Sue Dominus, a staff writer at the magazine, wrote this week's cover story about a psychologist and management professor named Adam Grant. Her last article for the magazine was a profile of the actress Connie Britton.
How did you hear about Adam Grant?
I've always been interested in organizational psychology, to the point where I nearly applied to graduate school in the field when I was about 25 years old. A Marxist friend of mine talked me out of it. But I stayed interested and started looking around for someone whose work was interesting. One academic told me that the clear rising star in the field was Adam Grant. He had been at the University of North Carolina, and when he announced he was leaving for Wharton, the governor of North Carolina called him to try to persuade him to stay. That piqued my interest.
And what made Grant such a standout?
That he had been given tenure at Wharton so early (at 30), that he had been so productive, won so many awards and done work that was influential in organizational psychology. His early study of call centers really established him because he showed that connecting workers to the beneficiaries of their work — in that case, scholarship students who benefited from the fund-raising phone calls — dramatically increased their productivity.
So, what's the Marxist downside to studying organizational psychology?
I remember my friend saying something like this: you want to go to school to learn how to psychologically manipulate people so that they'll make more money for their corporate employers? At 25, that stopped me in my tracks, but I see it with more nuance now.
Does the potential for manipulation disturb Grant?
In some of his papers, he does talk about the concern that companies might exploit people's naturally altruistic impulses to extract more out of them. But he also believes employees are not so naïve that they would not see through conscious efforts like that.
Might his research also apply to our personal lives?
People in healthy personal relationships do act more as what he calls "givers," and he's encouraging people to bring that into the workplace.
Your own efforts to become a giver seemed somewhat fraught, and you are not alone in that. How realistic is his generous model for the rest of us mortals?
I do think seeing the world through what he calls a prosocial lens can make most kinds of work more pleasant, at a minimum. I see a weekly memo at my office that for various reasons can make me a bit anxious; when I started approaching it as an opportunity to see if I could help move along whatever came up on that memo, it changed, for the better, the whole experience of it. On the flip side, I do struggle with staying on top of the "can you put me in touch" e-mails that a lot of people in publishing and in other fields receive. Adam is unusually motivated to help, but in truth, he is also wildly organized, which makes that kind of thing that much easier for him.
It's not a pure "give," though, because sometimes it's a "take" from the person you are putting them in touch with, right?
Of course. Because I was reading Adam Grant's book and spending time with him, over a period of several months I became much more self-conscious about trying to connect people. A few times, I did feel as if my effort to help turned out to be an imposition on someone else; but I was surprised by how often it turned out to be useful to both sides. And that's the perfect Adam Grant scenario: when you are just a conduit between two people who do need to connect and are grateful to have found each other. It's very satisfying. Of course, there are limits.
But is this altruistic behavior just another way of networking, with a bigger network?
Yes, in that someone else now has a sense of you as someone who is helpful and that you are not just in it for yourself — and if you ever do have a favor to ask of that person, that someone may be more inclined to help. Adam makes the point that you can't be doing it for that reason, of course — I'm not sure what mysterious voodoo will come back and punish you if you are giving with the long game in mind. But he probably just means that people can read others' motivations very well.
But that's when his work starts to sound like spiritual doctrine rather than economic insight.
There were times when I was reading his book that I felt uncomfortable with the assurances that the more you give away financially to charities the more will redound to you because you will be happier and thus more successful and thus wealthier. I'm sure it's all based in studies but it does start to have this almost Suzy Orman-esque karmic feeling.
Grant has pledged to introduce any of his students to any of his contacts. What does he do when a student is not so great?
He did say that his students were excellent in general, but that he would coach a student in how they might improve if he had concerns. A big part of his book is about the power of seeing the potential in everyone. He cites a fascinating study in which teachers were told ahead of time which students were expected to be strong; over time, those students did turn out to be strong, even though they had been chosen at random. The point is that when people expect greatness, they elicit it. I heard him describe his students constantly, to them and to others, in incredibly positive terms. He really is very generous in the way that he characterizes people and their motivations.
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