by Adam Grant
Annie landed all of these perks without ever negotiating. Instead, she used a form of powerless communication that’s quite familiar to givers.
Entering negotiations, takers typically work to establish a dominant position. Had Annie been a taker, she might have compiled a list of all of her merits and attracted counteroffers from rival companies to strengthen her position. Matchers are more inclined to see negotiating as an opportunity for quid pro quo. If Annie were a matcher, she would have gone to a senior leader who owed her a favor and asked for reciprocity. But Annie is a giver: she mentors dozens of colleagues, volunteers for the United Way, and visits elementary school classes to interest students in science. When her colleagues make a mistake, she’s regularly the one to take responsibility, shielding them from the blame at the expense of her own performance. She once withdrew a job application when she learned that a friend was applying for the same position.
As a giver, Annie wasn’t comfortable bargaining like a taker or a matcher, so she chose an entirely different strategy. She reached out to a human resources manager and asked for advice. “If you were in my shoes, what would you do?”
The manager became Annie’s advocate. She reached out to the heads of Annie’s department and site, and started to lobby on Annie’s behalf. The department head, in turn, called Annie and asked what he could do to keep her. Annie mentioned that she wanted to finish her MBA, but couldn’t afford to fly back and forth. In response, the department head offered her a seat on the jet.
New research shows that advice seeking is a surprisingly effective strategy for exercising influence when we lack authority. In one experiment, researcher Katie Liljenquist had people negotiate the possible sale of commercial property. When the sellers focused on their goal of getting the highest possible price, only 8 percent reached a successful agreement. When the sellers asked the buyers for advice on how to meet their goals, 42 percent reached a successful agreement. Asking for advice encouraged greater cooperation and information sharing, turning a potentially contentious negotiation into a win-win deal. Studies demonstrate that across the manufacturing, financial services, insurance, and pharmaceuticals industries, seeking advice is among the most effective ways to influence peers, superiors, and subordinates. Advice seeking tends to be significantly more persuasive than the taker’s preferred tactics of pressuring subordinates and ingratiating superiors. Advice seeking is also consistently more influential than the matcher’s default approach of trading favors.
This is true even in the upper echelons of major corporations. Recently, strategy professors Ithai Stern and James Westphal studied executives at 350 large U.S. industrial and service firms, hoping to find out how executives land seats on boards of directors. Board seats are coveted by executives, as they often pay six-figure salaries, send clear status signals, and enrich networks by granting access to the corporate elite.
Takers assume that the best path to a board seat is ingratiation. They flatter a director with compliments, or track down his friends to praise him indirectly. Yet Stern and Westphal found that flattery only worked when it was coupled with advice seeking. Instead of just complimenting a director, executives who got board seats were more likely to seek advice along with the compliment. When praising a director’s skill, the advice-seeking executives asked how she mastered it. When extolling a director’s success in a task, these executives asked for recommendations about how to replicate his success. When executives asked a director for advice in this manner, that director was significantly more likely to recommend them for a board appointment—and they landed more board seats as a result.
Advice seeking is a form of powerless communication that combines expressing vulnerability, asking questions, and talking tentatively. When we ask others for advice, we’re posing a question that conveys uncertainty and makes us vulnerable. Instead of confidently projecting that we have all the answers, we’re admitting that others might have superior knowledge. As a result, takers and matchers tend to shy away from advice seeking. From a taker’s perspective, asking for advice means acknowledging that you don’t have all the answers. Takers may fear that seeking advice might make them look weak, dependent, or incompetent. They’re wrong: research shows that people who regularly seek advice and help from knowledgeable colleagues are actually rated more favorably by supervisors than those who never seek advice and help.
Appearing vulnerable doesn’t bother givers, who worry far less about protecting their egos and projecting certainty. When givers ask for advice, it’s because they’re genuinely interested in learning from others. Matchers hold back on advice seeking for a different reason: they might owe something in return.
According to Liljenquist, advice seeking has four benefits: learning, perspective taking, commitment, and flattery. When Annie asked for advice, she discovered something she didn’t know before: the company’s jet had extra seats, and it traveled back and forth between her two key locations. Had she lobbied more assertively instead of seeking advice, she might never have gained this information. In fact, Annie had several previous conversations in which no one mentioned the jet.
This brings us to the second benefit of advice seeking: encouraging others to take our perspectives. In Annie’s previous conversations, where she didn’t ask for advice, the department head focused on the company’s interest in transferring her while saving as much money as possible. The advice request changed the conversation. When we ask for advice, in order to give us a recommendation, advisers have to look at the problem or dilemma from our point of view. It was only when Annie sought guidance that the department head ended up considering the problem from her perspective, at which point the corporate jet dawned on him as a solution.
Once the department head proposed this solution, the third benefit of advice seeking kicked in: commitment. The department head played a key role in generating the jet solution. Since it was his idea and he had already invested some time and energy in trying to help Annie, he was highly motivated to help her further. He ended up paying for the rental car that she used in the Midwest and agreeing to fund commercial flights if the corporate jet was not running.
There’s no doubt that Annie earned these privileges through a combination of hard work, talent, and generosity. But a clever study sheds further light on why the department head was so motivated to offer Annie more than just the corporate jet. Half a century ago, the psychologists Jon Jecker and David Landy paid people for succeeding on a geometry task. In the control group, the participants kept the money, and visited the department secretary to fill out a final questionnaire. But when another group of participants started to leave, the researcher asked them for help. “I was wondering if you would do me a favor. The funds for this experiment have run out and I am using my own money to finish the experiment. As a favor to me, would you mind returning the money you won?”
Nearly all of the participants gave the money back. When questioned about how much they liked the researcher, the people who had done him the favor liked him substantially more than the people who didn’t. Why?
When we give our time, energy, knowledge, or resources to help others, we strive to maintain a belief that they’re worthy and deserving of our help. Seeking advice is a subtle way to invite someone to make a commitment to us. Once the department head took the time to offer advice to Annie, he became more invested in her. Helping Annie generate a solution reinforced his commitment to her: she must be worthy of his time. If she wasn’t important to him, why would he have bothered to help her? As Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
When we ask people for advice, we grant them prestige, showing that we respect and admire their insights and expertise. Since most people are matchers, they tend to respond favorably and feel motivated to support us in return. When Annie approached the human resources manager for advice, the manage
r stepped up and went to bat for her. According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin saw advice seeking as a form of flattery. Franklin “had a fundamental rule for winning friends,” Isaacson writes: appeal to “their pride and vanity by constantly seeking their opinion and advice, and they will admire you for your judgment and wisdom.”
Regardless of their reciprocity styles, people love to be asked for advice. Giving advice makes takers feel important, and it makes givers feel helpful. Matchers often enjoy giving advice for a different reason: it’s a low-cost way of racking up credits that they can cash in later. As a result, when we ask people for advice, they tend to respond positively to us.
But here’s the catch: advice seeking only works if it’s genuine. In her research on advice seeking, Liljenquist finds that success “depends on the target perceiving it as a sincere and authentic gesture.” When she directly encouraged people to seek advice as an influence strategy, it fell flat. Their counterparts recognized them as fakers: they could tell that the advice seekers were ingratiating based on ulterior motives. “People who are suspected of strategically managing impressions are more likely to be seen as selfish, cold, manipulative, and untrustworthy,” Liljenquist writes. Advice seeking was only effective when people did it spontaneously. Since givers are more willing to seek advice than takers and matchers, it’s likely that many of the spontaneous advice seekers in her studies were givers. They were actually interested in other people’s perspectives and recommendations, and they were rated as better listeners.
I believe this applies more generally to powerless communication: it works for givers because they establish a sincere intent to act in the best interests of others. When presenting, givers make it clear that they’re expressing vulnerability not only to earn prestige but also to make a genuine connection with the audience. When selling, givers ask questions in a way that conveys the desire to help customers, not take advantage of them. When persuading and negotiating, givers speak tentatively and seek advice because they truly value the ideas and viewpoints of others.
Powerless communication is the natural language of many givers, and one of the great engines behind their success. Expressing vulnerability, asking questions, talking tentatively, and seeking advice can open doors to gaining influence, but the way we direct that influence will reverberate throughout our work lives, including some we’ve already discussed, like building networks and collaborating with colleagues. As you’ll see later, not every giver uses powerless communication, but those who do often find that it’s useful in situations where we need to build rapport and trust. It can’t easily be faked, but if you fake it long enough, it might become more real than you expected. And as Dave Walton discovered, powerless communication can be far more powerful and effective than meets the ear.
6
The Art of Motivation Maintenance
Why Some Givers Burn Out but Others Are On Fire
The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than the unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.
—Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner in economics
Up to this point, we’ve been focusing on how givers climb to the top of the success ladder through the unique ways that they build networks, collaborate, communicate, influence, and help others achieve their potential. But as you saw in the opening chapter, givers are also more likely to end up at the bottom of the success ladder. Success involves more than just capitalizing on the strengths of giving; it also requires avoiding the pitfalls. If people give too much time, they end up making sacrifices for their collaborators and network ties, at the expense of their own energy. If people give away too much credit and engage in too much powerless communication, it’s all too easy for them to become pushovers and doormats, failing to advance their own interests. The consequence: givers end up exhausted and unproductive.
Since the strategies that catapult givers to the top are distinct from those that sink givers to the bottom, it’s critical to understand what differentiates successful givers from failed givers. The next three chapters examine why some givers burn out while others are on fire; how givers avoid being exploited by takers; and what individuals, groups, and organizations can do to protect givers and spread their success.
Recently, the Canadian psychologists Jeremy Frimer and Larry Walker led an ambitious effort to figure out what motivates highly successful givers. The participants were winners of the Caring Canadian Award, the country’s highest honor for giving, recognizing people who have devoted many years of their lives to help their communities or advance a humanitarian cause. Many winners of this award have sustained extraordinary giving efforts for decades in order to make a difference.
To reveal what drove them, all of the participants filled out a questionnaire asking them to list ten goals in response to “I typically try to . . .” Then, Walker conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-five Caring Canadian winners and a comparison group of twenty-five people who matched the winners in gender, age, ethnicity, and education, but had not sustained the same level or duration of giving. Walker spent a hundred hours interviewing all fifty people about their lives, covering key periods and critical events in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. From there, independent raters read the goal lists, listened to the interview tapes, and rated the degree to which the participants expressed two key motivations: self-interest and other-interest. Self-interest involved pursuing power and achievement, whereas other-interest focused on being generous and helpful. On which set of motivations did the Caring Canadian winners score higher than the comparison group?
The intuitive answer is other-interest, and it’s correct. In their life stories, the Caring Canadians mentioned giving and helping more than three times as often as the comparison group. When they listed their goals, the Caring Canadians listed nearly twice as many goals related to other-interest as the comparison group. The Caring Canadians highlighted goals like “serve as a positive role model to young people” and “advocate for women from a low-income bracket.” The comparison participants were more likely to mention goals like “get my golf handicap to a single digit,” “be attractive to others,” and “hunt the biggest deer and catch big fish.”
But here’s the surprise: the Caring Canadians also scored higher on self-interest. In their life stories, these highly successful givers mentioned a quest for power and achievement almost twice as often as the comparison group. In their goals, the Caring Canadians had roughly 20 percent more objectives related to gaining influence, earning recognition, and attaining individual excellence. The successful givers weren’t just more other-oriented than their peers; they were also more self-interested. Successful givers, it turns out, are just as ambitious as takers and matchers.
These results have fascinating implications for our understanding of why some givers succeed but others fail. Up until this point, we’ve looked at reciprocity styles on a continuum from taking to giving: is your primary concern for your own interests or others’ interests? Now I want to complicate that understanding by looking at the interplay of self-interest and other-interest. Takers score high in self-interest and low in other-interest: they aim to maximize their own success without much concern for other people. By contrast, givers always score high on other-interest, but they vary in self-interest. There are two types of givers, and they have dramatically different success rates.
Selfless givers are people with high other-interest and low self-interest. They give their time and energy without regard for their own needs, and they pay a price for it. Selfless giving is a form of pathological altruism, which is defined by researcher Barbara Oakley as “an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one’s own needs,” such that in the process of trying to help others, givers end up harming themselves. In one study, college students who scored high on selfless giving declined in grades over the course of the semester. These selfless givers admitted “missing class and
failing to study because they were attending to friends’ problems.”
Most people assume that self-interest and other-interest are opposite ends of one continuum. Yet in my studies of what drives people at work, I’ve consistently found that self-interest and other-interest are completely independent motivations: you can have both of them at the same time. As Bill Gates argued at the World Economic Forum, “there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest, and caring for others,” and people are most successful when they are driven by a “hybrid engine” of the two. If takers are selfish and failed givers are selfless, successful givers are otherish: they care about benefiting others, but they also have ambitious goals for advancing their own interests.
Selfless giving, in the absence of self-preservation instincts, easily becomes overwhelming. Being otherish means being willing to give more than you receive, but still keeping your own interests in sight, using them as a guide for choosing when, where, how, and to whom you give. Being otherish is very different from matching. Matchers expect something back from each person they help. Otherish givers help with no strings attached; they’re just careful not to overextend themselves along the way. Instead of seeing self-interest and other-interest as competing, the Caring Canadians found ways to integrate them, so that they could do well by doing good. As you’ll see, when concern for others is coupled with a healthy dose of concern for the self, givers are less prone to burning out and getting burned—and they’re better positioned to flourish.
***
“In West Philadelphia, born and raised, on the playground is where I spent most of my days . . . I got in one little fight and my mom got scared . . .”
When Will Smith wrote these famous lyrics for the theme song of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the hit sitcom that launched his career, he had just graduated from Overbrook High School in Philadelphia. Overbrook has a majestic façade, its five-story building resembling a castle perched atop a hill. During his time in the castle, Smith was treated like royalty, earning the nickname “Prince” from teachers for his ability to charm his way out of trouble. Years later, when he started a production company, he named it Overbrook Entertainment. Smith is not the only accomplished person to attend Overbrook, whose alumni include astronaut Guion Bluford Jr., the first African American in space, and Jon Drummond, an Olympic gold medalist in track. Overbrook is one of just six high schools in the entire United States that has seen more than ten students go on to play in the National Basketball Association, one of whom was the legendary Wilt Chamberlain.
