Managing As a Team

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.… 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 past three decades, in a series of ground-breaking studies, social scientists have discovered that people differ dramatically in their preferences for reciprocity. 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.

In the workplace, givers are a relatively rare breed. They tilt reciprocity in the other direction, preferring to give more than they get. Whereas takers tend to be self-focused, evaluating what other people can offer them, givers are other-focused, paying more attention to what other people need from them.… Most people act like givers in close relationships. In marriages and friendships, we contribute whenever we can without keeping score. But in the workplace, give and take becomes more complicated.


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