to be more selfish: she lacked the assertive edge that was expected of a consulting partner. She spent
too much time developing those around her, and she was so committed to helping clients that she bent
over backward to meet their requests. It was known that Bauer “wasn’t as forceful in pushing clients
as people felt she needed to be to make that partner hurdle, in those key moments where clients
needed to hear a harsh message, or clients had been pushing an agenda in the wrong direction.” For
Bauer, being a giver became a career-limiting move.
In a study that mirrors Bauer’s experience, management professors Diane Bergeron, Abbie Shipp,
Ben Rosen, and Stacie Furst studied more than 3,600 consultants in a large professional services
firm. The researchers coded giving behavior from company records of the weekly time that each
consultant spent helping new hires, mentoring more junior consultants, and sharing knowledge or
expertise with peers. After a year of tracking these giving behaviors every week, the researchers
obtained data on each consultant’s salary, advancement speed, and promotions.
The givers did worse on all three metrics. They had significantly lower salary increases, slower
advancement, and lower promotion rates. The givers averaged 9 percent salary increases, compared
with 10.5 percent and 11.5 percent for the takers and matchers, respectively. Less than 65 percent of
the givers were promoted to a manager role, compared with 83 percent and 82 percent for the takers
and matchers, respectively. And the givers who did get promoted had to wait longer, averaging
twenty-six months to promotion, compared with less than twenty-four months for takers and matchers.
This was a familiar pattern to Bauer: “If I err on one side, it’s probably being too generous: putting
others first, before myself.”
Hundreds of miles east at Deloitte Consulting in New York City, Jason Geller was also on the fast
track to partner. When he first started in consulting, Deloitte was just moving to e-mail and did not
have a formalized knowledge management process—there was no system for storing and retrieving
information that consultants gathered on specific industries and clients. Geller took the initiative to
collect and share information. When he heard about a project, he would ask the team for its output. He
kept a stack of articles on his nightstand, reading them in bed, and when he came across an interesting
article, he would file it away. He conducted research on what Deloitte’s competitors were doing. “I
was a little bit of a geek.”
Deloitte’s knowledge management system became Jason Geller’s brain, and his hard drive. His
colleagues began calling it the J-Net, the Jason Network. When they had questions or needed
information, he was the go-to guy. It was easier to ask him than to search for themselves, and he was
always willing to share the knowledge from his brain or his growing database. No one asked him to
create the J-Net; he just did it because it seemed like the right thing to do.
Since graduating from Cornell, Geller had spent his entire career at Deloitte, doing an MBA at
Columbia along the way. He was grateful for the support that his mentors provided to him. A matcher
would have paid it back, looking for ways to return the favor to his mentors. But as a giver, like
Lillian Bauer, Geller wanted to pay it forward. “It becomes the natural way of doing things. You see
that the folks who are successful are the ones who help others. I naturally fell into the practice of
helping others. I saw that others created those opportunities for me, and I now work very hard to
create them for other people.” Geller made a standing offer to every new employee: he would help
and mentor them in any way that he could.
The typical path to partner at Deloitte takes between twelve and fifteen years. Geller made it far
ahead of schedule, in just nine years. At just thirty years old, he became one of the youngest partners
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