Givers

But actually, it turns out there's a twist here because givers are often sacrificing themselves, but they make their organizations better. We have a huge body of evidence - many, many studies looking at the frequency of giving behavior that exists in a team or an organization - and the more often people are helping and sharing their knowledge and providing mentoring, the better organizations do on every metric we can measure: higher profits, customer satisfaction, employee retention - even lower operating expenses. So givers spend a lot of time trying to help other people and improve the team, and then, unfortunately, they suffer along the way. I want to talk about what it takes to build cultures where givers actually get to succeed. So I wondered, then, if givers are the worst performers, who are the best performers? And let me start with the good news: it's not the takers. Takers tend to rise quickly but also fall quickly in most jobs. And they fall at the hands of matchers. If you're a matcher, you believe in "An eye for an eye" - a just world. And so when you meet a taker, you feel like it's your mission in life to just punish the hell out of that person. And that way, justice gets served. Well, most people are matchers. And that means if you're a taker, it tends to catch up with you eventually; what goes around will come around. And so the logical conclusion is: it must be the matchers who are the best performers. But they're not. In every job, in every organization I've ever studied, the best results belong to the givers again.