others and often does it with no strings attached.
So sharing your knowledge, being a mentor. Making introductions or just showing up earlier, staying late to support the people around you. And matcher? The matcher is most of us professionally, right in the middle of that spectrum. Matchers try to keep an even balance of give and take, quid pro quo.
So Fran, if I were a matcher and I did you a favor, I think you owed me one back. And if you did me a favor, I'd feel this sense of debt until I'd been able to repay. Can we see the difference in people quickly or does it take time?
I think it varies a lot. So a lot of takers are good fakers. When you first meet them, they're very charming, they're friendly, they look for ways to try to support you. Codmen?
Exactly! And they stab you in the back. They do?
A lot of takers actually, one of the ways you can catch them though... is by a pattern of kissing up and kicking down. Tell me about that.
Takers do a lot of faking with powerful people because, after all, you want important people to think you're generous. Yes. But it turns out it's a lot of work to pretend to care about everyone you meet. And so takers will let their guard down a little bit when dealing with their people. peers and subordinates and it may be that those people get to see more of their true colors.
All right we're in the world of social media and so we don't see people we're texting we're emailing we're Facebooking we're LinkedIn out up down all this stuff how can we identify is that make it harder to identify that taker? It actually it makes it easier in some ways yeah so what one way is anybody who has a social media network whether you're on LinkedIn or Facebook or elsewhere you now have access to common connections of people you meet for the first time. So when I'm going to meet someone, I can go on LinkedIn, look up whether we know anyone in common, and then actually get some unfiltered reference information about, can I trust this person or not?
There are also a lot of clues that people leak on social media. So a lot of takers are narcissists. They think that they're very special. They have big inflated egos.
And there's actually a study showing that takers have more attractive profile photos on Facebook. Now, they're not necessarily hotter. than your average person, but they will take their very best picture and make sure that's the one that puts their best foot forward.
Can a taker change into a giver? I would love to know the answer to that question. I think it's one that's really hard to study because we all have moments of giving and taking and matching. So I guess to really answer that question, we'd have to know, you know, of all the roles and relationships where you tend to take, is it possible over time that you would do more giving in those situations?
And I think the answer is a qualified yes. Yes. There is evidence that as people get older, they shift from taking toward giving.
As they gain responsibility at work, as they start raising families, they start to think much more about other people and less about themselves. And also they begin to think more about their legacies and giving back as part of building a legacy. If I'm hiring people or choosing people to be partners, what am I looking for?
As I start my conversations out, how do I really start getting a feeling of, Is this the right kind of person or not? Well, I think one of the first things that you can do is actually ask the person to walk through their work history. Talk to me about your successes and your stumbling blocks. But you don't want to pay so much attention to what the person's accomplished. You want to focus on how they explain their accomplishments.
Because what takers will often do is they'll use I's and me's to take credit, whereas givers are much more likely to share success and really recognize other people. And then that'll flip with failure. So take credit. takers will talk about all the bad things that have happened in their careers but they're always somebody else's fault whereas with givers they'll take much more personal responsibility for errors I believe and I want you to challenge me on this if you would I think that great leaders be their coaches be the parents teachers whatever are the people also that ask questions that are curious to find out what someone else is thinking is that a is that a positive pattern for a taker Let me turn that back around on you.
Why do you think questions are important for leaders and coaches? It kind of, for me, I don't know everything. I know I don't know everything.
Even when I was playing as a Hall of Fame quarterback of the National Football League, I spent most of my time looking at the work of other people, talking to other quarterbacks. talking to other coaches, finding out what they were thinking, what they were doing to give me more information to be able to make better decisions and to make changes that would make me better. I knew I could not stay the same. And if I was not going to stay the same, I'll go this way. Most of my learning has come from other people.
Maybe all of my learning. I don't think I've had an original idea myself. I think it's all come from what I've seen, what I've read, what I've heard. Well, I think that would very much characterize the way that a giver goes through life.
Takers tend to ask fewer questions when they're dealing with other people because it feels like they're exposing some vulnerability, right? I want to be the smartest person in the room if I'm a taker. I don't want to admit that you might know something that I don't. Whereas I think givers are-Why do you want to be the smartest person in the room? Is it because of- of an ego thing?
What is it? So ego is one factor. Another is that a lot of takers think that success is zero sum and that in order for me to win, somebody else has got to lose. But most of life is not like a football game, right? There doesn't have to be a winner and a loser in every exchange.
And so I think a lot of takers fear that, you know, if they are not the smartest person in the room, that somebody, some other taker might actually step on them on the way to the top. That's an interesting thing because in football, yeah, it hurts to lose. It's a clear-cut winner and loser. But I never left the field. feeling bad about my opponent.
Never? No, I didn't feel bad about my opponent. I had great respect for my opponents, a great respect for the players. We saw them just in uniforms and on film, but I respected their skill set. And I was disappointed that we didn't lose, but I didn't blame it on them.
I blamed the loss on me. What did I not do? How did I not prepare properly?
What did I not practice? What have I got to change? And so it was a good internal thing. feedback system for me in the losing.
Yeah. Yeah. And interestingly, takers actually learn less from that kind of feedback because after a loss, they will look to blame other people and protect their egos.
And then they don't learn. They don't pick up the lessons. Whereas givers are much more likely to say, this isn't about me. This is about what I can really glean from this series of mistakes that will help the whole team become better. I believe, I want you to challenge this, I believe we learn much more from losing than we do from winning.
Yeah. I wish I could challenge that, but unfortunately. it's true.
You know when I played a football game and when we won, went out with my buddies, we celebrated, we high-fived and how great we were. Remember that play and what we did so good? And then when we lost, I didn't go out. I went back and looked at film. And I studied and I thought about what did I not do?
How can I get better? And so I've always felt that we learn much more from losing than we do from winning. Yeah I think you're absolutely right. There's a lot of research.
research on this that backs up your intuition and much of it is because when you win, that's basically a signal to repeat the status quo and to continue doing what you already know how to do. It worked for us, why would we change it? Whereas a loss is basically a signal to hit the reset button and go back to the drawing board and figure out do we need to change our plays?
Do we need to change maybe the roster and really try to create a better way of winning? Curiosity, I think that's a great trait of anybody living, to want to. find out more, to learn more, no matter what's your age.
Now, in this whole thing of give and take, is it generational? Are we finding that as a young person, you're more selfish or old? I mean, is it generational? So there's a lot of debate about this.
There's a really neat book written a couple years ago by Jean Twenge called Generation Me, where she reported some new data showing that the millennial generation is more narcissistic, more entitled, more selfish than baby boomers or gen Xers. And a lot of people got worried. But then a group of sex One psychologist led by Brent Roberts at Illinois came back and said, wait a minute, this is more complicated because actually every generation is Generation Me until they become older and more mature.
And they found that actually age is a much bigger factor than generation. So the millennial generation is actually becoming more generous as they age.