A force of habit

By: Adam Grant
According to conventional wisdom, highly successful people have three things in common: motivation, ability and opportunity.

If we want to succeed, we need a combination of hard work, talent and luck… There’s a fourth ingredient, one that’s critical but often neglected: success depends heavily on how we approach our interactions with other people.

Every time we interact with another person at work, we have a choice to make: do we try to claim as much value as we can, or contribute value without worrying about what we receive in return? Over the last three decades, in a series of groundbreaking studies, social scientists have discovered that people differ dramatically in their preferences for reciprocity — their desired mix of taking and giving.

To shed some light on these preferences, let me introduce you to two kinds of people who fall at opposite ends of the reciprocity spectrum at work. I call them takers and givers.

Takers have a distinctive signature: they like to get more than they give… to prove their competence, they self-promote and make sure they get plenty of credit for their efforts.

In the workplace, givers are a rare breed. They tilt reciprocity in the other direction, preferring to give more than they get… Research suggests that the worst and the best performers tend to be givers; takers and matchers are more likely to land in the middle… Givers dominate the bottom and the top of the success ladder.

From “Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success”