BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

7 Ways That Generosity Can Lead To Success

This article is more than 10 years old.

At 31, Adam Grant is the youngest tenured professor at Wharton and a leader in the field of organizational psychology. He regularly consults with companies like Google, Merck and Goldman Sachs on how to make their workers more productive. He has built his career in part on a surprising proposition:  that the most productive, high-achieving people are also the people who are the most giving and altruistic.

In his new book, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (Viking, $28), he does a convincing job of proving that givers can achieve much more than cautious, self-protective takers who “believe the world is a competitive, dog-eat-dog place,” where they need to put themselves first, for fear someone else will elbow them aside. He identifies a third category, called matchers, who try to balance what they give with what they get. A giver himself, Grant shows how the aphorism “nice guys finish last,” while sometimes true, can also be completely wrong.

Among Grant’s intriguing findings: Though a number of studies show that givers consistently come out on the bottom, those same studies reveal that while takers and matchers occupy the middle ground, givers are also at the top of the success scale. Grant ran a study of salespeople in North Carolina where he put together a “giver score” that calculated to what extent each person focused on helping others, rather than on promoting themselves. The least productive salespeople all had giver scores that were 25% higher than average performers. They were so concerned about what was best for their customers, they didn’t sell aggressively enough. But he found a surprise among the top performers: They were givers too, and averaged 50% more in annual revenue than the takers and the matchers.

Throughout the book Grant offers examples that illustrate his point about how excessive giving can land people at the top of their profession. Like David Hornik, a quirky (he collects Alice in Wonderland comic books) Silicon Valley venture capitalist. At his daughter’s soccer match one day, Hornik meets Danny Shader, an intense entrepreneur who asks Hornik to consider Shader’s idea for a new company that offers a way for low-income people to buy things online without using their credit or debit cards. Instead of the usual VC tactic of making Shader an offer with a tight deadline, which would cut off his ability to shop his idea to other investors, Hornik tells him he should take all the time he needs. Thinking that Hornik is too nice and won’t challenge him to do his best, Shader chooses another investor.

But after he makes the decision, Shader has second thoughts and realizes he misses Hornik’s generous input. Though he has to sell more of the company than he had planned, he invites Hornik to invest. Hornik winds up offering lots of new ideas and pushing Shader to expand in ways Shader hadn’t considered. Shader lands partnerships with companies like 7-Eleven and Greyhound and his business takes off. Hornik puts Shader on his list of references and Shader refers more clients to Hornik, with glowing recommendations. (Forbes wrote about Shader’s business, PayNearMe, back in 2010.)

Hornik has broken other rules in the VC business. In 2004 he became the first in his profession to start a blog about his ideas. His colleagues and competitors thought he was nuts to divulge secrets about the deals he was doing but Hornik cared more about sharing with his community. He also put together a conference called The Lobby, where he invited VCs from rival firms and invested $400,000 of his own money to get it off the ground. Again colleagues thought he was crazy to set up a situation where other VCs could network and benefit from his connections. But the conference thrived and most importantly to Hornik, he was able to share ideas with others in his profession. Of course he got some new ideas of his own.

Hornik’s unconventional generosity has paid off. While most VCs have a signing rate of 50%, in 11 years in the business, writes Grant, Hornik offered 28 term sheets and got 25 acceptances.

How is it that some givers, like Hornik, land on top, while other givers wind up on the bottom, as pushovers and doormats, failing to advance their own interests? Grant picks apart the differences between the two groups. The most important thing givers must do: Find a way to advance their own interests while they are giving to others. Hornik does this by funding and closing deals and taking advantage of the returns his good will brings him to advance his own business.

I’ll break down Grant’s advice into seven ways that givers can find success:

1. Don’t be completely selfless. It’s great to give away as much of your talent and share as many of your connections as possible. But it’s also important to care about whether you are getting ahead at the same time. As Grant puts it, “self-interest and other-interest are completely independent motivations: You can have both at the same time.”

2. Find a way to see the impact your job is making. Grant tells the story of a 24-year-old Teach For America  worker, Conrey Callahan, who quickly gets burned out by putting in impossibly long days at a failing Philadelphia high school. Instead of cutting back on her hours, on the weekends she volunteers as a TFA mentor, and she starts a chapter of a nonprofit that helps high-achieving low-income students get into college. Unlike her teaching job, her volunteer work has tangible results: her mentees advance and the kids she coaches get into college. Seeing good things come from her volunteer work gives Callahan the energy she needs to keep teaching.

To further make this point, Grant cites a study of Israeli radiologists, where 53% improved their CT scan diagnoses and 28% did worse. It turns out the radiologists who improved their performance saw photos of their patients just before their final scans, while the 28% of poor performers saw no photo. Seeing the people they were impacting helped the doctors better their performance.

3. Shift the focus of your giving. Though Callahan was giving her all in her teaching job, she had trouble seeing the results of her efforts as her students continued to struggle. Once she focused on her volunteer work, she felt more motivated and gratified.

4. “Chunk” your giving.  Grant cites a study of people who performed five random acts of kindness every week for six weeks. Those who concentrated their giving into a single day each week felt much happier at the end of the experiment than did those who dispersed their giving throughout the week. Grant calls this “chunking” as opposed to “sprinkling.” One reason Callahan felt rewarded by her volunteer work is she did it in intense periods on the weekends.

5. Volunteer at least 100 hours a year. Several studies have shown that doing roughly two hours of volunteer work a week makes people happier than volunteering fewer hours than that. One study of more than 2,000 Australians in their mid-sixties showed that those who volunteered at least 100 hours a year were happier and more satisfied than those who volunteered less. In another study, Americans who volunteered at least 100 hours in 1998 were more likely to be alive in 2000 than those who did no volunteer work.

6. Volunteer to do something that’s meaningful to you. Volunteering for the sake of volunteering is not going to make you happy or more productive, writes Grant. Psychologists Netta Weinstein and Richard Ryan have run studies that show that when people give because they feel obligated rather than giving to a cause or program that is meaningful to them, they feel no boost of energy and happiness. But when they give out of a sense of enjoyment and purpose, they feel much more invigorated.

7. Ask for help from colleagues. People like Callahan, who work around the clock in a giving profession and then volunteer on the weekends, need to feel supported by colleagues. Grant points to work by UCLA psychologist Shelley Taylor who has discovered that many people who are under stress tend to come together with coworkers to give. Callahan’s volunteer work earned her the respect and support of her mentees and strengthened her sense that she was making a difference.

The New York Times Magazine ran a wonderfully written profile of Grant yesterday. You can read it here. It seems Grant is a compulsive giver, but that he doesn’t lose sight of how giving propels his own  career forward. That seems to be a recipe for success.

Also on Forbes: