SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/842067
3 8 SXS W O R L D | M A R C H 2 0 1 7 I N T E R ACT I V E / F I L M | SXSW.COM Adam Grant: Workplace Generosity Pays Off in Personal Joy By Shermakaye BaSS Grant says that the key for people to find meaning and motivation in their jobs is to tap their innate sense of selflessness. In multiple studies over the past decade-plus, he has repeatedly illustrated that if you engage people by appealing to their sense of generosity, most of the time it pays big dividends. Consider one study he did as a grad student at the University of Michigan, in which he showed students at a scholarship fundraising call center that their success at the phone bank could truly change another student's life. The students were often disillusioned by the rude responses on the other end of the phone and were therefore performing dismally, so Grant invited a student to come and speak, giving concrete examples about how his life had dramatically shifted because of those scholarships. Several weeks after the encounter, the study revealed that those same callers had increased their fundraising by 171 percent and spent 142 percent more time in their efforts. Grant realized in the process that good intentions and altruism at work could be directly linked to increased productivity and success, in general. Since then, he has continued exploring these motivators through his consulting work, giving his time to students and sharing with the larger world through his books and talks. Those concepts have likewise inspired his most recent research. "One of the things I'm most fascinated by right now is culture change," Grant says. "I feel like one of the questions beneath the surface of Originals is how to champion your ideas inside group- think, and a lot of the good examples and data-points I draw are from entrepreneurs and inventors, from people who sort of had an idea for a product or a service or a concept, and more and more I've seen people applying these ideas to try to sort of disrupt and evolve the cultures of their organization. "I really want to understand that better, especially if you're not the CEO of a company or you're not at the top of an organization, and you think the culture is not embodying the values that the organization stands for. Or if it's just not effectively serving the mission, then what do you do about that? And that's something that I'm starting to tackle now." Adam Grant will be an Interactive Keynote speak- er tomorrow (Monday, March 13) at 2pm in Ballroom D of the Austin Convention Center. For more program- ming in the Workplace track at SXSW Interactive, see sxsw.com/conference/workplace. A dam Grant's blockbuster books Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success and Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World have both have topped The New York Times Best Sellers List in the past four years. The speaker, teacher and organizational psychologist has also been cast as one of the world's most generous and original thinkers by Harvard University, the World Economic Forum and several Silicon Valley CEOs, as well as by motivational gurus and his pro- fessor colleagues. But most important, Grant says, are his students at the The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. But how does Grant strike the balance between helping others— through formats as diverse as TedTalks, NGO consulting, scholarly journal writing and startling workplace-motivation studies—while focusing on his own wide work world? Interestingly enough, he admits that he has to now follow his own advice. "I don't think it's my place to judge whether I'm a giver or not. I think that's in the eye of the beholder," Grant says. "I can tell you that I chose this as a core (focus) and wrote about it in my first book because it's a set of values that I hold most dear … I guess one of the things that I had to become clearer on as I've become more visible outside the ivory tower, I've had to prioritize, actually who am I trying to help, and how?" In order to continue that line of thinking, after the success of Give and Take, he had to delve further into what motivates and satisfies people at their job, himself included: "I wanted to focus as much as possible on the places where I could have a unique impact, where I was contributing something that wasn't as easily available by lots of other people that the people asking might have access to." Such are the things he tells his students and shares with his readers. At the heart of it is the question: Can one truly be helpful and suc- cessful, original and ahead of the curve at work, without losing one's own sense of private joy? Even though those may seem like incompat- ible concepts, Grant sees them as totally complementary: "If you look at people who run large organizations, you are affecting thousands, or hundreds of thousands or sometimes mil- lions of people's lives, and if you can do something about that, it's more feasible to make large-scale systematic change to work than it is to their families or their spirituality, and I also think at some level there's more of a need for it, because there's a gap between what most people's work experiences are like." Adam Grant, photo by Lange Studio