of knowledge and advice.
After being told she was too generous, Bauer adopted an approach that resembled Geller’s. She
started doing group mentoring sessions instead of only one-on-ones:
I asked myself, “Am I really the only person who can help in this particular
instance?” I tried not to think about myself as the only resource I was optimizing,
and started connecting people to help each other. Now, I’m quite explicit with my
mentees. I tell them, “People did this for me, and you need to do this for other
people. There is an expectation that when you receive that kind of generosity
from people, you need to pay it forward.”By deciding not to carry the burden alone, Bauer expanded the pie, enabling her giving to have a
broader impact while protecting her own time. “If you have a natural mix of givers, takers, and
matchers in your company,” Bauer says, “you can do a lot to magnify the giver tendency, suppress the
more aggressive taker tendencies, and shift the matchers toward giving. There’s an energy and a
satisfaction that you get out of it. In its own way, it’s addictive.”
Instead of assuming that they’re doomed to become doormats, successful givers recognize that
their everyday choices shape the results they achieve in competitive, confrontational situations. The
dangers lie less in giving itself, and more in the rigidity of sticking with a single reciprocity style
across all interactions and relationships. As the psychologist Brian Little puts it, even if a style like
giving is our first nature, our ability to prosper depends on developing enough comfort with a
matching approach that it becomes second nature. Although many successful givers start from the
default of trusting others’ intentions, they’re also careful to scan their environments to screen for
potential takers, always ready to shift from feeling a taker’s emotions to analyzing a taker’s thoughts,
and flex from giving unconditionally to a more measured approach of generous tit for tat. And when
they feel inclined to back down, successful givers are prepared to draw reserves of assertiveness
from their commitments to the people who matter to them.
For Lillian Bauer, these shifts in strategy catalyzed a chump change. As Bauer learned to leverage
her natural strengths in advocating for others and reading other people’s motives, she adapted her
behavior to invest in those on whom she could have the greatest influence and encouraged them to
give as well. The cumulative effect was that she transformed from a doormat into a successful giver.
Even though her generosity initially slowed her rise to partner, she ended up getting there ahead of
schedule. Lillian Bauer was one of the first members of her consulting class to make partner.