Give and Take: a journey of self-awareness towards building better teams
I recently finished reading Give and Take by Adam Grant [1]. It’s rare to find a book that gives you interesting insights, while also holding up a mirror for you to see yourself in a new light. This was one such book.
In essence, Give and Take describes three primary behaviour profiles:
Givers – Generously giving their time, energy and resources to help others succeed. In this category, there are also “Altruistic Givers” who often forego success by putting the needs of others before themselves, and “Otherish” givers who are equally motivated in finding their own success as they are in making others successful.
Matchers – Who believe strongly in reciprocity and only offering resources to those from whom they can expect something in return, and
Takers – Low on empathy towards others, their primary focus is their own success.
As expected, people don’t always neatly slot into these three buckets.
Reflecting on my past behaviour and actions, I can honestly say that I have found myself toggling between Giving and Matching over the years, and I was definitely in situations where I tended towards being a Taker early in my career.
To me, that was the biggest personal insight – Giving, Matching and Taking behaviours can be very situational.
Apart from an insight related to the primary focus of the book, I wanted to share some excerpts from this book that raised my awareness levels, particularly in the context of teams in a professional work environment.
Build Self-Awareness in Failure and Success
Generally speaking, it’s important to recognise that a lot of your success at work, comes with the support of others on your team. They are a part of your successes, just as you should be a part of theirs.
Adam Grant mentions a study (with professors Robert Huckman and Gary Pisano of Harvard Businss School) that wanted to discover whether surgeons get better with practice.
Overall, the surgeons didn’t get better with practice. They only got better at the specific hospital where they practised. For every procedure they handled at a given hospital, the risk of patient mortality dropped by 1 percent. But the risk of mortality stayed the same at other hospitals. The surgeons couldn’t take their performance with them. They weren’t getting better at performing coronary artery bypass grafts. They were becoming more familiar with particular nurses and anaesthesiologists, learning about their strengths and weaknesses, habits, and styles. This familiarity helped them avoid patient deaths, but it didn’t carry over to other hospitals. To reduce the risk of patient mortality, the surgeons needed relationships with specific surgical team members.
Your outcomes at work, especially your successes, are as much a function of your work environment and the team you work with, as they are a function of your own skill and attitude. This should not be used as a crutch or excuse in failure, and it absolutely should be kept in mind when achieving success on a team.
Regardless of success or failure, there is a need to reflect on the circumstances that led there. In failure, taking ownership of shortcomings; and in success, examining the ways in which the team worked together to kick ass.
This sort of postmortem is necessary to stay grounded and raise self-awareness. In the absence of this, it’s going to be hard to replicate success or avoid failures, especially if you’re looking to find success with another team or organisation.
Your Team Wants to Help You
Do you remember your first job, working on a team where everyone was likely more experienced than you? After a few years of experience, do you remember the last time you started on a new team at a new organisation?
I bet there were plenty of times you thought – “I can’t ask for too much help, it’ll annoy my teammates”. Even if it meant spinning your wheels on a task you had no idea how to move forward with?
✋ I’ve definitely been guilty of this.
For anyone else who raised their hand or nodded their head while reading this, here’s some food for thought:
When people assume that others aren’t givers, they act and speak in ways that discourage others from giving, creating a self fulfilling prophecy.
Research shows that at work, the vast majority of giving that occurs between people is in response to direct requests for help. In one study, managers described times when they gave and received help. Of all the giving exchanges that occurred, roughly 90 percent were initiated by the recipient asking for help. Yet when we have a need, we’re often reluctant to ask for help.
Much of the time, we’re embarrassed: we don’t want to look incompetent or needy, and we don’t want to burden others.
As one Wharton dean explains, “The students call it Game Face: they feel pressured to look successful all the time. There can’t be any chinks in their armour, and opening up would make them vulnerable.”
Psychologically safe working environments make it easier to be vulnerable, eliminating the barriers and friction that prevent people from asking for or giving help. In a new team or new workplace, hold on to your giver mindset, and start by assuming that everyone else feels the same way.
Help Yourself With Grit
As I look back on my career so far, and think about all the teams I have been a part of, the successful ones were the ones with grit. These were teams where grit was weaved into the culture, and was often catalysed into new members joining the team.
Team members enjoyed working with each other, and weren’t afraid to challenge each other while setting a high bar.
In Give and Take, Adam Grant mentions:
Research shows that above and beyond intelligence and aptitude, gritty people — by virtue of their interest, focus, and drive — achieve higher performance. This is why givers focus on gritty people: it’s where givers have the greatest return on their investment, the most meaningful and lasting impact. And along with investing their time in motivating gritty people, cultivating Grit is about setting high expectations, getting people to stretch, and getting them to do more than they thought they were capable of.
It struck me that these teams with “high grit” were also teams where there was a culture of generously sharing time and resources, to help each other succeed. Because of this, these teams tended to foster a culture of mentoring and giving, while also attracting mentors and givers from outside the team.
I can confidently say that this book has raised my self-awareness and given me another lens with which to examine the dynamics of the teams I work with. It’s an engrossing and well written book — I would highly recommend it.
Footnotes
[1] This link is to betterworldbooks.com — they “have raised millions of dollars for literacy, saved millions of books from landfills, created jobs for hundreds of people, and provided wonderful books to millions of readers worldwide” — I’m a huge fan of their mission, please consider buying your next book from them