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