ADAM GRANT
GIVE AND TAKE
EPISODE 75
Starting our journey into Adam Grant - celebrated author and professor - Mike and Mark begin a three-part series with Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (Buy on Amazon), in Episode 75.
Adam has been recognized as one of the world’s most-cited, most prolific, and most influential researchers in business and economics. His pioneering research has increased performance and reduced burnout among engineers, teachers, and salespeople, and motivated safety behaviors among doctors, nurses, and lifeguards. He is a former magician and Junior Olympic springboard diver.
SHOW OUTLINE
INTRO
Part 1: Adam intro-ing the book
01-intro_PN
Part 2: Givers Takers in 60 secs
60 Second Book Brief_ Give and Take by Adam Grant
STEP ONE) UNDERSTANDING GIVING
Givers, Takers, Matchers
In the Workplace, Givers Finish Last _ Adam Grant _ Google Zeitgeist
How to be a giver, and create a barrier around you
Avoiding the Doormat Effect_ How Givers Set Boundaries
STEP TWO) HOW TO BUILD A TEAM THAT GIVES
Screening takers
Adam Grant_ Screening out the takers
Takers into givers
Adam Grant_ Turning takers into givers
OUTRO
Making better decisions for yourself
Why Giving Advice To Friends Is Easier Than To Ourselves
TRANSCRIPT
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Mike Parsons: Hello and welcome to the moonshots podcast. It is a wonderful episode 75 I'm your cohost Mike Parsons, and as always I'm joined by Mark Pearson Freeland for what is to be a very exciting new series. Hello, Mark.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Hey, good morning, Mike. It's a nice autumnal. Cool Sydney day, isn't it beautiful? Blue skies are out and there's certainly blue skies.
When we start a new series Mark, where do we go now? We've just ended a rip roaring a journey into the world of media innovators. What's next
after that powerhouse of a trilogy of the media crew, we're now stepping a little bit more into a psychological space of Adam Grant. He is a very, very impressive author, Ted talker, as well as tenured professor.
Uh, in fact, I think he got his. Tenure at the age of 28 which has incredible age.
Mike Parsons: I know. Can you imagine being 28 and having a job for life? Guaranteed? It's, but what you left out is perhaps his two biggest achievements, uh, Mark. And that is that Adam Grant was not only an all American diving champion.
He's also. Quite a good magician. So I'm honestly asking myself, what can this guy not do? Because I think Adam Grant can deliver these amazing books that give us insights into our minds and behavior, but it sounds like he can pull off pretty much anything he puts his mind to. And so my question is, with all of his body of work.
Where do we want to start this journey into author and tenured professor Adam Grant?
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Well, I think, although I'd love to begin with his magician background, maybe
Mike Parsons: tricks,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: tips, and tricks of the magician. We're actually going to begin with his first book, which came out in 2013 give and take a revolutionary approach to
Mike Parsons: success.
And we've got some, uh, we're going to go for a special one here. We're going to go for a double header, a two clip magic combo. Um, so we've supersized, uh, the, the upfront of this show where we're going to hear from the author himself. Um, first of all, and what's really good is we hear from him really the, the background that has led him to this work to understanding, giving and taking and life in.
The workplace.
So I want you to look around
Adam Grant: the room for a minute and try to find the most paranoid person here. And then I want you to point at that person for
Mike Parsons: me,
Adam Grant: don't actually
Mike Parsons: do it. But
Adam Grant: as an organizational psychologist, I spend a lot of time in workplaces and I find paranoia. Everywhere. Paranoia is caused by people that I call takers.
Mike Parsons: Takers
Adam Grant: are self serving in their interactions.
Mike Parsons: It's all about what can
Adam Grant: you do for me? The opposite is a giver.
Mike Parsons: It's somebody who approaches most
Adam Grant: interactions by asking,
Mike Parsons: what can I
Adam Grant: do for you?
Mike Parsons: And I wanted to give you a chance to think about your
Adam Grant: own style. We all have moments of giving and taking your stylist, just how you treat most of the people.
Most of the time your default.
Mike Parsons: Yeah. The givers and the takers. This is going to be at the heart of this show. Understanding. What exactly this looks like. Seeing the behavior, working out how we can adopt the behavior, and then if we're really good, we can work out how to teach to inspire and to support others in giving a whole lot more.
Then they're taking, but what I'm going to do right now, Mark, is I'm just going to drop us straight in deep. This is a great 62nd deep dive into the real content of Adam Grant's book. Give and take. I wrote the book give and take to help us understand how the world's
Mark Pearson-Freeland: most successful
Mike Parsons: people approach the world around them and how you can do the same for a taker.
Their driving motivation is to make sure that they get more than they give and they count every contribution they make and ensure that they get more in return for a giver. The driving motivation is to give more than they get. They focus on what others need from them. Givers take care to recognize what other people contribute
Mark Pearson-Freeland: as a result.
Givers. And the respect of the collaborators, perhaps surprisingly, top of the success food
Mike Parsons: chain is dominated by givers.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: However, you'll also see
Mike Parsons: some givers at the
Mark Pearson-Freeland: bottom as well.
Mike Parsons: The difference between the givers at the top and the bottom of the food
Mark Pearson-Freeland: chain is that
the
Mike Parsons: successful givers match their desire to help others
Mark Pearson-Freeland: with ambitious fools
Mike Parsons: of their own.
Become that type of giver.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: And you'll soon find yourself at the top of the successful food chain
Mike Parsons: for the other givers of the world.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: So there
Mike Parsons: you have it.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Give and take. 60 seconds.
Mike Parsons: A great
Mark Pearson-Freeland: synopsis from both Adam as well as, as a third party on where what I like about, you know, the Adam Grant series, but also specifically the give and take hook that we're focusing on for this episode is this awareness of a human connection in business nowadays.
And obviously we'll be delving into a couple of different strands of that. Firstly understanding it and then like say how we, how we can inspire others and motivate others. But just to call out here, what's, what's interesting about Adam's work is he's looked at business in the past where perhaps. It was a little bit about who you knew.
It was a little bit about how much work you put in your passion. Um, I think he's even cited, you know, luck in the past was, was possibly a driver of success. But actually where we're seeing ourselves nowadays is it actually really, really depends on how you interact with others. Other people, other colleagues,
Mike Parsons: uh, HR departments,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: uh, CEOs, founders and so on.
And. What I think is the focus of this particular book is a lot of people do fall into one of these three, uh, boxes. And I suppose it's figuring out, okay, well where do I sit? How do I be inspired by others? And where do I figure out what is that? Um, that intersection, I suppose, between each of the different,
Mike Parsons: um,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: each of the different goals, each of the different
Mike Parsons: individuals.
Um, why don't you just, um, before we, before we dive into some more clips, Mark, why don't you kind of paint a little bit of a picture of those three archetypes? Because these are themes that are going to come back a lot in this show. So why don't you paint a picture for our listeners and then we can sort of have that as a North star and then we can keep coming back to that throughout the show.
So why don't you hit them up with your best Adam Grant wisdom.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Beautiful. Okay. Okay. I'll start with the takers because they're perhaps the easiest to, to really grasp, take us through a little bit more. Um, self-focused, I suppose. They have their own interests, uh, perhaps in the front of their minds, perhaps over others' needs, and they'll try to gain as much as they can from interacting with other people.
Maybe they even go so far as to, uh. Put forward less of their own efforts and actually use other people's work. They delegated to better themselves. So a little bit,
Mike Parsons: a little bit louder. Yeah. Yeah. That's typical. And I think they're also, they're always keeping score and they're looking for. Immediate given take and they, they sort of lack any sort of faith in just good karma.
Like they've no patients in just doing the right thing and knowing whether directly or indirectly the right thing will come back to them. They're always keeping score. And, and you know, the classic thing is that. They're always extracting their pound of flesh.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Exactly, exactly. And who are those? They're givers of the pound of flesh.
Well, they're the givers. They're others focused. You know, they are providing support to those around them. Sometimes with. You know, no strings attached. They'll often wonder in their day to day work, okay, well how can I dedicate some of my time to helping my colleagues, my coworkers, and actually as we'll find out when we explore some, some of Adam's work, that's not necessarily the best behavior to have.
Cause it can be very easy.
Mike Parsons: Exactly. And what we heard in the previous clip is the secret formula. Um, and what Adam Grant really gets to. Now, this is really guys, this is really his formula. It's when givers are giving. In line with their goals. And he said, this is what really separates those that ascend, those that achieve fulfillment satisfaction.
Success is when they are givers who have great goals, where there is good alignment between the giving and the goals. If you're just giving it with reckless abandon, then chances are some people might take advantage of you or you will have a disconnect between your immediate behavior and your, um, longterm ambitions.
So that's why those goals need to match to the giving. But there's a sort of a silent majority in all of this. We've talked about givers, we've caught, talked about takers, but what's the third archetype that Adam Grant points out for us?
Mark Pearson-Freeland: I mean, the third is, I suppose you could call it the center of the Venn diagram, but they're called the matches, so they actually preserve
Mike Parsons: quite an equal balance.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Of the takers attitude, but also the givers attitude. So instead of landing on either side of the fence, it's a, it's a reciprocity. You take from me, I'll take from you. If you give to me, I'll give something to you.
Mike Parsons: And it's that very fair
Mark Pearson-Freeland: exchange of effort, of work, of deliverables. And that's, I suppose, the sweet spot, isn't it?
Mike Parsons: Well, I'm not sure if it's the sweet spot. I think what Adam actually. Challenges us to do is that the matches will take inspiration from either party. So it's sort of our job to make sure that we get givers next to the matches, cause they will match the behavior type. They can be influenced either way.
Uh, you know, a lot of the takers, um, it can be a hard job to get them out of that behavior type, but the matches will, um, adopt the behavior of the cultural. A default within a team is to give the matches will pony up and come to the party. Whereas if it's a majority of taking culture, they can be swung the other way.
So I think there's a lot inside of this, and I actually, when we zoom out, there's a couple of big things coming up for our, for our listeners. One, that giving as a default is not as easy as it might sound. Too. There are a lot of people that are going to read the tea leaves and see which way the organization's going.
So it's our job to work out what giving looks like for ourselves so that we can inspire others. And Mark, I think we've got a bevy of great clips coming up that are going to showcase what it, what it really looks like, how we might do it for ourselves, and how we can inspire others to do it. I think we're ready to jump into getting into the DNA of givens takers and matches and how we can be on the right side of giving.
I think so,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: and I think we can begin straight into our first step, which is all about understanding those givers, understanding what it means to be a giver or taker, a matcher in the workplace.
Adam Grant: I wanted to compare the success of givers, takers, and matchers who are the most productive, who are the least productive.
So I got data across different kinds of jobs and different measures of success. Tracking the productivity of engineers as a function of how many favors they do for their colleagues versus how many they receive in return. Look at the grades of medical students based on how much they like helping others.
And then also tracking salespeople. How much revenue do they accrue each year, depending on the amount of time they invest in their colleagues and their customers. Now, a lot of people think that the takers finish last, and if that's you, I want to congratulate you on being a raging optimist. They don't.
Mike Parsons: The
Adam Grant: data show consistently that the givers finished last in each of these jobs, the worst engineers who get the least work done and make the most errors are the ones who do more favors than they get back. They're so busy helping their colleagues do their work. They run out of time and energy to get their own stuff done in medicine.
This is going to sound like a joke, but it's not. The lowest grades in medical school belong to the students who agree most strongly with statements like,
Mike Parsons: I
Adam Grant: love helping
Mike Parsons: others,
Adam Grant: which suggests the doctor you ought to trust is the one who came to medical school with no desire to help anybody. And then is sales.
The lowest revenue belongs to the people who spend the most time trying to help both their colleagues and their clients. I used to work in sales and I found this a little bit puzzling, so I went to our data. I found the person with the highest giver score in his company. And the lowest revenue, and I asked him, how do you explain this?
Why do you suck at your job? I didn't ask it that way,
Mike Parsons: but
Adam Grant: what is, what is the cost of being a giver in sales? And he
Mike Parsons: paused and he said,
Adam Grant: can I be honest with you? I said, no. As a researcher, I want you to lie to me. Yes, please be honest. He said, well, if I can be a hundred percent candid, I care so deeply about my customers that I would never sell them one of our crappy products.
I'm now rethinking, honestly, it's the research policy.
Mike Parsons: All right. Okay, so, so this is really interesting and I know right now some of our listeners might most be like, well, Mark and Mike have gone on a serious dark side here. But actually what I think is so powerful about what Adam Grant sets out for us in his book give and take, is that there is this whole notion that are low, you know, do the right thing and all be good.
Actually, what he's framing is in this case. Someone who's a natural giver, he's not really got an intersection between how he gives and his goals and the goals of the organization that he's in. So when you've got this disconnect, he's essentially telling us a story that he's playing for the wrong team because they're the goals and the giving are actually working against each other.
No, with each other, and I'll take you back to that earlier clip at the start of the show where we actually pointed out that it's the intersection of when your goals and your giving match. This takes you right to the top. And I think this is the big aha in sort of creating our awareness around giving, is that you've got to do it in the right way and you've got to do this almost.
Um, with some sort of constraints, there's almost a catch 22, you gotta do it in the right way other, otherwise it's sort of, you end up like that sales guy that Adam was pointing out. And it's a bit of a surprise, isn't it, Mark?
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Yeah, it is. And it's a great.
Mike Parsons: Uh,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: I suppose awareness that we need to have. I know I've used this word a couple of times now, but for me, Adam is really, really seeing all about raising a little bit of a flag over these, of these topics, which is, there's a natural tendency to assume, uh, I want to be a giver.
You know, I, uh. I'm giving away all of my time. Therefore it's, it's a good thing. But actually what I think Adam is pointing out here and what you've just summarized there, Mike, you've got to have an awareness of giving in the right way, what identify where you might be falling short. Maybe you're giving too much of your time and therefore what you're actually doing is being detrimental, not only to yourself, but maybe even to the business as a whole.
Maybe you're dedicating too much
Mike Parsons: time. Sure. Yeah, yeah, I think you're absolutely right there. And um, I mean, at first glance, like. When you say, you know, I want to give to others, it's, it's really no different than, I mean, it's such an agreeable concept. It's like saying, I want to be a nice guy.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Yeah, of course you do.
Mike Parsons: I mean, few people in this planet wake up saying, I want to be an idiot. I want to be, uh, uh, someone who is, uh, awful to be around. Now that's not at all that, that the case, but then. What Adam points out to us is we've got to think this through and do this in the right way. For me, it all comes down to our personal energy, the effort, the capacity for us to wake up everyday and be our best selves comes from giving in the right way.
In the right environment to the right people. And this is why I love this, this, this mantra of surround yourself with great people. In fact, to take us all the way back to Jim Collins in good to great. So much of what we could learn from him is that if we want to build a great organization, don't start with the plan.
Start with the people, just get the right people on the bus. And in fact, this is where we see Adam and Jim intersecting. He's talking about give under the right goals, give under the right conditions, and all of this starts with the capacity. To know your energy, who you want to give to, how you want to give, and what environment you need to do that.
And he's core concept that we're going to learn from now is how to create boundaries in order to let your energy and let your giving have the maximum. Impact. So let's have a dive into the world of Adam Grant and listen to how we can avoid being a doormat and how we can set boundaries.
Adam Grant: Caution is how do you avoid the doormat effect?
And I would give a bunch of different answers to this. The first one is others gave her set boundaries. One of my
Mike Parsons: favorite people that I interviewed for the book is
Adam Grant: a delight consulting partner by the name of Jason Geller. If you join Deloitte human capital,
Mike Parsons: Jason's the HR transformation leader, both for the
Adam Grant: U S and globally.
He's a really busy guy. But if you join at any level and you meet them in the New York office, he will make a standing offer to you and every other new hire,
Mike Parsons: which is,
Adam Grant: let's set up a meeting and I will mentor you. And
Mike Parsons: if it's useful, we will have a recurring meeting
Adam Grant: once a month forever. Anybody works for delight is open to that.
And the question is how does he maintain his own time and energy? One of the
Mike Parsons: best ways that he does this
Adam Grant: is he has basically Friday set aside his meeting time and the other days of the week he's got blocked off to do his own work. On Fridays. He knows he's going to be mentoring, helping and trying to benefit other people,
Mike Parsons: but soon
Adam Grant: he has more mentees than he could possibly fit on a Friday.
So what does he do? He takes a page out of Adam Rifkin's book.
Mike Parsons: And he says, okay, what I'm going to
Adam Grant: do is I'm gonna start turning other people into givers. So
Mike Parsons: new hire starts to come in and he asks his
Adam Grant: current mentees to come to lunch with them and basically asked the people he's mentored to start mentoring the people below them, and he starts creating mentor networks.
So now he's giving us more efficient because he's trained a bunch of people in how to be a successful mentor, and now they're kind of paying that forward to the next group. And that turns out to be really, really scalable. A couple of other favorite versions of this is a fortune 500
Mike Parsons: company. A few years
Adam Grant: ago it was trying to produce a laser printer on time.
It was a state of the art product. They'd only had one product ever launched on time in
Mike Parsons: the history of the company and
Adam Grant: the engineers who are doing this work. We're basically getting interrupted all the time by each other. So you'd be working for 30 seconds and somebody says, Hey, what do you think of this?
You get another minute of work done, and then somebody interrupts you and says, I really need your help with this. And by the time you're done helping other people, it's like 11 at night. So what are the engineers start
Mike Parsons: doing?
Adam Grant: They start working nights and weekends and early mornings, but everyone starts doing this.
And so then you have all these people following you into the office at off hours who are now bugging you for your help. So some of the engineers become takers and they just say, you know what, I'm just going to be really nasty and tough with my colleagues, and then they won't bother me. Obviously not productive or efficient if you have knowledge to share.
So Harvard professor Leslie Perlow comes in and says, I'm going to work with the engineers to create a quiet time policy
Mike Parsons: three days
Adam Grant: a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday from nine to 12 no interruptions. You can get your own work done in that window. And then you have all afternoon, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and all day Tuesday, Thursday to help.
Engineers on average, 66% of them achieved above average productivity. They launched the product on time, second time in division history, and it was a really simple boundary to maintain. One of my favorite applications of this is out of office messages on email. I'm working on a really important project right now.
I'm busy for the next four hours. If something is urgent, please come see me or give me a call. Almost no one ever does, and I think it's a really great way to protect your time if you're a giver without being helpful all the time, every moment.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Hm. Nice meaty clip. Uh, let's try and distill some of the key things that Adam's saying that if the, if the proceeding Clint was all about awareness and finding that
Mike Parsons: intersection,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: um, of, of giving and trying to find the right balance of achieving your goals and helping others at the same time.
I think this one's actually okay, well, let's now get into the meat of it. Let's now think about action activity. What can we do? And. It reminds
Mike Parsons: me a little bit of
Mark Pearson-Freeland: of what Brene was saying, because once you've really uncovered, okay, once you've identified the challenges that maybe you have in place for yourself and for helping others, you can then try to actually take ownership of it.
You know, this is something that you and I have spoken about a lot in the past, Mike, once you take ownership of
Mike Parsons: your time,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: of your projects, and of the things that you can control. It becomes a lot easier to, to stay on top of things. And I think what Adam is saying
Mike Parsons: here is
Mark Pearson-Freeland: you've got to make sure that you are protected.
And I love this idea of the barrier and the doormat and
Mike Parsons: so on.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: So for me, I think sometimes my projects and sometimes time and sometimes requests from, let's say, clients will come up and that will distract me or that will. You know, maybe knock my day off kilter.
Mike Parsons: So for me, what I've tried to do
Mark Pearson-Freeland: is actively, over the last couple of weeks, in fact, block out time,
Mike Parsons: very similar to what
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Adam's saying here, and very, very reminiscent of what Cal was teaching us in the, in the deep work.
Uh. Deep work. What book of his? It's actually dedicating specific and allotment of time. Turning off all your notifications, your phone, putting any headphones and just getting on with a little bit of work. What, what do you think, Mike? What w? For me, I think time blocking really, really helps.
Mike Parsons: Yes. Not only does it in terms of, I think it's a basic, a survival technique of modern work.
I honestly think, um, that, uh. I noticed particularly large organizations, a lot of the executives are literally just back to back nine to five. And so my question to those folks is, when do you do any work? Like, when do you think, uh, when do you decode, when do you learn? Um, and so I think this idea of creating, you know, what Adam was talking about though, is actually enforcing a quiet time.
And so, um, this is enormously powerful, I think. And what you start to see is, um, that you have full control of your time in your calendar and you can push back. Um, and. You know, for me the best way to push back is listen, in order for me to provide this deliverable, this document, this presentation, this masterclass, whatever is your thing, um, I need this much time by you requiring an additional thing.
You put the quality of my work in jeopardy. So I often provide trade offs. Oh. If you want to do that really quickly, then when I manage my time, we have to then push back this other deliverable. And then what I often find is when you present, uh, that, um, people will, I never get to an impasse, let's put it that way.
Even with the biggest of clients on the most important of deliverables. Um. W there's always a way for us to get it because it starts from, you know, I know what I can do and deliver. In addition to that, there was something else, um, that, that I really liked about that, that I, I want to pull out a bit more from Adam.
He talked about allocating a time, Hey, if you really need me, call me or come and walk over to me. And he gave away an interesting thing that I've also learned, which is, he said, and a lot of people don't do that.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Hmm.
Mike Parsons: So they're looking for the quick win. Like, Hey, Mark, can you do this for me? Hey Mark, I need that.
Or, Hey, Mark, what do you think of this? But if you just raise the barrier to participation, um. What you'll find is a lot of people just simply won't put the work in. So a great thing is when someone says, can you help me on something? Um, Oh yeah, sure. Can you just write a small brief? And if it really matters to them, they'll happily write you a small brief.
They've probably already got a small brief. And then if someone's prepared to. Right and do a writeup of the problem, then you instantly know it matters to them and they frame it to the best of their ability, that problem. And then you can apply your energies to that. So the classic screener that I have, when somebody rings me up and says, Oh, Mike, we want to build an amazing product.
Let's do this. I'm like, great. Um, send me a writeup of the idea and send me all of the user testing that you've done. And immediately then only maybe five out of every hundred actually follow up on that. And so. And my point here is this is how I protect myself from a natural desire to want to learn and innovate and work with others.
My filter is, okay, send me a brief. So I actually have a thing right now where an organization wants to build this big, uh, new, uh, piece of technology. And, um, I'm like, please send me the brief and I've yet to receive it. So I know that for whatever good reasons, it's just not that important to them. So I'm spending.
Zero time on helping them. Zero time on giving them. And I hope that would make Adam Grant very proud. And
Mark Pearson-Freeland: just to, just to build on that, cause I've scribbled it down because I love that the barrier to participate,
Mike Parsons: which,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: which I think is a great phrase,
Mike Parsons: the barrier to participate
Mark Pearson-Freeland: is actually exactly what Adam would say is.
Uh, you know, the action that you would have. You know, he talks about, uh, putting quiet time to do your work. I think here that awareness and that creation of yours is you saying, Oh, you being aware of you being a giver. Normally. And it would be detrimental to your own time as well as, you know, existing commitments that you've made if you were to freely hand it out.
So I think that that barrier actually not only pushes the new activity forward, it pushes that new client to align their own dots,
Mike Parsons: but actually it
Mark Pearson-Freeland: protects those around you as well. I think that's a great,
Mike Parsons: a great barrier.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Nice.
Mike Parsons: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, and I think that, um, giving with intention, uh, giving when it matters our old ways of framing.
Um. Adam Grant's advice. Don't just be reckless in your giving to all and everyone that just swings by because the truth is, um, you're giving means the most when somebody really wants the help and the support. So filter for that. And invariably, what I find is a lot of people are lazy, so they ask for help.
But what they're saying is, can you do my work for me? Yes. Exactly.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Take us.
Mike Parsons: So that's, yeah. So they're takers. So just protect your yourself. So I feel like when now I've really starting to frame, um, sort of the DNA of giving and this little catch 22 of it that you can't just, um, give like crazy and, and sort of hope that it all works out.
There's a bit of an art to it and, and that, that setting boundaries is the perfect advice from Adam Grant. Mike, before we jump into the second part of the show. When we really get into the how we do giving in the right way. How do we inspire others? Something that strikes me is we haven't told people, we haven't told all our listeners where they should go if they want to get show notes, if they want to get into the archive, if they want to connect to any of our social, um, where does one go?
If they want to know more about the moonshots podcast, it's
Mark Pearson-Freeland: my favorite destination on the planet or in the universe. Perhaps it is www.moonshots.io of course.
Mike Parsons: Everybody has to be. Now, if I, if I remember rightly, you did promise us that we were going to be challenging Netflix on, on, uh, on traffic. I think.
I think you wanted to go more than 180 billion or 180 million users, Mark, I think that was daring goal. You said that was
Mark Pearson-Freeland: the big hairy audacious goal. Um,
Mike Parsons: I wasn't Beehag for sure, for sure. I'm not really sure if we're there yet, but I can tell you that we continue to get lots of ratings and reviews. We are just a few ratings shy of 100 ratings on all the, uh, podcast, uh, apps around the world.
Mark, I think there's a big call to action to our listeners if they're listening right now. What do we want to ask them? We want to crack the 100 right?
Mark Pearson-Freeland: We really do. In fact, maybe if we can get that. By next week. I don't know what an amazing event that would be. I love everybody. We both love everybody. To go and leave us a review in Apple podcast, Spotify, wherever you consume your podcasts.
We really appreciate all of the emails that we receive@helloatmoonshots.io. Uh, we just want to get the word out there and your listening as well as your interactions really drive.
Mike Parsons: At
Mark Pearson-Freeland: all our ability to reach other people. So thank you very
Mike Parsons: much
Mark Pearson-Freeland: for listening, as well as leaving reviews where possible.
Mike Parsons: And it really mad is because, um, when you give us a rating or review, this is one of the primary ways that the podcast apps, uh, no, to recommend our show to new listeners. And we're all about helping more and more people, uh, to learn from innovators. And I'm so excited to, to share with everyone that, um, if we look at, at how writing and reviewing the show has really helped, we have entered in, um.
Uh, we're on the chats now for, um, the top, uh, Spanish business podcasts with entity into Mexico as well. My, I hope you're brushing up on your Spanish, um, and eating a little bit of tapas, um, were rocketing up the chats in Macau places on the podcast. So ladies and gentlemen, it really does help and we're so grateful for.
You sharing your time with us to learn from innovators? And it really does when you write the show, when you review the show, it helps others find out about it. So just jump into your podcast app right now, why we're chatting, and just give us your review, your writing, your thoughts, because we get them from all over the world.
We do love them, and it is an essential part of our mission, which is to help others learn from innovators. All right. I think we're ready now to jumping to the hard work of giving in the right way. And, um. You know, the interesting thing is, once again, we're going to kind of push on the, on the negative side first here, because I think it's really important to do.
Um, and what Adam Grant really points out. We'll remember that he gave us three archetypes. They give us the takers, the matches, and one of the things. That's really crucial is to be able to spot a taker. One, you've got to protect yourself. And what we'll get into later on the show is actually we want to try and convert them to being more of a matcher, or even if we can, to making them a giver.
But let's start with Adam Grant talking about how we screen out the takers.
Adam Grant: The negative impact of a taker
Mike Parsons: typically exceeds
Adam Grant: the positive impact of a giver by a multiple of two or three to one. You find that's pretty easy for one taker to be the bad Apple that spoils the barrel.
Mike Parsons: But
Adam Grant: when you put one giver in, an organization like one good egg will always make a dozen.
I spend a good chunk of time in the past year working with organizations on mechanisms for screening out takers. And I think what's powerful about that is if you can eliminate takers from your organization, then you have givers and matchers. The givers will act more generously because they don't have to be paranoid that takers are out to get them.
And the beauty of matters, which is most people, is that they tend to follow the norm and reciprocate the way that they've been treated. So mantras act like givers in the presence of givers. They're also useful for dealing with, if you have clients, for example, who are takers, matchers will actually fight fire with fire when they have to.
So then the question is how do you screen out takers? And there are a couple of ways to think about this. One way to screen out takers is to recognize that they follow a pattern of kissing up, kicking down. If you're a taker, it's quite important to be a good faker when you're dealing with powerful people.
Because of course you want them to think, well, if you. But if you've never tried, it turns out to be a lot of work to pretend to care about every person you meet. And takers tend to let their guard down a little bit when dealing with peers and subordinates, which means that you should be really skeptical of references that come from bosses and lateral and references from below are actually quite valuable.
There's also evidence that takers, when they talk about success, tend to use two words more than the rest of us, which are I and me, and then when they talk about failures, they tend to place blame externally. And then my favorite way of screening out takers actually is to present them with situational interviews.
A lot of organizations do behavioral interviews where they're backward looking and asking about your history, what you've accomplished, what challenges you've overcome, and those actually don't turn out to be very effective. If you look at the evidence because they suffer from an apples and oranges problem, it's very hard to compare it to people's work histories.
Instead, what you want to do is you want to ask, what would you do in a situation like this and give everybody the same situation. The
Mike Parsons: problem
Adam Grant: is. Nope. No one wants to admit I would be a taker here, but there's an easy way around this, which is, instead of asking what would you do you ask people to predict what other people would do.
Most of us tend to project our own motivations on other people. So if you give me a scenario where it's not clear whether the appropriate. Behavior is giving, taking her matching. Lo and behold, what I'll tend to do when predicting other's behavior is ask, well, what would I do in this situation? And then you get my honest opinion.
So integrity test research, for example, shows that the higher my estimate that other people will be thieves, the greater the odds that I myself am a thief.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Hmm. Yeah. It's again, it's a nice, good meaty clip from, from Adam. This one again, is very much around identifying others and identifying. Perhaps behavioral
Mike Parsons: traits,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: um, language, um, behavior that means that individuals fall into,
Mike Parsons: you know, take a space.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: What I like about it is, you know, Adam is again, demonstrating something that's slightly different to some of the other innovators that we covered on the show. He's very,
Mike Parsons: very, uh.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Really focusing on how we interact with others. You know, again, this idea of business having previously been really, really focused on.
Passion and perhaps who you know now this idea of, okay, well where do you spend your time and how do you dedicate,
Mike Parsons: how do you collaborate? Right? How do you work with each other? Exactly. That's the word. And if you're, if you're a taker, no one really wants to collaborate with you. Right?
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Exactly. Because that
Mike Parsons: is exhausting.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Yeah. Where, where's the reciprocal
Mike Parsons: nature? Humans are reciprocal. That's where it was.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Takers off falling away from that
Mike Parsons: and what a great screen tip, this idea of propose to them as a scenario where it's not really clear how others would do it and then they will actually project. Their own point of view when it's not clear.
I thought that was brilliant, didn't you?
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Oh yeah, and I love that tip. Instead of thinking how you would respond, how would others respond? It's a nice way of quite literally taking your, your kind of brain out of your head
Mike Parsons: and thinking outside the box. Yeah, yeah. And as he was describing some of those behaviors, what I would call out to all of our listeners is you can, I mean, I was personally just having this visceral like, yeah, I don't want to be around people like that.
Now as much as he kind of framed it is. These are the how you spot a taker, how you screen them out. What I also do is I find it a timely reminder to me about the appropriate behavior with others and I think it's really important to remember to ask yourself, I mean, let's do this as an example. If you think about the three people that you collaborate the most with at work.
Are you giving enough? Are you really helping supporting and mentoring them enough? I just think that's a really important thing to ask yourself of the people around you to know. If you're on track, and I think what we're starting to see is. As we, and I think why this is so timely is that skills can be learned.
So, and I've talked about this a lot on the podcast, so you can jump into YouTube and to say, how do I dot, dot, dot. Fill in the blank, right? A lot of those skills and tactics can be, can be learned. Habits can be formed, but the most important thing is to challenge yourself on a behavioral. On your norms and values because those are so fundamental.
And I would always propose this to our listeners if you. Are brilliant. If you have an expert skill, but you're a huge taker in the way you behave and collaborate with others, you will not go far because no matter how brilliant you are, the the tax of working with you is perceived to be so high from others in the organization that you're basically all that talent will go to waste.
So if we can remind ourselves to be givers or at least matches and definitely avoid being takers, I think were really not only helping those around us, but I think we can, uh, unlock. More of the potential inside of us because people will want to be with us to work with us, to help us when we need it. And I think that's such an important thing to emphasize because so much of recruitment and evaluation is based on skills and not on behaviors and that, that to me, Mark, that's the power of Adam Grant's work.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: You know?
Mike Parsons: You're totally right.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: That that is, that is, uh, he's raising that awareness of focus on people's behavior rather than the skills. And, and you're, you're right. Skills can be learned. Behavior is much harder to,
Mike Parsons: to change
Mark Pearson-Freeland: what we're talking about and give, give and take is identified and then have a proactive action to.
Mike Parsons: Challenge yourself.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: I like this as a, as a mantra. Um,
Mike Parsons: how, how much
Mark Pearson-Freeland: am I supporting? How much am I giving to one another? Am I giving them enough? Um, and, but also challenging myself? Am I saving enough time to give to myself,
Mike Parsons: you know,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: to, to do my own work? That's most business practice.
Mike Parsons: So I really love the two sides of screening.
Are takers using it for the people around you, um, and calling people out if they're taking too much, but also holding yourself to account. Um, making sure that you're on track and that you're not taking, um, more than you are giving. But we did say that this behavioral change. It ain't easy, and we've talked a lot about putting the lens on yourself, but the great news is that Adam Grant has more wisdom for us.
Mark, he's got a lot more. Uh, thinking for us to decode around this behavior change. And I think this is the real, we're starting to see the dimensions of Adam Grant. We're seeing that it's about really getting to the understanding of giving that sort of DNA that there are these three archetypes, and that if you're going to be a giver, you really do need to create these boundaries and constraints so that you don't, um, you know.
Become a doormat, as, as he would say. And it really also then takes us to this level of looking around you is, is spotting the takers and making sure that you don't have takers in your team and that you always challenge yourself to evaluate yourself because this is an inherent behavior. So it's a very deep thought.
It's a very deep feeling that comes from us and it powers how we collaborate. But Adam Grant, I think Mark Adam Grant has got a lot more for us.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: He certainly does. And in the next clip, we're going to hear a little bit from Adam about turning what you might call takers and try to ease them, or at least identify themselves and practically move into something more like givers.
Mike Parsons: For
Adam Grant: me, the biggest unanswered question from give and take is what are the steps for turning a taker into a giver? We know a lot about how to get takers to give in a particular moment. No one wants to be seen as a taker. If you can make behavior visible, takers tend to either match or give a little bit more.
We also know that takers tend to be more generous. Once they identify with an organization or a person, as they become attached to either you or to a group of people, then they start to blur the line between self interest and concern for others. Because if we're identified with each other, then helping you or helping this organization.
It's going to reflect positively on me. The problem is when the taker switches to a different relationship, a different group, a different organization, it's like a reset button has been hit and that person might go back to his or her old ways. So one of the things I'd love to explore next is what is it?
What does it actually require to shift to takers? More fundamental mindset and values. It's probably worth recognizing that there are different reasons that people fall into a taker pattern of behavior, and that we might actually need different strategies for influencing them depending on whether they're taking, because they're narcissists.
And they have very inflated but fragile egos, and it's a sense of scarcity and insecurity that leads them to feel they've got to claim everything for themselves. Is it on the other hand, that they used to be a giver or a matcher and got burned one too many times and learned the hard way? It's, it's dangerous to not.
Be selfish and I'd love to do investigate that a little bit more. But if you look at the data, what most employers are looking for in their jobs is a sense of meaning and purpose. And when you look at, in turn, what makes work meaningful? What enables people to feel that their daily lives in organizations are significant more than anything else.
It's the belief that my work makes a difference. That what I do has some kind of benefit or lasting value to other people. And I think this is something a lot of leaders overlook. I spent a couple of years studying call centers and ask leaders, what would you do to motivate people who are working in very stressful, difficult jobs?
And the most common answers were, of course, the opposite of what we actually found worked. A lot of employees were skeptical, especially in a call center context of, you know, does, does my work really do this good or is my boss just trying to get me to work harder? There's an ulterior motive there. And what I found with the group of colleagues is that it's actually really effective to outsource inspiration.
To find the customers, the clients, the end users who would benefit from your products and services, who can really speak firsthand to their impact, and we'd got staggering results in the call center setting. When doing this, we bring in one person who's benefited from the work that you do to talk for five minutes about its impact, and we get over a 400% color by color spike and weekly productivity.
I think sometimes there is a tension between highlighting the mission and purpose behind work and measuring day to day performance. I think one of the challenges that we all face as leaders is also an opportunity to say, what can we do to actually translate those day to day performance metrics into your contributions toward the mission or into, here's the way in which the purpose of this work is being fulfilled.
So an interesting example of this that comes to mind is at Merck, where we've had a number of conversations about the idea that many of the jobs, particularly if you're doing sales, are hard to connect to. What's the real impact on patients. But if you could actually translate the value of a drug into life year saved or quality of life contributed, it really shifts the meaning of the work.
And now the performance measurements are less mundane. It's not easy to do, but I think in the next few years we're going to see organizations actually start to innovate by coming up with, with mission relevant metrics as opposed to just standard performance evaluations.
Mike Parsons: Holy guacamole Mac. That was like the most dances clip we've ever had on the show.
I think that our, my gosh, there was a lot in there, wasn't there? There's a lot
Mark Pearson-Freeland: to delve into though, which is great, isn't it?
Mike Parsons: Yeah. So let's, let's try and decode this right now together and share some, some thoughts with our listeners. I want to go back to the start and I kind of feel like there was three levels of what he just said.
First of all is it's all about getting to why is someone actually a taker? What is the motivation? And then he was like, okay, how can we, how can we open them up again to be more of a giver and how can that giving on the third level fit in with the overall purpose of the team and the organization? I think that was the frame in which we can, we can study this so.
As an exercise. I'm going to put some questions to you. When you have been working with takers, what do you, what from your experience, why are they take as, why are they looking to exploit rather than to give? When you think back Mark to all the people you've worked with, the takers, why are they like that?
Mark Pearson-Freeland: The easy answer.
Mike Parsons: The
Mark Pearson-Freeland: easy answer would be they're a bit lazy. They don't want to do the work.
Mike Parsons: Right. But I think that
Mark Pearson-Freeland: that would be too easy. You know, and actually, and something that we've obviously talked about in the past on the show is the best way to work with others to collaborate and maybe even to lead others, is to have an awareness of what's going on.
In that person's,
Mike Parsons: uh,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: peripheral vision, their life, their environment, and so on and so forth.
Mike Parsons: So.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Even though my natural inclination would be to say, Oh, this so and so, he's a taker because you know he's lazy and wants to take the glory. I've actually then got to challenge myself with thinking, Oh, but hang on.
He's only like this because maybe he's been burned
Mike Parsons: before.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Maybe he has suffered at the hands of another individual, and now he's put up his own barriers. Like Adam's telling us, make sure you've got your. Uh, you know, your anti doormat effect. Maybe this individual is just going a little bit too far and maybe they've now lashed out at each other.
People like myself and they are now negatively impacting the world.
Mike Parsons: I think, uh, I think it's fear. I think a lot of people are scared. I think a lot of, a lot of people want to fit in. I think a lot of people want to be accepted. A lot of people don't want to feel the embarrassment of failure. And so their defensive mechanism is that they're actually closed.
They're actually not prepared to give of themselves, but to take from others as a defensive mechanism. And I think that the reason why people don't try. To your point about license, I think you're absolutely right. People can be lazy. I think the reason that they don't try is they're scared to death about failure.
And that might be from an experience that they've had in life where they tried and failed, and it was embarrassing. And I think what's so amazing is how crippling. Uh, that attitude, this fear of failure, this insecurity in oneself, how it can be such a blocker to people realizing their potential being the best version of themselves.
So let's take this archetype, cause I'm sure everyone is now kind of imagining someone that they know. And thinking about that person. Go, they are such a taker. They're not a giver, and let's, let's think about that person and see how we might get them over this fear or this laziness or whatever it is that is driving them, which is closing them up.
And I think. I think it comes from creating safety, um, and giving them confidence that even if they were to fail. That it would be celebrated as a learning rather than judged as a personal failure. Now, if we were to create that environment, my hypothesis that I'm proposing is that this might help someone who's at harder and at archetype as Adam Brandt would call it a taker if we can create that safety.
So my question, the second followup question here, Mark, is. How do you create those kinds of conditions for people in your team?
Mark Pearson-Freeland: I think it begins with communication,
Mike Parsons: whether that's,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: you know, face to face in business as usual. Obviously it's a little bit harder right now in the current climate, but you can still do that over telephone calls, video conferencing, emails, text messages, and so on.
And I think it's communicating a couple of different points. One could be how you doing. And, and checking in from, uh, you know, uh, status, uh, perspective, progress, perspective, mindset perhaps, but also following it up with how can I help? So what you're doing there is you're instilling one, I'm reaching out to you, starting the dialogue to, I'm giving you a chance to ask for help if you need it.
It's okay to ask for
Mike Parsons: help.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: And I think that's one of the, the core blockers, I think. Uh, when it comes to accepting safety and accepting comfort, like you say, it's the fear, the fear of failure, but also the fear of asking for help when you, when you need it.
Mike Parsons: So how are you going to, so you've got this, this taker in front of you, you're going to communicate to them.
And what do you communicate to them? Like how do you, how do you, let's get into this, like what does that communication look like?
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Yeah, I think, I think
Mike Parsons: in January really starts
Mark Pearson-Freeland: much like Adam is telling us it's the human reciprocity. So I will, um, maybe I behave more like a matchup. So. A good demonstration of this perhaps could be, right.
Um, teammate, I need you to help me here. I need your skills at, I don't know, producing a podcast perhaps, and in return, even though you might not, you know, vouchered or, or couch it as that. I will help you out by doing X. And then what you're starting to do with the taker is showing them two sides of the coin.
You're showing them you will benefit if I help you out here. But also I'm going to ask for your help. And in doing so, we become stronger. We become a team. We collaborate and the work will be greater. No longer will you be. Um. You know, taking or benefiting from whatever it is that you've done in the past.
Now we're going to work together and it's a little bit more cohesion, a little bit more
Mike Parsons: like glue. Yeah, I like it. I mean, this w this would be a classic construct, uh, where you could use Simon Sinek to say, here's what we're doing is how we're doing it. And here's why. Because this comes back to the third point that Adam Grant was making this third level of turning takers into givers, which is making people aware and understanding of the purpose of the team and the organization.
Often people have very little, uh, understanding of why does this company exist. They might understand what they do, maybe a little bit about how we do it, but certainly, rarely is the why understood of an organization. So I think you can, you can definitely, and I love this idea that you suggested communicate.
Cause often it all comes down to people are just not aligned cause they haven't communicated. And I think the checklist for all of us. Is, are we communicating what we're going to do? How are we going to do, why we're going to do it? And it's a great formula. It's the golden circle from Simon Sinek. Go check it out.
Podcast on Simon. The key to this is communication, but I think it's also, there has to be the capacity. To create explicit safety for, for learning, for testing, for experimenting, because most people have big dreams, but it's the fear of failure that stops them from going out into the world and living the life they dream.
I mean. How many times do you hear, even from your friends when they talk about, Oh wow, that would be amazing. If only, or I wish. I'd imagine if in a work setting you say to them, you give people the opportunity. To feel the safety of dreaming big and they try something, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. And then all you say is, that's okay.
What did you learn? What? What might we do next? Based on that learning, and if you, if you have a growth mindset. Versus the inverting of that, which is judgment being judgmental, accusation, pointing out all the negative. If you create safety, I truly believe a lot of takers will dare to give. I think they will, they will make that move.
But for those that are listening to this podcast, it's our choice to be givers and to be forgiving of those who are takers and to help them see that it is safe to give. I think there's a huge win there. If we can make that step and bring there, bring those takers, if you will, along with us. I
Mark Pearson-Freeland: couldn't say it better myself.
Mike, I think Adam would be 100% on your page there.
And
Mark Pearson-Freeland: if, if I can just add one slight thing, I think you know what Adam's teaching us in, in the last clip, he's talking about outsourcing inspiration and similar to what you've just said with regards to confidence and the question from friends, colleagues.
Of I wouldn't it be nice if, and this fear of failure outsourcing innovation is in, in its course from user testing, go and get the product out there. Go and ask some questions, see how your end users are using it, what they like about it, what they don't like about it. And slowly you'll start to realize, Oh.
I don't mind receiving some negative criticism because ultimately it's going to be proactive and productive, and the fear of failure then starts to subside. It starts to go away a little bit because suddenly you're seeing iterative growth and exactly as you just say,
Mike Parsons: what do we learn?
Mark Pearson-Freeland: What are we going to go and do next?
And I think that's, that's a really nice, I just wanted to add that.
Mike Parsons: Love it. Nice. Nice. Nice. Nice. Well, yeah. Here we are, we, we get to this point where it's a very last and final clip. And, um, you know, the interesting thing now. Is we're getting to learn a really powerful technique, which I truly hope that all of our listeners can use as soon as the podcast is finished.
This is something that you can use on yourself. This is Adam Grant talking about making better decisions. For yourself. Have you ever given
Adam Grant: advice to a friend where you just felt like, I just gave the best advice ever, and then you found yourself in the same situation a few days later and you made a horrible decision?
Mike Parsons: Absolutely. I do it all the time. I'm very good advice giver.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Very
Mike Parsons: bad life decision maker.
Adam Grant: Yeah. What's that about? Because they're the same skills, right? Giving people advice on what to do and then making your own decisions. It's exact same thing, except it's not. It's called Solomon's
Mark Pearson-Freeland: paradox.
Adam Grant: and the idea is that when you give other people advice, you look at the problem through a telescope. And you see the big picture, you focus on the two or three criteria that are really
Mike Parsons: important. Whereas
Adam Grant: when you're making your own decisions, you tend to look at it through a microscope,
Mike Parsons: which is how we
Adam Grant: end up with these Excel spreadsheets that have 19 different columns, and then you're adjusting the weights.
How important is each factor in order to get the decision that you want. And I think that
Mike Parsons: illustrates, it's
Adam Grant: one thing to know what a good decision is. It's another thing to be able to make that decision yourself and
Mike Parsons: because,
Adam Grant: because it's so difficult. If you were to actually sit down and analyze every decision in your life, you could spend hours deciding, well, what time should I wake up?
I wake up at six Oh one
Mike Parsons: or six Oh two.
Adam Grant: I mean, my whole life could be different because of that, right? What should I order it to eat? You know who, who should I call first this morning? Which way should I take to work
Mike Parsons: these decisions? We could
Adam Grant: spend all day just making these
Mike Parsons: potentially paralyzed
Adam Grant: decisions.
We don't want to do that. We don't want to waste our time. So what we do is
Mike Parsons: we develop
Adam Grant: what are called heuristics, which are sort of mental shortcuts.
Mike Parsons: if I can say to myself, well,
Adam Grant: you know, experts are usually correct. I don't have to analyze a bunch of decisions where there's already expert opinion, and a lot of times those heuristics make us smart and they make us much more efficient decision-makers. The problem is we over apply them, and so we might end up in a situation where the heuristic was good the last nine times we tried it, but you know what?
Now. The expert is wrong and we haven't really stopped to think about whether we can trust that expert in that situation.
Mike Parsons: Oh, Adam's bringing it all the way
Mark Pearson-Freeland: round in that final clip, isn't he?
Mike Parsons: We've learned
Mark Pearson-Freeland: the identifying takers and givers as well as receiving some inspirational advice on how we can action certain barriers, acknowledgement of of how to do it in our day to day life.
What I like about that final clip there is.
Mike Parsons: Right.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: Well, how can I demonstrate that in my day to day life as soon as I wake up, not even when I'm interacting with colleagues and clients. And it's so true. I'm very much one of these people who probably has a spreadsheet of 19 columns, uh, allowing me to make a finite or minute decisions here and there.
And actually what it does is it removes my ability at seeing the whole picture. And sometimes. When I talk about things, when, when I talk about a challenge or a problem with, uh, you know, my wife or friends, I really do feel as though they're. Disconnect from the day to day interaction that I have with that particular problem.
It betters my own understanding of it. It is quite removed. You know, the whole problem shared is a problem half. Um, testimony I think comes from, once you've shared it with somebody else, you realize, Oh, it's not that big a deal. It's okay that from the bigger picture, just because this particular challenge is not as much of an opportunity as I thought it might be.
That's okay. Not the end of the world, and I like how Adam uses this telescope versus microscope. Um, analogy there. I think that's really powerful for
Mike Parsons: me. Yeah. And, and I think that what he's getting at is we often have this huge bias that we're not aware of. And often that bias is caused by emotional triggers in the situation that cloud your vision.
And this is why controlling your emotions is so important and your mindset is how you do this. I think one of the practices. That I've really enjoyed to give myself perspective on myself. It needs to take a little bit of time when big things are happening. I try and create time and space, whether that's an hour, a day, a week, whatever I can get.
Just to. Simmer down, both on the upside and the downside. And one of the things that I do is I try and do somebody as if I'm almost coaching myself. Um, and I, I love the analogy of a chess game. Just I have this thing, don't, um, get overexcited or over frustrated. It's a chess game. Play that for the long haul.
What's the move to make you like it to chess game? So. I think what that does is creates a little bit of emotional separation, um, so that you can like take a breath, take some time, and make a more balanced, uh, decision and avoid just rapid fire emotional response. How do you move between the microscope and the perspective part, Mike?
What do you do to, to, to kind of make better decisions for yourself. Tell you, well,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: I can't get the chess game out of my head. Now. They are reacting so vitally. If somebody has taken your Rook, you know that that's a great life lesson. Don't react so instantly. It's okay. It's the long haul. Hey, the strategic game.
I think that's
Mike Parsons: great. Okay, but let's turn the
Mark Pearson-Freeland: mirror on me. What do I do? I think we've discussed, um, particularly when I think we were, we were talking about Michelle, this idea of taking a beat. Before making decisions. So having a, you know, I'm, I'm reminded of your behavior when you walk in through the door.
Maybe that's your opportunity to take a breath. And I quite like that. And I think when I'm not trying to make a rash decision, I think taking that breath, maybe even sleeping on it. One of my techniques is I will make a decision.
Mike Parsons: Let's say it's
Mark Pearson-Freeland: something is. Silly as where to go on holiday all the way through to, okay, well how do I want to respond to this real challenge at work?
I will
Mike Parsons: choose a decision
Mark Pearson-Freeland: and say, cool, that's it. Close the laptop, close my book and I'll sleep on it. They want to wake up and I'll fully commit in my own head that that is the decision when I wake up and start thinking about it again, if I have an element of regret or pushback or unease. Then that's my trigger to know I don't think this was the right
Mike Parsons: decision, and I think.
And I think when you, when you are composed like that, I think it also helps you avoid being a taker and just set you up for being much more of a giver or at least a matcha. And I think that's where Adam Grant's advice really comes three 60 for us. Um, what we have been able to see is, is very, um, very clear.
A path of there is a sort of a. A formula, if you will, to to understanding giving, which is these three archetypes, givers, takers, matches. And if you, we know that givers net net have the most positive contribution to making the world, but, and this is a big, but you've got to do it in the right way. You've got to set those boundaries.
And if you set those boundaries, you'll give. Of yourself, you'll be the best version of yourself. But then secondly, this allows us to operate within teams, to screen out the takers, and to also take deliberate leadership behavior to convert takers. Into givers and with we go with our best self, we'll make the right decisions about ourselves, those around us, our teams, our businesses, our communities.
And I think it is such a powerful reminder of a very, very fundamental idea of give more than you get. And I think. Understanding the role of giving and taking, like a lot of the things that Simon Sinek brings. I think Adam Grant is talking about things that are not usually on the agenda in a team at work.
And I love the fact that we're putting as equal attention to skills and behaviors because really in the end, if you really enjoy working with someone in the office. Maybe they're not the greatest on the skills level, but if they're generous and helpful and collaborative, it's amazing the Goodwill and the good energy that comes from that, isn't it?
Mark Pearson-Freeland: I totally agree. It's, it's Adam's really, really celebrating this idea of identifying behavior and celebrating it, which is why I'm really excited about the Adam
Mike Parsons: Grant series, you know? Yes. Yeah. I mean, we're going to go on a bit of a roller coaster, um, over the next two episodes, we're going to look at creativity and original thinking and overcoming adversity.
I mean, how good is that? What a spectrum in which. Adam Grant, uh, operates. I'll let me ask you, Mike, what's, what's one thing that you might change now that you've had the chance to deep dive into Adam Grant's book? Give and take.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: I think it's going to be the giving in the right way.
Mike Parsons: So
Mark Pearson-Freeland: challenging myself at thinking, okay, right?
How do I maintain a barrier around what I really, really need to do? You know, this,
Mike Parsons: this,
Mark Pearson-Freeland: um. DOR. Matter of fact, I think is very, very easy to do. It's very easy to either a ask too much of others, but also be, it's, I think it's easy to give too much to others. So maintaining that protection I think is going to be my challenge each
Mike Parsons: day.
Mark Pearson-Freeland: I'm going to think, okay, well how do I make sure that that is, that is protected? How about you Mike? What's your
Mike Parsons: take out? What's your
Mark Pearson-Freeland: activity?
Mike Parsons: Yeah, I think, um. I think the new thing for me, I feel like I'm looking at the list Mark and I'm like, Oh, I'm trying, trying to do that. And I'm trying to do that. I think, I think specifically I'm creating some of that, that safety and, um, that environment for those that are not natural givers.
To transform, then I think that's, that's where I'm going to focus my effort on and, uh, to inspire them, um, to give a little
Mark Pearson-Freeland: more fantastic. What an episode.
Mike Parsons: There we are. Well, Mark, thank you so much for coming on this journey into Adam Grant. We have two more episodes. The next one we'll be diving into his book, originals.
Um, this is such a step change to the media innovators, which is a step change to the women in innovation. Uh, I just. Learning from innovators just keeps on giving. So thank you to you and a special thank you to all our listeners. Don't forget if you're still listening, you need to go out and you need to give us a review or rating in your favorite podcast application because we're dying to get the word out.
Um, and we really do look forward to all of you joining us on the next episode of delving into Adam Grant and all these wonderful thinking. I think that brings us to the end of the show. Another end of the moonshots that's around.