Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

To effectively help colleagues, people need to step outside their own frames of reference. As George Meyer did, they need to ask, “How will the recipient feel in this situation?” This capacity to see the world from another person’s perspective develops very early in life.

If you insist on a quid pro quo every time you help others, you will have a much narrower network.” When matchers give with the expectation of receiving, they direct their giving toward people who they think can help them. After all, if you don’t benefit from having your favors reciprocated, what’s the value of being a matcher?

when managers were randomly assigned to see employees as bloomers, employees bloomed. McNatt concludes that these interventions “can have a fairly large effect on performance.” He encourages managers to “recognize the possible power and influence in (a) having a genuine interest and belief in the potential of their employees . . . and (b) engaging

In networks, new research shows that when people get burned by takers, they punish them by sharing reputational information. “Gossip represents a widespread, efficient, and low-cost form of punishment,” write the social scientists Matthew Feinberg, Joey Cheng, and Robb Willer. When reputational information suggests that someone has taker tendencies

For many of us, a challenge of networking lies in trying to guess the motives or intentions of a new contact, especially since we’ve seen that takers can be quite adept at posing as givers when there’s a potential return. Is the next person you meet interested in a genuine connection or merely seeking personal gains—and is there a good way to tell

As Samuel Johnson purportedly wrote, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”

The takers posted information that was rated as more self-promoting, self-absorbed, and self-important. They featured quotes that were evaluated as boastful and arrogant. The takers also had significantly more Facebook friends, racking up superficial connections so they could advertise their accomplishments and stay in touch to get favors, and post

One of Rifkin’s maxims is “I believe in the strength of weak ties.” It’s in homage to a classic study by the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter. Strong ties are our close friends and colleagues, the people we really trust. Weak ties are our acquaintances, the people we know casually.

Reactivating a dormant tie actually required a shorter conversation, since there was already some common ground.