Although they don’t always put their skills to good use, givers have an instinctive advantage in
sincerity screening. Research suggests that in general, givers are more accurate judges of others than
matchers and takers. Givers are more attentive to others’ behaviors and more attuned to their thoughts
and feelings, which makes it possible to pick up more clues—such as describing successes with first-
person singular pronouns, like I and me instead of us and we. Givers also gain a sincerity screening
advantage from habitually trusting others, which creates opportunities to see the wide range of
behaviors of which other people are capable. Sometimes, givers get burned by takers. In other
situations, givers find that their generosity is reciprocated or even exceeded. Over time, givers
become sensitive to individual differences and shades of gray between the black-and-white boxes of
agreeable and disagreeable.
But givers become doormats when they fail to use this fine-tuned knowledge of differences
between veneers and motives. The inclination to give first and ask questions later often comes at the
expense of sincerity screening. In consulting, Lillian Bauer made a habit of clearing her schedule for
virtually anyone who asked, regardless of who they were. When a client asked for a supplementary
analysis, even if it wasn’t technically part of the project, she would do it, wanting to please the client.
When a junior analyst needed advice, she would immediately open up time in her calendar,
sacrificing her personal time.
At Deloitte, Jason Geller intuitively adopted an approach that closely resembles sincerity
screening. Geller starts by offering help to every new hire, but in his initial conversations with them,
he pays attention to who seems to be a giver versus a taker. “I can’t proactively go and spend time
with every single person in the practice globally, so I try to sense who’s genuine and who’s not. Some
folks approach the conversation in terms of learning. Others come in and say, ‘I want to get promoted
to senior consultant. What should I do?’” Geller assumes these consultants are takers. “They focus on
telling me what they’re doing, with a thirty-minute agenda of things they want to update me on,
because they want to make me aware. They’re not really asking insightful questions; it’s very
superficial. We don’t get deep enough for it to be really helpful for them.”
Over time, as she sacrificed her own interests, Lillian Bauer began to recognize that some people
operated like takers: “they’re so self-focused that they will take what they can and move on, so I
started being more systematic in how I helped other people.” She started to pay more attention to who
was asking and how they treated her, and made a list of reasons to say no. To continue giving but do
so more efficiently, she wrote advice guides for engagement managers and associate partners, putting
much of her knowledge on paper so she didn’t end up repeating it to takers. “I found that was a more
strategic way of being a giver,” Bauer says.*
Once givers start to use their skills in sincerity screening to identify potential takers, they know
when to put up their guard. But sometimes, this awareness sets in too late: givers have already
become loyal to a taker. If givers are already trapped in exchanges where they feel concerned for a
taker’s interests, how do they protect themselves against the doormat effect?
michael s
(Michael S)
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