so I want you to look around the room
for a minute and try to find the most
paranoid person here and then I want you
to point at that person for me
okay don't actually do it but as an
organizational psychologist I spend a
lot of time in work places 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 and 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 so 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
this is the only thing I will say today
that has no data behind it but I am
convinced the longer it takes you to
laugh at this cartoon the more worried
we should be that you're a taker 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
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 match or 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 now
I studied dozens of organizations
thousands of people I had engineers
measuring their productivity I looked at
medical students grades even sales
people's revenue 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 favours 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 to agree most
strongly with statements like I love
helping others which suggests the doctor
you ought to trust the one who came to
med school with no desire to help
anybody and then in sales to the lowest
revenue accrued in the most generous
salespeople and 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 don't ask it
that way but what's the costs of
generosity and 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
and matchers raise your hands
okay 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
and 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 and 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 matters 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 a true mission in
life to just punish the hell out of that
person 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 so
take a look at some data that I gathered
from hundreds of salespeople tracking
the revenue what you can see is that the
givers go to both extremes they make up
the majority the people who bring in the
lowest revenue but also the highest
revenue and the same patterns were true
for engineers productivity and medical
students graves givers are Oprah
over-represented 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
government's are you ready
I was gonna do it anyway but I
appreciate the enthusiasm the first
thing that's really critical is to
recognize it 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
fortunes best networker
it's the guy not the cat
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 look 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 and 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 to
figure out if I can recognize somebody
who's work who has gone unnoticed and
those five minute favors are really
critical to helping giver set boundaries
and protect themselves and 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 what you see with
successful givers is they recognize that
it's okay to be a receiver to and if you
run an organization we can actually make
this easier we can make it easier for
people to ask for help a couple of
colleagues and I have studied at
hospitals and we found it on certain
floors nurses did a lot of help seeking
and on other floors they did very little
of it and the factor that stood out on
the floors were 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 and when that
role was available nurses said oh it's
not embarrassing it's not vulnerable to
ask for help it's actually encouraged
now 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 an organization 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 and
yeah if nobody ever asked 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 on to
your team I figured you want a culture
productive generosity you should hire a
bunch of givers but I was surprised to
discover actually that that was not ripe
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 but I hope you do know 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
crate if 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 and if you can do that well you
will 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
matters 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 and there's a
personality trait that throws us off
it's called agreeableness one of 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 where there
was actually a national contest to come
up with a new Canadian slogan and fill
in the blank as Canadian as and I
thought the winning entry was going to
be as Canadian as maple syrup or ice
hockey but now Canadians voted for their
new national slogan to be a kid you not
as Canadian as possible under the
circumstances
now for those of you who are highly
agreeable or maybe slightly Canadian you
get this right away how could I ever say
them any one thing when I'm constantly
adapting to try to please other people
disagreeable people do less of it the
more critical sceptical challenging and
far more likely than their peers to go
to law schools that's not a joke that's
actually an empirical fact so I was
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 or 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
that every consultant in the room is
waiting for and draw two by two
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 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 other's best interests
at heart or as an engineer put it o
disagreeable givers like somebody with a
bad user interface but a great operating
system if if that helps you
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 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 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 and 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 the 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 okay 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
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 that they're
going around behind your back and saying
exceptionally glowing things about you
and the great thing about a culture of
givers is that's not a delusion it's
reality look I want to live in a world
where givers succeed and I hope you will
help me create that worlds thank you
[Applause]
you