Adam Grant’s Give and Take and the Benefits of Teamwork

“When you commit to the success of others, your success is guaranteed”

If there is one thing that has marked my professional future, it has been the personal conviction that the best way to achieve success in everything I undertook was to make shared success possible. This is, in my opinion, the most important commitment of a leader to his followers, the commitment to their personal development and their professional success.

The advantages of teamwork

In today’s reflection, I would like to deepen the link between success and commitment to others with Adam Grant, an authority on positive psychology. The Adam Grant’s book “Give and Take” (“Give and Take”), based on more than ten years of research on human relationships, shatters the myth that greed is the path to success and gives us concrete examples of why in the Age of Collaboration sustainable success in our lives necessarily depends on the success of those around us. His vision, without a doubt, has profound implications for the way we relate to our family and friends, manage our careers, raise our children and design our organizations.

What does success in our lives depend on?

We usually associate achievement in life, personal and professional, with factors such as effort, talent, perseverance, perseverance, discipline, daring or even luck. Grant offers us a new and refreshing perspective on the art and science of success.

His research, full of compelling examples, shows us that success depends largely on how we approach our interactions with other people. Every time we engage with another person at work or in our particular sphere, we have to make a choice: “Give or Take.” That is, we bring value to the other person without worrying about what we receive in return, or we try to get as much value as possible from the relationship without caring about others. The answer we give to this question depends to a large extent, according to Grant’s research, on our success in both family and professional life.

Three different ways of relating to others.

In his study, Grant identifies three basic patterns of behaviors in people according to our natural way of relating to others:

• Givers – Those who “normally give more than they receive”. They are generous in their relationships and like to help others without conditions. They naturally share their knowledge and solve problems for others without seeking anything in return.
• Policyholders – Those who like to “receive more than they give”. They are people, by contrast, generally competitive, who try to get as much as possible from us, without giving anything in return. They operate on the premise that if they don’t do anything for themselves no one will. They are masters at hoarding credit and self-promotion and their ultimate goal is to make sure they are alone at the top.
• Comparators – They are people who strive to “maintain a balance between giving and receiving.” They are equitable and tend to seek reciprocity in their relationships. When they do a favor for someone, they expect it to be returned another time.

If we were asked directly what style of behavior we personally identify with, most of us would say that we are “givers” in our family relationships and “comparators” in our professional lives. That is, we are generous with our own, contributing whenever we can without keeping score, and in our professional lives we try to achieve a balance between giving and receiving. We seek reciprocity in our relationships, avoiding damage to our reputation from an overly “taker” attitude and at the same time protecting ourselves against the exploitation and burnout suffered by “givers”.

Who is more successful? The selfish or the generous?

To answer this question objectively, Grant conducted an extensive study in three very different domains: engineering, medicine, and sales. At each of the companies, the researchers collected data on whether employees tend to operate as givers, takers, or comparators and cross-referenced these results with objective data on their professional performance, productivity and error rates in engineering, grades in medical school, and sales revenue.

In all three options, the “givers” were the worst performers. The engineers with the lowest productivity and the highest number of errors were those whose colleagues rated them as doing far more in favor than they received in return. Similarly, the medical students with the poorest grades and the marketers with the lowest number of annual sales, were the ones who most frequently identified with phrases such as “I love helping others.” These “givers” ran out of time and energy to complete their work effectively because they put others ahead of them.

However, the most successful people turned out to be “givers” as well. In all three contexts, engineering, medicine, and sales, the highest achievers were the people most driven to help others.

What differentiates “successful givers” from “failed givers”? The key is in the ability to give and support others in ways that are not only not in conflict with their personal interests, but help them to be more successful. They are people who are able to help others at a very low personal cost, they care about benefiting others, but they also have ambitious goals for the promotion of their own interests. Their generosity tends to forge deeper relationships; by opening the doors to new networks their reputation grows, so they become trusted collaborators and gain the loyalty of their peers. Quite the opposite is true of “failed givers” who have the problem of being too empathetic and altruistic, so they end up sacrificing their personal success in favor of others.

Equipped with these self-preservation strategies, successful givers generally achieve better results than their fellow “takers” or “comparators.”. But their success also has a different quality. And it is that they achieve their personal goals in a “win-win” way. That is to say that they make friends, not enemies along the way, so they are never alone at the top, as is the case of many “takers” whose success is based on the exploitation of others or on the personal attribution of a collective success.

Do you want to know your style?

Adam Grant has launched the Give and Take portal

where if you spend a few minutes to complete the evaluation test you can know your personal style. You need to register with your email to receive the results.

You can do a self-assessment by answering the test naturally and honestly, and also check your own assessment with those of your classmates, sending the surveys to some contacts in your network so that they can evaluate you. Let’s see if they match!

I share with you my results: 53% Give, 20% Taker and 27% Comparator. As expected, we all have a mix. In my case, the dominant style is giving, which won’t surprise you if you’re a regular reader of the blog.

A fundamental difference: Sharing creates value.

The reality is that while we can achieve success in both ways, as givers and takers there is a fundamental difference. When a taker wins, there is usually someone who loses around them. In contrast, when a giver wins, their success creates value and cascades to the people around them. This difference is fundamental to the culture and productivity of organizations. By encouraging employees to both seek and provide help, recognizing “givers,” and discarding individualistic “taker” behaviors, companies can reap significant and sustainable benefits.

Our collaborative innovation programs in large organizations They show us, time and time again, how by creating the right contexts, organizations reap great benefits and improve their productivity when employees freely share their knowledge and skills with others. A win-win organizational culture improves team coherence and coordination, accelerates collective innovation, ensures that experience is transferred to new employees, and creates an environment where customers feel that their needs are the top priority of everyone in the organization.