-
So I want you to look around
the room for a minute
-
and try to find the most
paranoid person here --
-
(Laughter)
-
And then I want you to point
at that person for me.
-
OK, don't actually do it.
-
(Laughter)
-
As an organizational psychologist,
-
I spend a lot of time in workplaces,
-
and I find paranoia everywhere.
-
Paranoia is caused by people
that I call "takers."
-
Takers are self-serving
in their interactions.
-
It's all about what can you do for me.
-
The opposite is a giver.
-
It's somebody who approaches
most interactions by asking,
-
"what can I do for you?"
-
I wanted to give you a chance
to think about your own style.
-
We all have moments of giving and taking.
-
Your style is just how you treat
most of the people most of the time --
-
your default.
-
I have a short test that you can take
-
to figure out if you're more
of a giver or a taker,
-
and you can take it right now.
-
[The Narcissist Test]
-
[Step 1: Take a moment
to think about yourself.]
-
(Laughter)
-
[Step 2: If you made it to Step 2,
you are not a narcissist.]
-
(Laughter)
-
This is the only thing I will say today
that has no data behind it,
-
but I am convinced the longer it takes
for you to laugh at this cartoon,
-
the more worried we should be
that you're a taker.
-
(Laughter)
-
Of course not all takers are narcissists,
-
some are just givers who got
burned one too many times.
-
And then there's another kind of taker
that we won't be addressing today,
-
and that's called a psychopath.
-
(Laughter)
-
I was curious though about how
common these extremes are,
-
and so I surveyed over 30,000
people across industries
-
around the world's cultures.
-
And I found that most people
are right in the middle
-
between giving and taking.
-
They choose this third
style called matching.
-
If you're a matcher,
-
you try to keep an even
balance of give and take --
-
quid pro quo --
-
I'll do something for you
if you do something for me,
-
and that seems like a safe
way to live your life.
-
But is it the most effective
and productive way to live your life?
-
The answer to that question
is a very definitive ...
-
maybe.
-
(Laughter)
-
I studied dozens of organizations --
-
thousands of people.
-
I had engineers,
-
measuring their productivity.
-
(Laughter)
-
I looked at medical students' grades --
-
even sales peoples' revenue.
-
(Laughter)
-
And unexpectedly,
-
the worst performers in each
of these jobs were the givers.
-
The engineers who got the least work done
-
were the ones who did more
favors than they got back.
-
They were so busy doing
other people's jobs,
-
they literally ran out of time and energy
to get their own work completed.
-
In medical school,
-
the lowest grades belong to the students
-
who agree most strongly
with statements like,
-
"I love helping others."
-
Which suggests the doctor
you ought to trust
-
is the one who came to med school
with no desire to help anybody.
-
(Laughter)
-
And then in sales, too,
-
the lowest revenue acrcued
in the most generous sales people.
-
And I actually reached out
to one of those sales people,
-
who had a very high giver score.
-
And I asked him,
-
"Why do you suck at your --"
-
I didn't ask him that way.
-
(Laughter)
-
"What's the cost of generosity in sales?"
-
And he said,
-
"Well, I just care so deeply
about my customers
-
that I would never sell them
one of our crappy products."
-
So just out of curiosity,
-
how many of you self-identify more
as givers than takers or matchers?
-
Raise your hands.
-
OK, it would have been more
before we talked about this data.
-
But actually it turns out
there's a twist here,
-
because givers are often
sacrificing themselves,
-
but they make their organizations better.
-
We have a huge body of evidence;
-
many, many studies looking
at the frequency of giving behavior
-
that exists in a team or an organization.
-
And the more often people
are helping and sharing their knowledge
-
and providing mentoring,
-
the better organizations do
on every metric we can measure.
-
Higher profits, customer satisfaction,
employee retention --
-
even lower operating expenses.
-
So givers spend a lot of time
trying to help other people
-
and improve the team,
-
and then unfortunately
they suffer along the way.
-
I want to talk about what
it takes to build cultures
-
where givers actually get to succeed.
-
Not Synced
So I wondered then if givers
are the worst performers,
-
Not Synced
who are the best performers?
-
Not Synced
And let me start with the good news:
-
Not Synced
it's not the takers.
-
Not Synced
Takers tend to rise quickly
but also fall quickly in most jobs.
-
Not Synced
And they fall at the hands of matchers.
-
Not Synced
If you're a matcher,
-
Not Synced
you believe in "an eye for an eye,"
-
Not Synced
a just world.
-
Not Synced
And so when you meet a taker,
-
Not Synced
you feel like it's your mission in life
-
Not Synced
to just punish the hell
out of that person.
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
And that way justice gets served.
-
Not Synced
Well, most people are matchers.
-
Not Synced
And that means if you're a taker,
-
Not Synced
it tends to catch up with you eventually.
-
Not Synced
What goes around will come around.
-
Not Synced
And so the logical conclusion
is it must be the matchers
-
Not Synced
who are the best performers.
-
Not Synced
But they're not.
-
Not Synced
In every job,
-
Not Synced
in every organization I've ever studied,
-
Not Synced
the best results belong
to the givers again.
-
Not Synced
So take a look at some data
-
Not Synced
that I gathered from hundreds
of sales people,
-
Not Synced
tracking their revenue.
-
Not Synced
What you can see is that the givers
go to both extremes.
-
Not Synced
They make up the majority of the people
who bring in the lowest revenue,
-
Not Synced
but also the highest revenue.
-
Not Synced
And the same patterns were true
for engineers' productivity,
-
Not Synced
and medical students' grades.
-
Not Synced
Givers are overrepresented
at the bottom and at the top
-
Not Synced
of every success metric that I can track.
-
Not Synced
Which raises the question,
-
Not Synced
how do we create a world where
more of these givers get to excel.
-
Not Synced
I want to talk about how to do that
not just in businesses,
-
Not Synced
but also in non-profits, schools --
-
Not Synced
even governments.
-
Not Synced
Are you ready?
-
Not Synced
(Cheers)
-
Not Synced
All right, I was going to do it anyway
but I appreciate the enthusiasm.
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
The first thing that's really critical
-
Not Synced
is to recognize that givers
are your most valuable people,
-
Not Synced
but if they're not careful,
-
Not Synced
they burn out.
-
Not Synced
So you have to protect
the givers in your midst,
-
Not Synced
and I learned a great lesson about this
from Fortune's best networker.
-
Not Synced
It's the guy not the cat.
-
Not Synced
His name is Adam Rifkin.
-
Not Synced
He's a very successful serial entrepreneur
-
Not Synced
who spends a huge amount
of his time helping other people.
-
Not Synced
And his secret weapon
is the five-minute favor.
-
Not Synced
Adam said, "Look, you don't have
to be Mother Teresa or Gandhi
-
Not Synced
to be a giver,
-
Not Synced
you just have to find small ways
-
Not Synced
to add large value to other
people's lives."
-
Not Synced
And that could be as simple
as making an introduction
-
Not Synced
between two people who could
benefit from knowing each other.
-
Not Synced
It could be sharing your knowledge
or giving a little bit of feedback.
-
Not Synced
Or It might be even something
as basic as saying,
-
Not Synced
"You know,
-
Not Synced
I'm going to try and figure out
if I can recognize somebody
-
Not Synced
whose work has gone unnoticed."
-
Not Synced
And those five-minute favors
are really critical
-
Not Synced
to helping givers set boundaries
and protect themselves.
-
Not Synced
The second thing that matters
-
Not Synced
if you want to build a culture
where givers succeed
-
Not Synced
is you actually need a culture
where help seeking is the norm;
-
Not Synced
where people ask a lot.
-
Not Synced
This may hit a little too close
to home for of you.
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
What you see with successful givers
-
Not Synced
is they recognize that it's OK
to be a receiver, too.
-
Not Synced
And if you run an organization,
-
Not Synced
we can actually make this easier.
-
Not Synced
We can make it easier
for people to ask for help.
-
Not Synced
A couple colleagues and I
studied hospitals,
-
Not Synced
and we found that on certain floors,
-
Not Synced
nurses did a lot of help-seeking,
-
Not Synced
and on other floors they did
very little of it.
-
Not Synced
And the factor that stood out
-
Not Synced
on the floors where
help-seeking was common --
-
Not Synced
where it was the norm --
-
Not Synced
was there was just one nurse
-
Not Synced
whose sole job it was to help
other nurses on the unit.
-
Not Synced
And when that role was available,
-
Not Synced
nurses said, "Oh, it's not embarrassing,
-
Not Synced
it's not vulnerable,
-
Not Synced
to ask for help.
-
Not Synced
It's actually encouraged."
-
Not Synced
Help-seeking isn't important
just for protecting the success
-
Not Synced
and the well-being of givers,
-
Not Synced
it's also critical to getting more
people to act like givers.
-
Not Synced
Because the data says
-
Not Synced
that somewhere between 75 and 90 percent
of all giving in organizations
-
Not Synced
starts with a request.
-
Not Synced
But a lot of people don't ask.
-
Not Synced
They don't want to look incompetent,
-
Not Synced
they don't know where to turn,
-
Not Synced
they don't want to burden others.
-
Not Synced
And yet if nobody ever asks for help,
-
Not Synced
you have a lot of frustrated
givers in your organization
-
Not Synced
who would love to step up and contribute
-
Not Synced
if they only knew who
could benefit and how.
-
Not Synced
I think the most important thing,
-
Not Synced
if you want to build a culture
of successful givers,
-
Not Synced
is to be thoughtful about who
you let onto your team.
-
Not Synced
I figured,
-
Not Synced
you want a culture
of productive generosity,
-
Not Synced
you should hire a bunch of givers.
-
Not Synced
But I was surprised to discover actually
that that was not right --
-
Not Synced
that the negative impact
of a taker on a culture
-
Not Synced
is usually double to triple
the positive impact of a giver.
-
Not Synced
Think about it this way:
-
Not Synced
one bad apple can spoil a barrel,
-
Not Synced
but one good egg just
does not make a dozen.
-
Not Synced
I don't know what that means --
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
But I hope you do --
-
Not Synced
No.
-
Not Synced
Let even one taker into a team
-
Not Synced
and you will see that
the givers will stop helping.
-
Not Synced
They'll say, "I'm surrounded
by a bunch of snakes and sharks.
-
Not Synced
Why should I contribute?"
-
Not Synced
Whereas if you let one giver into a team,
-
Not Synced
you don't get an explosion of generosity.
-
Not Synced
More often people are like,
-
Not Synced
"Great, that person can do all our work."
-
Not Synced
So effective hiring and screening
and team building
-
Not Synced
is not about bringing in the givers;
-
Not Synced
it's about weeding out the takers.
-
Not Synced
If you can do that well,
-
Not Synced
you will be left with givers and matchers.
-
Not Synced
The givers will be generous
-
Not Synced
because they don't have to worry
about the consequences.
-
Not Synced
And the beauty of the matchers
is that they follow the norm.
-
Not Synced
So how do you catch a taker
before it's too late?
-
Not Synced
We're actually pretty bad
at figuring out who's a taker,
-
Not Synced
especially on first impressions.
-
Not Synced
There's a personality trait
that throws us off.
-
Not Synced
It's called agreeableness;
-
Not Synced
one the major dimensions
of personality across cultures.
-
Not Synced
Agreeable people are warm and friendly,
-
Not Synced
they're nice,
-
Not Synced
they're polite.
-
Not Synced
You find a lot of them in Canada.
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
Where there was actually
a national contest
-
Not Synced
to come up with a new Canadian slogan
with fill-in-the-blank,
-
Not Synced
"As Canadian as ... "
-
Not Synced
And I thought the winning entry
was going to be
-
Not Synced
"As Canadian as maple syrup,
-
Not Synced
or ice hockey."
-
Not Synced
But no,
-
Not Synced
Canadians voted for their new
national slogan to be --
-
Not Synced
I kid you not --
-
Not Synced
"As Canadian as possible
under the circumstances."
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
Now for those of you
who are highly agreeable,
-
Not Synced
or maybe slightly Canadian,
-
Not Synced
you get this right away.
-
Not Synced
How could I ever say I'm ever one thing
-
Not Synced
when I'm constantly adapting
to try and please other people?
-
Not Synced
Disagreeable people do less of it.
-
Not Synced
They're more critical,
skeptical, challenging,
-
Not Synced
and far more likely than their peers
to go to law schools.
-
Not Synced
That's not a joke,
-
Not Synced
that's actually an empirical fact.
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
So I always assumed
that agreeable people were givers,
-
Not Synced
and disagreeable people were takers.
-
Not Synced
But then I gathered the data,
-
Not Synced
and I was stunned to find no
correlation between those traits.
-
Not Synced
Because it turns out that agreeableness,
disagreeableness is your outer veneer.
-
Not Synced
How pleasant is it to interact with you?
-
Not Synced
Whereas giving and taking
are more of your inner motives.
-
Not Synced
What are your values?
-
Not Synced
What are your intentions toward others?
-
Not Synced
If you really want to judge
people accurately,
-
Not Synced
you have to get to the moment
-
Not Synced
that every consultant
in the room is waiting for,
-
Not Synced
and draw a two-by-two.
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
The agreeable givers are easy to spot:
-
Not Synced
they say yes to everything.
-
Not Synced
The disagreeable takers
are also recognized quickly,
-
Not Synced
although you might call them
by a slightly different name.
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
We forget about the other
two combinations.
-
Not Synced
There are disagreeable givers
in our organizations.
-
Not Synced
There are people who are gruff
and tough on the surface,
-
Not Synced
but underneath have others'
best interests at heart.
-
Not Synced
Or as an engineer put it,
-
Not Synced
"Oh, disagreeable givers --
-
Not Synced
like somebody with a bad user interface
but a great operating system."
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
If that helps you.
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
Disagreeable givers are the most
undervalued people in our organizations
-
Not Synced
because they're the ones who give
the critical feedback
-
Not Synced
that no one wants to hear
but everyone needs to hear.
-
Not Synced
We need to do a much better job
valuing these people
-
Not Synced
as opposed to writing them off early,
-
Not Synced
and saying, "Eh, kind of prickly,
-
Not Synced
must be a selfish taker."
-
Not Synced
The other combination we
forget about is the deadly one:
-
Not Synced
the agreeable taker,
-
Not Synced
also known as the faker.
-
Not Synced
This is the person
who's nice to your face,
-
Not Synced
and then will stab you right in the back.
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
And my favorite way to catch these people
in the interview process
-
Not Synced
is to ask the question,
-
Not Synced
"Can you give me the names of four people
-
Not Synced
whose careers you have
fundamentally improved?"
-
Not Synced
The takers will give you four names,
-
Not Synced
and they will all be more
influential than them
-
Not Synced
because takers are great at kissing up
and then kicking down.
-
Not Synced
Givers are more likely to name people
who are below them in a hierarchy,
-
Not Synced
who don't have as much power,
-
Not Synced
who can do them no good.
-
Not Synced
And let's face it,
-
Not Synced
you all know you can learn
a lot about character
-
Not Synced
by watching how someone
treats their restaurant server,
-
Not Synced
or their Uber driver.
-
Not Synced
So if we do all this well,
-
Not Synced
if we can weed takers
out of our organizations,
-
Not Synced
if we can make it safe to ask for help,
-
Not Synced
if we can protect givers from burnout,
-
Not Synced
and make it OK for them to be ambitious
in pursuing their own goals
-
Not Synced
as well as trying to help other people,
-
Not Synced
we can actually change the way
that people define success.
-
Not Synced
Instead of saying it's all about
winning a competition,
-
Not Synced
people will realize success
is really more about contribution.
-
Not Synced
I believe that the most
meaningful way to succeed
-
Not Synced
is to help other people succeed.
-
Not Synced
And if we can spread that belief,
-
Not Synced
we can actually turn paranoia upside down.
-
Not Synced
There's a name for that.
-
Not Synced
It's called "pronoia."
-
Not Synced
Pronoia is the delusional belief
-
Not Synced
that other people
are plotting your well-being.
-
Not Synced
(Laughter)
-
Not Synced
That they're going around behind your back
-
Not Synced
and saying exceptionally
glowing things about you.
-
Not Synced
The great thing about a culture of givers
is that's not a delusion,
-
Not Synced
it's reality.
-
Not Synced
Look, I want to live in a world
where givers succeed,
-
Not Synced
and I hope you will help me
create that world.
-
Not Synced
Thank you.
-
Not Synced
(Applause)