Name: Are You a Giver, a Taker or a Matcher?
Uploaded: 2025-11-30T09:57:13.000Z
Duration: 5 min 53 s
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Adverbs of degree

I'm interested in our success as individuals.

I'm interested in why do some people become incredibly productive?

Why do some people do extraordinarily high quality work?

Why do some people rise faster than others up the promotion ladder?

So one of the things I've been doing for a long time is polling people, including Wharton students, and

asking them, what is it that drives success?

What do successful people do that distinguishes them from others?

And consistently, three answers come out.

We know that successful people tend to have an extraordinarily strong work ethic.

They tend to be really good at something.

They end up finding themselves in the right place at the right time or ending up in the right opportunities.

So if you want to be successful, I think the recipe is be hard working, be talented, and

And for me, that's a really great idea, but

it's missing a huge part of what drives success in organizations, which is the way that we interact with others.

And of course, that's what I've been studying for quite a while now and gotten really interested in, is how do the motives that we bring to our interactions with other people shape the results we achieve, the promotions that we get, even the salaries that we attain.

And so that's what we're going to spend a good chunk of our time on today.

Now, I love this quote from Robert Benchley.

He says there are two kinds of people in the world.

Those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't.

And I always thought it was kind of sad that people like to look at other humans and oversimplify them into very, very rough categories.

So I decided instead of dividing the world into two kinds of people, I would divide it into three.

So the basic idea is, I think most of us walk into interactions with different kinds of goals in mind.

And there are some people who walk into their interactions at work and think, okay, how can I get as much as possible from other people?

And those are the people that I call takers.

Most of the time when they're interacting with others, they're trying to claim value and not contribute much back in return.

On the other end of the reciprocity spectrum, we have people that I would call givers.

These are not people who donate money to charity necessarily, or who volunteer a lot, but

people who are looking to benefit the others around Them by offering help, perhaps sharing knowledge, making introductions, giving advice without expecting anything in return.

Now, both of these extremes are pretty rare.

As many of you know, most of us fall right in the middle.

Matchers are the people who try to maintain an even balance of give and take.

So if I help you, I expect you to help me.

If I do a favor for someone, I want one back.

And I'm going to maintain some kind of quid pro quo.

Seems like a really nice way to achieve balance and fairness.

The question that I really got started with as I was discovering sort of this spectrum of takers to givers was, of the three groups, the takers, the givers, and

the matchers, who is most likely to end up at the bottom of the success spectrum across different jobs, different industries, and

And I looked at a couple different studies that I thought were really revealing on this one was Frank Flynn's study of engineers.

And what he found was when he asked the engineers to rate how many favors do you give to your colleagues versus how many do you get back?

The least productive engineers in this company and the engineers with the worst quality work and the most errors were the ones who did a lot more favors than they got back.

They kind of ran out of time to get their own work done carefully.

And then if you look at medical students, you see something that's very similar with their grades.

You find that medical students who agree with statements like, I love to help others and I'm always trying to promote the interest of others actually did worse in their first year grades.

And a lot of that seems to be driven by the fact that they spend time helping other people study instead of filling the gaps in their own knowledge.

And then I had a lot of fun with this when studying salespeople, I collected a bunch of data on salespeople with a former student, Dane Barnes.

And again, we got people to fill out a survey where we measured whether they were takers, givers, or matchers.

And sure enough, the givers ended up at the very, very bottom of the spectrum.

They had the lowest revenue scores annually of anybody in the company.

And it's kind of simple when you think about it, right?

If you're a salesperson who loves helping others, then instead of selling stuff to your customers, you actually help them.

And sometimes those two things are at odds.

And I thought that was really interesting.

And then I started asking people, okay, if givers are at the bottom and who's at the top.

And the matchers seem like, ok, they're not going to be doormats, they're not going to burn out like a lot of givers do.

And as a lot of you know, I was really surprised to find it's the givers again that actually the same people who are endorsing statements like I love to help others, like I'm willing to help others without expecting anything in return, are over represented not only at the bottom, but

also at the top of all of these success metrics.

In Frank Flynn's study, the most productive engineers, highest quality, highest quantity work, also are people who do a lot more favors than they get back.

The medical students with the highest grades in Belgium over a seven year period are people who say I love to help others.

And even salespeople, the very best salespeople across four or five different industries turn out to be people who say they're givers.

And so that for me raises the really fundamental question of number one, what do successful givers do that takers and matchers can learn?

So for those of us who don't operate on the giver end of the spectrum, if there's a limit to our success, if as takers and matchers we may reach a ceiling and there are givers in the world who exceed that level of success, what can we learn from them?

And then the second question really is, what differentiates givers at the bottom from those at the.