Adam Grant on when to make time for others

In a more connected world, the people you know are more important. Grant shares tips on how to be in touch and when to say "I can't help."

Adam Grant is everyone’s favorite life coach. An organizational psychologist and a professor at Wharton, Grant has written an entire book on givers and takers. He thinks it’s a good idea to be generous with your time and attention. Which is why, this week, I wanted to get his help on a very personal pain point: how we nurture our social networks.

Grant has very smart thoughts on how and when to be a giving person and why it will matter even more in the future. He has a great approach to drawing boundaries with people. And he explains how he gets his work done without distraction. Plus, Caroline Fairchild collects tips on how to do a better job at saying "no."

JESSI HEMPEL: From the editorial team at LinkedIn, I’m Jessi Hempel, and this is Hello Monday, a show where I investigate the changing nature of work, and how that work is changing us.

Adam Grant is everyone’s favorite life coach. He thinks you can improve your memory. He has rules for how to tame your Inbox. He has an endless stream of productivity tips.

Adam’s an organizational psychologist and a professor at Wharton. He’s written an entire book on givers and takers, and he thinks it’s a good idea to be generous with your time and attention.

Which is why, this week, I wanted to get his help on a very personal pain point: how we nurture our social networks.

I’m not talking about software here. I mean our actual communities – the people we meet, work with, and choose to help out. And when I say “pain point,” let me be clear: I’m completely overwhelmed by the number of ways I am in touch with people – phone, via text, on work email, personal email, via messaging services, and on social networks--and I feel like I fail all the time. I miss important things. And it cuts into the time I have to a critical part of my job as a writer--the writing part. So this episode, Adam and I compared notes.

He has very smart thoughts on how and when to be a giving person and why it will matter even more in the future. He has a great approach to drawing boundaries with people. And he explains how he gets his work done without distraction.

Here’s Adam.

***

JESSI: So Adam, I was thinking about all the things we could talk about today and specifically, I was thinking back to the book that you published in 2013, that really addressed this idea of generosity and the idea that the more you give, the more successful ultimately you can become.

ADAM: Yeah, I think the gist of it was that I found there are three different styles that people bring to their interactions at work right? They’re givers, takers and matchers and givers to be generous. The takers tend to be selfish. Most of us don't want to fall off either edge of that. So we end up in this matching style of trying to be fair and saying, I'll do something for you if you do something for me. And my surprise in writing the book and doing research for a decade going into it was that the givers tended to be overrepresented among both the worst performers and the best performers. And so, yeah, helping others can elevate your career, but it can also undermine it if you're not thoughtful about how you do it.

JESSI: When does it hurt you?

ADAM: When you, when you look at the differences between successful givers and failed givers, you see that anybody who is generous is high in concern for others and the difference is about, do you also care about yourself? And you see that successful givers are ambitious for themselves as well as others. And they're, they're careful when they help others to make sure it doesn't come at too much of a personal cost so they're not wandering around, you know, sacrificing themselves. And that's what you see failed givers do, is they say, look, I'm gonna drop everything for anyone at anytime a request comes in. And so I think that that giving becomes risky, especially in a career sense when you're not thoughtful about who you help. And so you end up getting burned by takers. It's risky when you're not thoughtful about when you help and you're constantly falling behind on your own work, and you can't get your own work done because you're doing other people's jobs. And it's risky when you're not thoughtful about how you help and you end up saying yes to all kinds of requests or actually not aligned with your skills and so you're not adding that much value and you're getting stretched in all these directions that don't make a lot of sense for you.

JESSI: Do you recommend sort of a framework for thinking about it is, it is sort of – like for example, one of the things that I remember is this idea of batching your favors rather than sort of spreading them out willy nilly when they come at you – deciding to do say five on Tuesday afternoon.

ADAM: So I think you've, you've started with a great one and there there's actually no evidence that this is true both for random acts of kindness, in your life and for the helping you do in your job that if you, if you batch them together in one day and let's say you're gonna do five helping acts this week, if you do all five on Monday, you actually get more of a boost to your energy and your sense of meaning than if you spread them out throughout, throughout the week. And I think that's because if you do a little bit every day, it feels like a drop in the bucket and you don't really know that you made a difference and you're kind of distracted. Whereas if Monday is, you're helping day, a case of the Mondays is actually turns out to mean something very different from what it meant in an office space, right? And you're like, oh, case of the Mondays is, that's the day where I matter to other people and I make a contribution.

JESSI: Is this the way, is this the way that you go about it in your own life?

ADAM: I try to, yeah. So I stack all my office hours together, so, you know, I'll have a day or two a week where I'm on campus and I'm totally focused on students and that's basically all I do. So I'm teaching, I'm in office hours. I might have an author on campus that I'm hosting and then I have some days where I work from home and I try not to talk to another human being who's not part of my family. And that way, I'm really focused on, on progressing with my own creative work, my writing data analysis whenever I'm working on. And I cannot stress enough how beneficial that is. And in terms of being focused and also feeling like I'm making progress, but I'm also able to show up for other people. And you know, I think the other, the other big strategy that's probably made a real difference in my life is I used to feel like I had to carry the burden of, of helping kind of in a tailored way for every person who reached out. Right? So one of the worst things that happened along this, this path was give & take came out the New York Times magazine did a cover story on my work and one of the scenes that, that Susan Dominus the reporter wrote about was me in office hours, giving career advice to students. And all of a sudden I got bombarded with career advice requests from complete strangers. And I've got to tell you, I'm not even good at giving career advice to people that I know well, right? I'm, I'm the person who became an organizational psychologist because I didn't know what I want to do with my life. And so I'm like, well, maybe my job could be to fix other people's jobs. And then I get to experience all of them vicariously. And so I'm not probably not the person you want to come to for, for career direction. And I'm especially bad if I don't know you well and I don't have a sense of your interests and your strengths and your goals and your values. And so I tried to field all these conversations individually and I talked to strangers. I responded to emails in depth –

JESSI: Wait Adam, you really did?

ADAM: Yeah, it was, I did it for a while and one I just couldn't keep up. And two, I did not actually feel like I was helpful. And so eventually it dawned on me that I should follow my own advice. So I went back to my research and writing and said, okay, what would I advise someone else to do in this situation? And the clear answer was one to be aware of of the ways that, that I add value and career advice is rarely one of them. And so when I did was I, I wrote up a list of most helpful books and articles I'd read on the topic and then I just kind of sent that out as, as an FAQ sheet to anyone who would reach out. And that made things way easier because instead of having the same conversation 12 times, I just put it into a one pager and said, hey, read these books, listen to these podcasts, read these articles. I hope there's something useful in there.

JESSI: So that sounds so practical Adam. And I'm thinking about it and I'm thinking about it in the role that I sit at and in which, people approach me and they would like all manner of favors for me and so I'm just curious, where does that fall for you?

ADAM: There's a whole bunch of research that Mark Bellino put on the map years ago and that a bunch of us have followed up on. There are two major reasons why people help others at work. One is kind of being a good soldier, right? You’re committed to the mission of your organization, you care about the people in your platoon and you really want to be helpful. And the other is being a good actor, right? It's all about impression management and maintaining a good image or reputation. And I think this is a test of, what are your motivations? If you're saying yes to people only because of the image benefits and you're not convinced you can be helpful, you're one doing them a disservice. But two, in the long run, you're actually doing your reputation as a service. All those people that I said yes to and then gave really bad career advice to, they probably hate me now. So I think that it's really easy to get sucked into the short term cost of saying, no, which is something that Vanessa Bonds and Frank Flan and their research had found. We tend to do a lot, right? We were kind of, we're too worried about the cost of saying no. And the reality is there are big costs of saying yes, and I think we need to be aware of those. And so I guess, Jessi, if I were in your shoes, what I would do is I would say, look, whenever somebody asks you for something and your impulse is to, to help because of a desire to be liked or respected, think about whether there's a more helpful way to say no. So for example, like one version of this for me is I get a lot of questions about, okay, should I leave my investment banking job or my consulting job now? And I'm like, well, technically I've never had one of those jobs, but I've taught a few thousand students have. And some of those students are really happy to pay it forward and they've gotten advice from people in the past. And so I've got a kind of a network of people now who are excited to help with that request and really knowledgeable about helping with that request. And it saves me time and it also makes me look better because I opened the door to somebody who could actually help them.

JESSI: Okay. So that makes a lot of sense. So I want to go back to the framework that you spelled out for how you decide when you're going to do nice things for people, how you decide what time is your time.

ADAM: Well, I think one of the things I've, I've actually gotten comfortable doing is responding in batches, right? So the same way that I have a day where I'm focused on students. I do kind of have an administrative day in each week and it's a day that I don't look forward to, but it's also a day with when I'm done with it, I feel like I have all, I have all this mental space and time freed up to think more creatively, and to be more proactive also in reaching out to people who I want to support as opposed to just being reactive and responding to whoever wants to sort of jump into my schedule. So I think, I think that can be matters the same way, right? I think too many people when they get the request in like, ah, I need to, I need to deal with this right away and get it out of my inbox. And I would say, no, you want to, you want to have an admin inbox or a favor inbox and you pick a day every week and actually carve out a time, it might be an hour or two where you get through as many of those as you can and then you pick it up the next week.

JESSI: Coming up after the break, our reporter Caroline Fairchild and I talk about how to prioritize when to be helpful, and how--to set better boundaries.

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JESSI: Okay, I’m back and I’m here with Caroline. Hi Caroline.

CAROLINE FAIRCHILD: Hey Jessi. So this week, both you and I got kind of obsessed with this idea of, how do you say no to the people in your network who you just can't help in the way that you want to help them.

JESSI: Right, either you actually don't have the skills to help them, or it doesn't make sense to prioritize the time to do it.

CAROLINE: And you and I have talked about this a lot, even before this episode. We both work on a social network, we're both journalists, we get a lot of inbound from people who want our advice and our help. And we genuinely want to help them. But I wanted to hear from people who have great strategies, for helping everyone in a way, in a way that allows them to actually get their own work done as well. So I talked with our listeners as well as some members on LinkedIn and I want to play some of what they had ot say for you. One of them was Sanyin Shian, she's the executive director at the Coach Kay Center for Leadership and Ethics.

MEMO: Here's my one trick. Offer them an alternative. So for example, someone would ask me to join a committee. I will come up wiht a solution such as, I may not be able to make every meeting, however I can bring someone else with me.

CAROLINE: So I loved this, because you are really saying no but it's in a wayin which the preson doesn't feel like they're being let down. We also heard from Will Jacyll who used to work for CNN and he gave a solution that perhaps will take less time.

MEMO: So a tip that I learned years was to give somebody two choices. Both of the choices acceptable to you. If somebody wants to meet for lunch, tell them that instead you can do a phone call on Monday at 10 AM or Wednesday at 3 pm.

CAROLINE: We also heard thsi week from Allison Levine. She's a keynote speaker as well as a New York Times best-selling author.

MEMO: So the other thing that often dictates whether or not I say yes to helping with something or getting involved in a project is the level of commitment I see from the person doing the asking. If they have not done their homework, then it's not something I'm willing to get involved with. Because if you're asking me for my time and attention, you better darn well have put in your time and given it your focus as well. So when people come to me and they haven't done their homework, then that's an automatic no. I'm like, can you do a two-minute Google search and get a little bit of information?

J: And I loved that one because gosh, it sounds familiar.

C: Another member that we heard from this week was Kate Luce. She's the president and CEO at the Mississippi Export Railroad Company. And what she told us is that if there's something that you can't do today but maybe you want to do tomorrow, just be honest with how you communicate that.

MEMO: So if there's not the opportunity for us to work together today, let's plant that seed for tomorrow. And I try to be very upfront like when someone wants me to join their board, in saying these are the commitments that I have right now, and so making it clear that now is not the right time, but I would like to stay engaged and learn more about their organization.

JESSI: It's actually advice that really resonates for me. If somebody approaches me about something, particularly if they approach through somebody I really care about, and I'd like to help them but I can't right then, I tell them when I can. I say please get back in June and I'll be freer in June and let's talk then. And the thing is, truthfully, most people, if especially they don't really want what you have to offer, they're not going to get back in touch with you in June. And if they do get back in touch with me, I always prioritize spending time with them. I feel like all of this comes back to this thing that I don't exactly understand why it's so difficult to do. Which is, just communicate directly and tell the truth.

CAROLINE: Yeah.

JESSI: And Caroline, so much of this gets back to, how do you use your time? And it occurs to me that that is something that would be great to know from other people.

CAROLINE: Right, we want to hear from you our listeners, on that this week. So if you have concrete ideas that you think others could benefit from about how you manage your time in an increasingly collaborative workplace, let us know. Send us a voice memo to hellomonday@linkedin.com and we hope to share your thoughts on next week's show.

JESSI: Thank you Caroline.

CAROLINE: Thanks Jessi.

JESSI: Now back to my conversation with Adam Grant.

***

JESSI: I want to know just what your, what your approach to email is. You

ADAM: Productive email habits are mostly about saying, look. I used to write soliloquies. It's right. And I just was not happy with the amount of time that I put into writing emails. And so I decided that I was going to try to respond in shorthand it and know that actually people appreciate a fast no, much more than saying yes and then dropping the ball or a delayed, really long response. And so my goal is when I open an email, I want to answer it. I guess sometimes people call that the touch it once policy. And if I can't do that, then it's not something that belongs in my inbox anymore. It's something that belongs on my to do list and I need to file it, automate my inbox, and that makes my inbox pretty clean. But otherwise, I actually, I actually like, I like the rhythm of saying all right, I'm kind of stuck on a sentence here. Let me go answer an email. I know this is going to sound really weird to a lot of people in it. Jessi as a, as a fellow writer, I don't, I don't know if this is going to be weird to you to tell me if, if, if it is odd, but you know, people are always talking about that like the distraction and the switching costs associated with multitasking. For, for me, sometimes though, the best way to get out of writer's block is actually just to answer some emails. Like if I have four or five emails and I get through them fast, I feel like I'm starting to get into flow. I'm like, Oh, today I'm a writer. Like my, like my, my typing is actually capturing something that's fluid. And so now maybe I can, I can carry that over to something more complex that I'm trying to write about. Do you ever have that experience?

JESSI: Well, it's funny that you say that I am because I do this thing that I really, I think I've only told my wife and now you and everybody listening, which is I set the timer on my phone to go off every 10 minutes and I just keep switching tasks until I start writing the thing that needs to be written and then it writes itself. So I would start writing it, but in my head I'd be like, I'm only committed to writing this cover story for x magazine for 10 minutes and then then I'm going to return emails for 10 minutes. Or then I'm going to clean the kitchen for 10 minutes. And I do that back and forth and back and forth until the one time I sit down and start writing for 10 minutes and know what I'm saying. And then I might write for four hours.

ADAM: Wow. Why?

JESSI: Surely there's a thing there. Surely that is, that is a way that people function in the world.

ADAM: Yeah. Why, why do you set it up this way?

JESSI: Well cause I need to take away the pressure to perform well. I mean, the thing about writing is – writing takes so many different forms right Adam, but when you're writing something like a book or a longer article, you have the pressure for it to be good and for it to impress people. And sometimes for me, that pressure becomes so overwhelming that I can't get started. Okay.

ADAM: Oh, that's interesting. So answering emails as a way of almost lowering your standards. Okay. I can, I can write something a little drafty and a little messy and that's okay.

JESSI: Yeah. I suppose, I mean, how do you write when you write something significant at piece of thought work?

ADAM: You know, I always think of a Vonnegut here. I loved his distinction between swoopers and bashers. And what drives me crazy is people who write like bashers, which is I write one sentence and then I perfect it. And then I write the next sense and it takes them forever. Swooping for me as much more efficient. And my read of the evidence from Bob Boison's colleagues is, it's just as effective, which is to say, all right, when I, when I write, I treat editing and writing as two separate tasks. And I think actually this applies to any kind of creativity that idea generation and idea evaluation and refinement are completely different. And maybe even opposite mindsets, right? Trying to draft an article is a, it's for me, it requires divergent thinking. Ah, I want to be connecting disparate ideas. I want to be open to lots of possibilities and it's pretty free flowing, whereas then vetting, is this sentence any good and how do I make it easier to read or more interesting to read that that requires much more of a narrow focus. It's about precision. It's convergent rather than divergent. And so I really cleanly separate those in the sense that I will, I will try to write an entire article or a draft of a chapter in, just as I would talk and not do, just like if we were in this conversation, you wouldn't just keep self editing and say like, wait, let me redo the last four sentences. I'm not going to do that when I write either. And then I'm going to go back when I'm, when I'm in a much, I guess much more critical mindset and read this stuff and say who wrote that garbage and now I can fix it.

JESSI: Huh. Well, one thing about the process of writing the process of, let's not say writing, the process of bringing new ideas to life is that it doesn't always fit into an sort of prescribed nine to five workday. And it can be really unruly and take over one's life at, at moments. And I'm curious, given that your whole career is focused on bringing new ideas to life, how do you balance work and things that are not work, your family, your community, whatever's important to you?

ADAM: Well, first of all, I think the balance metaphor is, is the wrong one. I don't think my life has ever in perfect balance and I don't know anyone who, whose is, I think know when I think about balance, I think about someone doing a tight rope walk and having everything in perfect sort of harmony or proportion. And I think the reality is that if you care about your family and you care about your work and you also care about your health and your friendships and you know, all the different domains of your life, they're not all going to be perfectly balanced. At least, in the span of a day, maybe even not in the span of a week. And so I've come to think about it much more in terms of work, worklife, rhythm. Hmm. In that it's like if you think about a year as a song with a bunch of different versus but then also with a melody and maybe a refrain that, that repeats a bunch of times when I try to do is say, okay, I'm going to have several days a week that are totally family focused. And I feel very lopsided in those days because I don't do a lot of work. And then my work days are the opposite. They're heavily work focused. And I feel out of balance on those days too. But the good news is that over the course of a month, that means I've, I've gotten into really deep work or flow, on some important projects. And I've also spent a lot of quality time with my family and I think there's this mythical aspiration of balance is something we should, we should just all give up on it.

JESSI: That is really true. Like there’s an idea that I’m reaching for that’s tied to where we begin in this conversation. This idea that success in the world is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others and we weill accomplish more by focusing on how we interact wiht others, how we help others, how those dynamics work.

ADAM: Okay, so as the world changes, is it better to be a giver, does, does the fact that we're more connected, change that dynamic at all? And I, the first thought that I had was, I actually think that as the world of work,kind of shifts under our feet. It's going to be harder and harder to get away with being a taker because, I think we're going to probably at some point move toward a world of work that's much more organized around, I wouldn't say gigs, but projects. Right? So there's like, there's no reason why we need to have in the future if we can automate a lot of, a lot of technical work. Not all of it, but a lot of it, there's no reason why we need to have a company as opposed to, kind of a professional guild. Right? So if I'm, if I'm doing something and I mostly have robots, let's say building cars, but I have a, a complex problem to solve. Like, why don't I go to the engineering guild and recruit some really great people there and whether I want to work with those people is heavily dependent on, okay, are they gonna make me better? And are they willing to use their knowledge and their skills to help other people succeed, not just to elevate their own success. And you know, if they can't accumulate all of this status and protection and power inside of one organization, it's going to be harder than for the really successful or competent takers to stay where they are, and maintain their success. Because people are going to say, you know what, I'm not limited to collaborating with the people in my organization who work lateral or above. I cago outside. I can go to a bunch of free agents and the people who are going to win in a free agent nation, which Dan Pink predicted two decades ago, I think are the people who not only are really capable but use their capabilities to elevate other people.

JESSI: That was Adam Grant. Next week on the show: Melinda Gates started working at Microsoft when she was just out of school. She entered an office that was overwhelmingly male, and she almost left. Until...she realized the importance of being herself.

MELINDA GATES: And the more I was myself, the more I could attract people around me.

JESSI: Now, years later and with the spotlight shining on her, it remains the most important lesson she practices.

If you enjoyed listening, subscribe, and rate us on Apple Podcasts – it helps new listeners find the show. And, remember, we’d like to hear from you! How do you manage your time well? Send a voice memo to hellomonday@Linkedin.com.

Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn. The show was produced by Laura Sim, with reporting by Caroline Fairchild. The show was mixed by Joe DiGiorgi. Florencia Iriondo is Head of Editorial Video. Dave Pond is our Technical Director. A shout out to listener Tenisha Urena for her voice memo….

TENISHA URENA: This podcast makes my whole week, it’s innovative, it’s motivating....Keep up the awesome work, guys.

Our music was by Podington Bear and Pachyderm. Dan Roth is the Editor in Chief of LinkedIn.

I’m Jessi Hempel, thanks for listening.

[CODA]

JESSI: Alright Adam, you know, unlike you, I am new at podcasting. And you're actually the first guests that I've had on who I haven't interviewed in person.

ADAM: I have to tell you, Jessi, I think in person podcast recording is massively overrated.

JESSI: You do?

ADAM: I do. Yeah. One, I think it's, I mean, you know what I look like, right? Why, why do you need to look at me? I often find when I'm in, when I'm in your shoes and I'm interviewing people, I often find that they're more open when, when they're doing it by phone. They don't, they don't have somebody else's eyes on them. Maybe they feel less judged. And I think there's maybe a different intimacy to just being in somebody's ears. And then I was also, I love this set of studies that Michael Cross led at Yale where he showed that if you want to read someone's emotions, you're better off closing your eyes and just listening to their voice, then you are trying to read their face too.