Prof. Adam Grant Shows How Being Generous Leads to Happiness

Thirty-one year old Adam Grant consistently helps others and in return for his generosity, he finds happiness and fulfillment. A recent New York Times magazine article illustrates the profile of a man who happens to be the highest rated professor at his university. Grant is also the youngest faculty member of Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is prolific, reputable, tenured, published, and has a PhD. But he is so much more. Most importantly, Adam Grant is, for all intents and purposes, a very generous and helpful person. And he urges others to do the same in order to increase their productivity.

A profile of generosity

What makes Adam Grant generous? Here are a number of reasons. He steps forward to help someone in need whenever the opportunity presents itself. And the help he gives is not necessarily monetary.

Here’s what sets Grant apart from those around him. He writes recommendations and introductions when requested to do so. He gives advice when sought. When a swarm follows him after a jam-packed lecture he continues walking toward his destination but answers every query thrown at him along the way. They keep pace because he keeps walking. And he keeps walking because more students are waiting for him where he’s headed and he does not like to keep anyone waiting.

A simple experiment

Adam Grant is also an avid researcher in the field of organizational psychology or the study of the dynamics in the workplace. This is one of the research questions that Adam Grant hopes to answer. Can being helpful and feeling helpful be beneficial to the rest of us (as it is to him)? Grant was a psychology major whose real-life anecdotes helped strengthen the foundations of his beliefs.

His pivotal work involves an attempt to motivate student-workers employed in a call center. The manager of the call center did not think Grant’s work would do his staff any good because he had trained many gimmicks in the past and they all failed. Grant proposed a very straightforward experiment at the call center. Here’s what he did. He called in someone from “Teach for America” who shared his inspiring life experiences. This person was a direct beneficiary of the fund-raising activity supported by the call center. What he wanted to show was whether or not meeting someone who benefited from their work would be enough to motivate members of the workforce. And just one month after the ten-minute testimonial there were significant and rather surprising results.

The call center’s revenues saw a 171% increase and the call center agents were on the phone 142% longer. They’re probably interacting more because the script that they use had not been changed. In subsequent months the revenues increased more than 400%. Letters from beneficiaries of the fund-raising activity affected the same results.

Small-scale

That simple experiment demonstrated Grant’s conviction that knowing how your work benefits others increases your productivity. But is this the same when you go out of your way to help a colleague with a favor? Grant says that it is. His philosophy of generosity is simple, really. It all boils down the law of karma and the Christian edict, “Do unto others…” But it must be known that Grant himself is not your regular do-gooder. He redefines selflessness with the tireless and compulsive drive to be helpful. It might not be that easy to follow his example.