B00AFPTSI0 EBOK (28 page)
Authors: Adam M. Grant Ph.D.
There’s little doubt that Huntsman is a skilled businessman. But the very act of
giving money away
might have contributed to his fortune. In
Winners Never Cheat
, he writes, “Monetarily, the most satisfying moments in my life have not been the excitement of closing a great deal or the reaping of profits from it. They have been when I was able to help others in need . . . There’s no denying that I am a deal junkie, but I also have developed an addiction for giving. The more one gives, the better one feels; and the better one feels about it, the easier it becomes to give.”
This is an extension of the idea that otherish givers build willpower muscles, making it easy to give more, but is it possible that Huntsman actually made money by giving it away? Remarkably, there’s evidence to support this claim. The economist Arthur Brooks tested the relationship between
income and charitable giving
. Using data from almost thirty thousand Americans in the year 2000, he controlled for every factor imaginable that would affect income and giving. He adjusted for education, age, race, religious involvement, political beliefs, and marital status. He also accounted for the number of times people volunteered. As expected, higher income led to higher giving. For every $1 in extra income, charitable giving went up by $0.14.
*
But something much more interesting happened. For every $1 in extra charitable giving, income was $3.75 higher. Giving actually seemed to make people richer. For example, imagine that you and I are both earning $60,000 a year. I give $1,600 to charity; you give $2,500 to charity. Although you gave away $900 more than I did, according to the evidence, you’ll be on track to earn $3,375 more than I will in the coming year. Surprising as it seems, people who give more go on to earn more.
Jon Huntsman Sr. may be on to something. Research shows that giving can boost happiness and meaning, motivating people to work harder and earn more money, even if the gift isn’t on the colossal scale of Huntsman’s. In a study by psychologists Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin, and Michael Norton, people rated their happiness in the morning. Then, they received a windfall: an envelope with $20. They had to spend it by five
P.M.
, and then they rated their happiness again. Would they be happier spending the money on themselves or on others?
Most people think they’d be happier spending the money on themselves, but the opposite is true. If you spend the money on yourself, your happiness doesn’t change. But if you
spend the money on others
, you actually report becoming significantly happier. This is otherish giving: you get to choose who you help, and it benefits you by improving your mood. Economists call it the
warm glow
of giving, and psychologists call it the helper’s high. Recent
neuroscience evidence
shows that giving actually activates the reward and meaning centers in our brains, which send us pleasure and purpose signals when we act for the benefit of others.
These benefits are not limited to giving money; they also show up for giving time. One study of more than 2,800
Americans over age twenty-four
showed that volunteering predicted increases in happiness, life satisfaction, and self-esteem—and decreases in depression—a year later. And for adults over sixty-five, those who volunteered saw a
drop in depression
over an eight-year period. Other studies show that elderly adults who volunteer or give support to others
actually live longer
. This is true even after controlling for their health and the amount of support they get from others. In one experiment, adults either gave
massages
to babies or received massages themselves. Postmassage, those who gave had lower levels of stress hormones—such as cortisol and epinephrine—than those who received. It seems that giving adds meaning to our lives, distracts us from our own problems, and helps us feel valued by others. As researchers Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker, and Emily Garbinsky conclude in a
national survey of Americans
, “meaningfulness was associated with being a giver more than a taker.”
There’s a wealth of evidence that the ensuing
happiness can motivate people
to work harder, longer, smarter, and more effectively. Happiness can lead people to experience intense effort and long hours as less unpleasant and more enjoyable, set more challenging goals, and think more quickly, flexibly, and broadly about problems. One study even showed that when physicians were put in a happier mood, they made
faster and more accurate diagnoses
. Overall, on average, happier people earn more money, get higher performance ratings, make better decisions, negotiate sweeter deals, and contribute more to their organizations. Happiness alone accounts for about 10 percent of the variation between employees in job performance. By boosting happiness, giving might have motivated Jon Huntsman Sr. to work harder and smarter, helping him build up his fortune.
Huntsman is not the only influential businessperson who has come to view giving as a source of energy. In 2003,
Virgin mogul
Richard Branson set up a council called The Elders to fight conflict and promote peace, bringing together Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, and other leaders to alleviate suffering in Sudan, Cyprus, and Kenya. In 2004, Branson launched Virgin Unite, a nonprofit foundation that mobilizes people and resources to fight deadly diseases like AIDS and malaria, promote peace and justice, prevent climate change, and support entrepreneurs with microloans and new jobs in the developing world. In 2006, he pledged to donate all $3 billion of the profits from the Virgin airline and train businesses over the next decade to fight global warming. In 2007, he offered a $25 million prize for innovations to fight climate change. Was this string of events caused by a midlife crisis?
Actually, Branson was giving long before he became rich and famous. At age seventeen, a year after starting
Student
magazine and five full years before launching Virgin Records, Branson started his first charity. It was the Student Advisory Centre, a nonprofit organization that helped at-risk youth with a range of services. He made a list of problems that young people faced, from unwanted pregnancies to venereal disease, and convinced doctors to offer free or discounted services. He spent many nights on the phone at three
A.M.
consoling people who were contemplating suicide. Looking back, he notes that early in his career, he “had been interested in making money only to ensure
Student
’s
continuing success and to fund the Student Advisory Centre.” Today, giving continues to energize him. The “thing that gets me up in the morning is the idea of making a difference,” Branson writes, “to help safeguard our future on this planet. Does that make me successful? It certainly makes me happy.”
These energizing effects help to explain why otherish givers are fortified against burnout: through giving, they build up reserves of happiness and meaning that takers and matchers are less able to access. Selfless givers use up these reserves, exhausting themselves and often dropping to the bottom of the success ladder. By giving in ways that are energizing rather than exhausting, otherish givers are more likely to rise to the top. In two studies of employees in a wide range of jobs and organizations, psychologist David Mayer and I found that otherish employees made
more sustainable contributions
than the selfless givers, takers, or matchers. Employees who reported strong concern for benefiting others and creating a positive image for themselves were rated by supervisors as being the most helpful and taking the most initiative.
Ironically, because concern for their own interests sustains their energy, otherish givers actually give more than selfless givers. This is what the late Herbert Simon, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, observed in the quote that opened this chapter. Otherish givers may appear less altruistic than selfless givers, but their resilience against burnout enables them to contribute more.
Chump Change
Overcoming the Doormat Effect
No good deed goes unpunished.
—attributed to Clare Boothe Luce, editor, playwright, and U.S. congresswoman
Lillian Bauer
was a brilliant, hardworking manager at an elite consulting firm. She was recruited out of Harvard, and after leaving the firm to complete her MBA, her consulting firm lured her back. She was widely seen as a rising star, and she was on track to make partner far ahead of schedule, until word began to spread that she was too generous. Her promotion to partner was delayed for six months, and she received very direct feedback that she needed to say no more often to clients and colleagues. After a full year, she still had not made it.
Bauer was passionate about making a difference. She devoted several years to a nonprofit organization helping women launch and grow businesses. There, she introduced a microloan program, opening doors for low-income women to start their own companies. In one case, a woman needed a loan to open a salon, but was turned down by two banks. Bauer worked with her to strengthen her business plan and financial statements, and both banks ended up offering her loans at highly competitive rates. As a consultant, Bauer spent countless hours mentoring new employees, giving career advice to associates, and even helping junior colleagues strengthen their applications to business school. “I really want to help. If an hour of my time saves people ten hours or gives them an opportunity they otherwise wouldn’t have, it’s easy to make the tradeoff and give another hour of my time.”
Bauer was extremely talented and driven, but she took giving so far that it was compromising her reputation and her productivity. “She never said no to anything,” explained one consulting colleague. “She was so generous and giving with her time that she fell into the trap of being more of a pushover. It really delayed her promotion to partner.” In a performance review, Bauer was told that she needed to be more selfish: she lacked the assertive edge that was expected of a consulting partner. She spent too much time developing those around her, and she was so committed to helping clients that she bent over backward to meet their requests. It was known that Bauer “wasn’t as forceful in pushing clients as people felt she needed to be to make that partner hurdle, in those key moments where clients needed to hear a harsh message, or clients had been pushing an agenda in the wrong direction.” For Bauer, being a giver became a career-limiting move.
In a study that mirrors Bauer’s experience, management professors Diane Bergeron, Abbie Shipp, Ben Rosen, and Stacie Furst studied more than 3,600
consultants in a large professional services firm
. The researchers coded giving behavior from company records of the weekly time that each consultant spent helping new hires, mentoring more junior consultants, and sharing knowledge or expertise with peers. After a year of tracking these giving behaviors every week, the researchers obtained data on each consultant’s salary, advancement speed, and promotions.
The givers did worse on all three metrics. They had significantly lower salary increases, slower advancement, and lower promotion rates. The givers averaged 9 percent salary increases, compared with 10.5 percent and 11.5 percent for the takers and matchers, respectively. Less than 65 percent of the givers were promoted to a manager role, compared with 83 percent and 82 percent for the takers and matchers, respectively. And the givers who did get promoted had to wait longer, averaging twenty-six months to promotion, compared with less than twenty-four months for takers and matchers. This was a familiar pattern to Bauer: “If I err on one side, it’s probably being too generous: putting others first, before myself.”
Hundreds of miles east at Deloitte Consulting in New York City, Jason Geller was also on the fast track to partner. When he first started in consulting, Deloitte was just moving to e-mail and did not have a formalized knowledge management process—there was no system for storing and retrieving information that consultants gathered on specific industries and clients. Geller took the initiative to collect and share information. When he heard about a project, he would ask the team for its output. He kept a stack of articles on his nightstand, reading them in bed, and when he came across an interesting article, he would file it away. He conducted research on what Deloitte’s competitors were doing. “I was a little bit of a geek.”
Deloitte’s knowledge management system became Jason Geller’s brain, and his hard drive. His colleagues began calling it the J-Net, the Jason Network. When they had questions or needed information, he was the go-to guy. It was easier to ask him than to search for themselves, and he was always willing to share the knowledge from his brain or his growing database. No one asked him to create the J-Net; he just did it because it seemed like the right thing to do.
Since graduating from Cornell, Geller had spent his entire career at Deloitte, doing an MBA at Columbia along the way. He was grateful for the support that his mentors provided to him. A matcher would have paid it back, looking for ways to return the favor to his mentors. But as a giver, like Lillian Bauer, Geller wanted to pay it forward. “It becomes the natural way of doing things. You see that the folks who are successful are the ones who help others. I naturally fell into the practice of helping others. I saw that others created those opportunities for me, and I now work very hard to create them for other people.” Geller made a standing offer to every new employee: he would help and mentor them in any way that he could.
The typical path to partner at Deloitte takes between twelve and fifteen years. Geller made it far ahead of schedule, in just nine years. At just thirty years old, he became one of the youngest partners in Deloitte history. Today, Geller is a partner in Deloitte’s human capital consulting practice, where the business he leads globally and in the United States has been ranked number one in the marketplace. Yet a colleague describes him as a guy “who frequently shuns the spotlight in favor of his colleagues.” As Deloitte’s global and U.S. HR transformation practice leader, Geller has taken the J-Net to a new level and is a strong advocate for Deloitte’s formal global knowledge management processes and technologies. With a mix of admiration and incredulity, one analyst notes that “although he is incredibly busy, he holds regular meetings with analysts so he can help them through any issues they may be facing at the time.” Geller is reluctant to take credit for his accomplishments, but after some prodding, acknowledges that “being generous is what has made me successful here.”
Although Lillian Bauer and Jason Geller are both givers, they found themselves on very different trajectories. Why did giving stall her career, while accelerating his?
The intuitive answer has to do with gender, but that’s not the key differentiator—at least not in the conventional sense. Lillian Bauer fell into three major traps that plague many givers, male and female, in their dealings with other people: being too trusting, too empathetic, and too timid. In this chapter, my goal is to show you how successful givers like Jason Geller avoid these risks, and how givers like Lillian learn to overcome them by acting less selfless and more otherish. Becoming a doormat is the giver’s worst nightmare, and I’ll make the case that an otherish approach enables givers to escape the trap of being too trusting by becoming highly flexible and adaptable in their reciprocity styles. I’ll also argue that an otherish style helps givers sidestep the land mines of being too empathetic and too timid by repurposing some skills that come naturally to them.
