210. First Impression to Lasting Impact: Use Status Strategically

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: What do you get when you combine warmth and assertiveness? You get a likeable badass. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Today we're excited to speak with Alison Fragale. Alison works at the University of North Carolina's Business School. She studies and teaches determinants of consequences of power, status, and influence in organizations, conflict resolution and negotiations. And she focuses on the verbal and nonverbal elements of communication. Her newest book is Likeable Badass: How Women Get The Success They Deserve. I could think of no better person to interview Alison than our own executive producer and likeable badass, Jenny Luna. Here's Jenny. 

[00:00:59] Jenny Luna: Hi Alison. It's so great to have you on Think Fast Talk Smart.

[00:01:02] Alison Fragale: Awesome to be here.

[00:01:04] Jenny Luna: In your book, you write a lot about power and status, and we've talked about both extensively on this show, but tell me how you define each. And something you wrote in your book that really caught my attention was, it's less than ideal when we have this power first, status second mentality.

[00:01:24] Alison Fragale: So power is controlling resources that have value to you, value to others. So money is a resource. The ability to hire and fire is a resource. You hold car keys and your teenager wants to drive a car, that's a resource. So you are in control of something that has value to you and other people. That is how psychologists generally talk about power. Status is how much you're respected and highly regarded by other people. Power and status has some things in common. One is they're both sources of influence. If you control the information, if you control the budget, if you control my performance review, I'm much more likely to do what you say because those resources matter to me and I want them.

[00:02:06] So you are gonna have some influence over what I do. Similarly, if I look at you, and I think, I really respect you and value you, I'm much more likely to listen to what you say. I'm gonna trust that your ideas are good. So power and status are both sources of influence, and they're also similar in that they are fundamental human needs. All human beings want to be respected. All human beings want to have some control over resources that matter. Not necessarily everything, but they want to control something. The difference is that one, you can control resources even if people oppose you. With status, it's a judgment in other people's minds.

[00:02:44] You can't steal it. You can't have it, without their willing consent. You only get as much status as other people think you have and other people want you to have. This is one important difference. And the other one, which you were talking about that I talking about the book, power First, status second. There's no doubt that we have talked about power and coach people for a long time on getting more power. There's a mentality that I hear, and some people will even say it out loud. As long as I can have the resources, if I can be in charge, if I can be paid, if I can advance, if I can get to be in control, I don't really care if people respect me or not. Like I don't really care what they think about me 'cause I'm winning. I get what I want.

[00:03:24] It doesn't feel good to not be respected. But the challenge with status is that it makes power a lot easier to achieve and it makes power a lot easier to use. Meaning we generally don't wanna give resources to people that we don't respect. Why would I give valuable things to you if I don't respect you? So when we are not respected by our audiences, it makes acquiring power, to advance, to get paid, things that I talk to people a lot about, particularly women, makes it a lot harder to achieve. And even if you have the power, you get a lot more resistance because we don't like power being in the hands of people we don't respect. And so the experience of having power and lacking status ends up being a very miserable experience for most people.

[00:04:09] Jenny Luna: So it sounds like we wanna focus on getting the respect of our audience and people first. 

[00:04:15] Alison Fragale: They're both important, but if you ignore status and you just are pursuing a life of power, one, you're not gonna be that successful. And even if you do succeed, you're gonna get a lot of pushback. Whereas if you pursue status before, or at least alongside power, everything is gonna fall into place, right? People are gonna be much more willing to give you those resources and when you have them, people are gonna be much more interested in allowing you to use them and doing what you say. It's not to downgrade power and say power is not important. It is. We've been talking a lot about it relative to the very little conversation we have about status, which is not only important, it's also essentially a prerequisite. If you are respected by your audience, all the other good things are just gonna start to come a lot easier.

[00:05:02] Jenny Luna: This show, it's all about communication, and our audience really likes tools and techniques that they can start applying to their life right away. So what are some tactics for speaking, and then even some nonverbal ways of communicating, that you think we can use to be more likeable and more badass? 

[00:05:21] Alison Fragale: So take a step back and answer your question, which is, as it said, likeable badass, catchy term, but it's referencing something specific. It is referencing where does status come from? And so the idea is that this is a communication process. I show up in the world and I do something. And if it convinces you that you respect me, what convinces you that you should respect me? Two things. One is, do you care about people other than yourself? So if I communicate to my audience that I care about them and at least care about somebody that's not just me, we respect that. We don't want to interact with selfish people or competitive people who are gonna hurt us. We want to interact with people who are gonna make our lives better.

[00:06:02] So that's one thing we have to communicate. Second, people can rely on us, that we know what we're doing in some capacity. Even if I think you care, if I can't trust you to execute anything well, I'm not really gonna respect you because I can't depend on you. So likeable and badass, psychologists would call it warmth and assertiveness. I need to convince you that I care and I can take charge of my environment and I, I know what I'm doing. Those are your two communication challenges to build your status. You asked about words and verbals and nonverbals. It can come through those behaviors. It can also come through actions, all different ways in which we show up.

[00:06:40] What are nonverbals that are gonna convey warmth. Smiling conveys warmth. Eye contact conveys warmth, so mimicry conveys warmth. If you cross your legs and I cross my legs, that's a, a warmth behavior, assertiveness to control of our environment. Faster reads of speech, what we call a shorter response latency. There's always a gap between when you stop speaking and when I start. And the shorter that gap, the more assertive I'm perceived to be. I didn't have to think very long about my answer. I had it ready to go. It's a sign of capability. Contact is a sign of warmth, but it is also a sign of assertiveness. When I first started doing this kind of status work, I looked at the pair of verbal cues. I'll use women because women are often counseled.

[00:07:26] Don't use all the hedges and disclaimers and tag questions, that stuff's bad. Do the more direct communication. The less direct, when I hedge, when I put in disclaimers, when I turn sentences into questions, that does build warmth, it's seen as a warmer behavior, but the more assertive, there are no filler words, I say exactly what I mean, every statement ends in a period, every question ends in a question mark, that behavior is seen as more assertive. So those kinds of behaviors that we exhibit do affect people's belief that we care about them and that we know what we're doing. Those are not the only ways. There are all kinds of other things that we do. The content, for example, of the communication is also really important for signaling those things. 

[00:08:10] Jenny Luna: It sounds like there's a bunch of tools as we approach different situations and different people when we're trying to either show power, warmth in both at the same time.

[00:08:22] Alison Fragale: There's the non-negotiables and the negotiables. The non-negotiable is every time you show up in front of an audience, whether that's an audience of one, an audience of many, whether it's in person or virtual on social media, whatever your audience is, when you show up in front of them in ways that convey you care about them and you know what you're talking about, you will build status. That's the non-negotiable part that everyone is trying to achieve. How do I do that? That's where you have infinite ways. And so those tools that you talk about, verbal and nonverbal communication, it's good to be aware of them because you wanna know, do I have behaviors that are working for me, or might I actually have some habits that I'm not particularly aware of that are detracting from my status, and I don't even know that I do it?

[00:09:16] One example that I've been made aware of is self-deprecating. So actually voluntarily put out a statement that says, I am terrible at something. People do that all the time. If you tell somebody you're not very good at something, they generally believe you. And so you're saying, I'm not capable in this domain. And we do that for a variety of reasons. Sometimes we do it to convey warmth to say, oh, I'm not better than you. Look at all my mistakes too. Sometimes we do it as a form of humor, but it's all to say that many times we might be doing something that is detrimental to building our status and we're not aware of what it is, and therefore we're not even in a position to decide is this authentic and true to who I am and I'm sticking with it anyway, or no, I actually think I should change that. 

[00:10:04] Jenny Luna: Another thing we talk about on the show is feedback. When we're trying to see how we show up, we may be missing things and having big blind spot. You write a lot about mentorship and having a mentor. I imagine a big part of that is getting feedback on things like how we show up. 

[00:10:21] Alison Fragale: Yeah. My big thing on mentorship is at every stage of your life, you should have mentors and you should be mentoring other people from your first day in the workforce, if not before, and certainly your last day. We always need to be doing both. And on the getting mentorship side, yes. One of the things that I have found is that people who find it fairly easy to communicate, likeable badass, to communicate assertiveness more at the same time, almost always without fail, will tell me that they lucked into a mentor early in their life or career that modeled that for them, and that mentorship shouldn't just be something we luck into by chance.

[00:11:04] For me, I talk about this a lot, that my advisor, when I went to Stanford, when I got my PhD, is a woman and what was interesting was I signed on to work with her because of content expertise, that she was an expert in organizational psychology in the areas where I also wanted to develop expertise. I didn't pick her because I thought she can teach me a lot about building status and navigating reputation and things like that. But when I think back on what did she teach me that has been most impactful in my career? It's not the academic stuff, but what she was really brilliant at doing was thinking about, with intention, the relationship between how she communicated with her audience, her words, her actions, her verbals, nonverbals, all of that and what that would bring to her. And she was able to articulate that to me at a young age of, here's how you need to think about your audience.

[00:11:56] Jenny Luna: So sounds like we wanna look for people who emulate what we are looking to be, more so than have the job or the role that we currently have. I've been really looking forward to talking with you because I just started a new job. In my new job i'm filling my calendar, coffee dates, forming relationships, walking meetings, getting to know people. And the first thing I'm noticing is in my former role, there was a lot more small talk, a lot more relationship building that came in these early meetings. My new role people cut right to the chase. They wanna just talk business. There's no personal questions or really foundation to be laid. So I'm, would love to hear some advice from you on, do I revert and push that culture, way of getting to know people and trying to set relationships? Or do I go more for the mimicry and meet people where they're at?

[00:12:50] Alison Fragale: Try a combination of both. You can experiment, you can change a variable, you can see what happens. You don't have to do one thing consistently with every person forever. So what might I try? We often follow people's leads. So if you go in and you are the first mover in the conversation and you start with a couple personal things or a couple of questions, you can see what response you get. If you are quiet when you walk in and they cut straight to the business, it might feel more awkward at that point to be like, wait, let's go back a minute. You can try to control the conversation from the beginning while still being sensitive to conversational norms. Where you get a sense if someone says, I've had enough of this line of questioning, and they're ready to move on.

[00:13:28] The second thing you can think about is you're playing a repeated game. So if someone in a, an initial interaction is very focused on the task at hand and you think, wow, there wasn't much opportunity there. What else could I do for a second round? People's lives are largely online, so you can, in a very appropriate way, stalk somebody and learn a lot about them that gives you an opportunity in the next interaction to, to lead with something that might get them interested in talking about things that are a little more personal. That could be from looking at their social media, reading their bio on the company website. It could be talking to people who know them, and what you would be looking for is points of similarity.

[00:14:07] If we look at psychology, right? Greatest basis of liking and attraction that psychology has ever found is similarity. And we like people who are like us when you find the thing that they have in common. Obviously when you're trying to highlight similarities, you have to be authentic. You can't pretend to like things you don't. It's gonna come across as phony. It's gonna destroy their relationship. But you could also be very strategic in looking for opportunities. So in the book, I tell a story of another academic Greg Northcraft. I know Greg through Maggie Neale. Greg and Maggie were assistant professors back at Arizona together long before I met her.

[00:14:43] And then I come into his circle as well. And so what he tells me is that one of the things he feels like he did really well in navigating his life as a professional in, in academia is developing personal connections with people by figuring out genuine points of similarity. And he said, look, I love to golf. And so the first thing I always try to do is figure out does the other person like to golf? 'Cause I know if I can meet a fellow golfer, I can make a friend. And if I can make a friend, I'm gonna have a much easier time getting what I want and need because people will do things for friends that they won't do for, for strangers.

[00:15:16] He develops a consistent habit of trying to find the common points between him and his audience wherever he goes. And he tells me this story, which I relay in the book, and he said, the time that it worked better than ever was he had to go meet somebody on campus. The subject was scarce resources, scarce money, every reason to think there was going to be a bit of a fight. Because everybody wants the money. He said, but I did something intentional. I had the status to ask this guy to come to my office, but I deliberately said, let's schedule the meeting in your office. He said, I'll come to you, and he said, I did that for one reason only. I wanted to scan his physical space because then I could learn about him and then I could strike up a personal connection.

[00:15:59] So he says, I'm shaking his hand, and as I'm doing it, I'm looking over his shoulder like, what's in this guy's office? And he says, you're not gonna believe it. In the guy's office, behind the desk is a hole in one trophy. Said, if you're a golfer and you ever see a hole in one trophy, two things are true. One, there's a great story behind that trophy and the person behind the desk is just dying to tell you what it is. So this idea of how do I get people to chit chat? He made the opening, I see you've got a hole in one trophy. You've gotta tell me about that. And he knows the person can't wait to tell. And he says, we spend fifty-five of our allotted sixty minutes chatting golf, and by that point we are friends. And we take five minutes and we solve our money problem amicably in those last five minutes.

[00:16:42] And so I tell that story, I tell the book, I tell it all the time in front of audiences, and what I love about it is it's a beautiful blend of authenticity and strategy, right? If I don't know somebody, I've gotta learn about what they care about, and I've gotta figure out our points of common interest, and I've gotta bring them into the conversation, and I'm gonna do that deliberately with intention by going to someone else's office, by asking questions, doing the homework, et cetera. That's where you can start to bring those two together using behavioral science and who you truly are, merge the two. And you get this very fun, authentic way to live that also reaps large benefits by people finding the ways in which they see themselves in you.

[00:17:24] Jenny Luna: I love that because if we think we're gonna be strategic and intentional, we often think that we don't get to be authentic and be ourselves. And so that's just such a beautiful way to show that we can do both where it benefits everyone.

[00:17:37] Alison Fragale: I spend a lot of time right now and in this stage of my career speaking to women specifically, but what I'm about to say does not just apply to women, but it applies to anybody who looks different than the majority of people around them. I always say, if you look different and don't take any intentional action, it's possible that what you're communicating unintentionally to your audience is I am different than you. We don't have anything in common, so if we show up, we look different, and that's all there is. And we just get down to the business at hand, what our audience might conclude is we're not the same. And that is not gonna be to our strategic advantage 'cause human beings like similarity. Everybody has to do this. Something to be aware of is between any two human beings, there are genuine points of similarity and connection. If you can find them, you can rise above any other perceived difference and show people the true things that you have in common.

[00:18:32] Jenny Luna: Yeah. So we need to highlight that difference right away and bring that up rather than try to sweep it under the rug or pretend it's not there. Something I've also been thinking a lot about in my new role is first impressions and how important those are. But I'm curious, let's say we didn't set the right first impression. I didn't maybe get that warmth and assertiveness out in the first meeting. How bound am I to that first impression that I'm making? 

[00:19:01] Alison Fragale: You're not bound to it, right? First impressions change. You've changed your mind about people, so they'll change their mind about you. But if you use yourself as a starting point and say, hmm, when I've changed my mind about people, I don't change my mind as easily as I formed my initial impression. So it might not be one more meeting, it might be two, three, and four. I might have to work on it a little bit. That's one thing to keep in mind. Um, second thing is another negotiation tactic that can be useful here is to use an agent. Sometimes we may not be the best messenger if we feel like we got off perhaps on the wrong foot, or I wasn't able to show up in the assertive, warm way that I wanted. Maybe my first meeting with somebody was about a disagreement or a conflict. How am I gonna convey that who really respects me, that also has the respect of my audience? How could I use that person to help build my status, help change my reputation.

[00:19:55] If you've ever had an awkward interaction with somebody and you find out every other person you talk to loves them and thinks they're spectacular, and then you think, huh, maybe I should give 'em a second chance. The more people that are out there saying, right, oh, Jenny's amazing, Alison's amazing, the better off. So that's something you could think about doing very deliberately, is to say to somebody who really does respect you and value, say, I'm new here. I don't have a lot of opportunity to interact with this person. Or maybe our first interaction really wasn't that smooth. Can you help me? Can you, when it feels natural, talk about the great work that I'm doing and use them. And so a lot of times it's just about changing the messenger. 

[00:20:30] Jenny Luna: So at the end of every episode, we ask each guest three questions. Two that we've been asking everybody, and then one that we make up, especially for you. Are you ready?

[00:20:41] Alison Fragale: Yes.

[00:20:42] Jenny Luna: So I'm curious, what are you excited to study next, or what's bubbling up to the surface for you now? 

[00:20:49] Alison Fragale: So what I've been doing a lot on, is thinking about this idea of power without status. It's a downer because it is a lot about the bad things that happen to us while we have power without status. So I've still been doing a lot of work in that space to show how important status is and being able to live the life. So I've been doing a lot of work in civility and the mistreatment that happens to people. And again, although it's a bit of a downer, one of the things that I'm very focused on is how do we retain women throughout the career life cycle, particularly in what was like a leaky middle, where women, after having some success and advancing in organizations, are often leaving at like mid to senior levels.

[00:21:31] And it has a lot to do with what we see in terms of, of surveys of women feeling like as they get more power, but if they haven't successfully navigated status, they're encountering more interpersonal mistreatment, worse work environments. And that is prompting them to say, I don't wanna do this anymore, and I'm exiting. So I'm still doing that work and what I'm excited about is bringing that over to think about how do we create a better experience for women in the workforce at mid to senior levels that are gonna keep them advancing and keep better representation at the most senior levels for women. Bringing those two things together is something that I'm excited about right now.

[00:22:17] Jenny Luna: Awesome. I'll look forward to reading your next book as you move forward with that research. Who is a communicator you admire and why? 

[00:22:28] Alison Fragale: Maybe because she is top of mind, but Maggie, my advisor, may be well known to this audience, but not worldwide, necessarily famous. She taught me more than anything how to be very clear and assertive about what it is that you want, while also never faltering from the importance of doing right by other people. I think that's why she's able to be very successful and I feel like a lot of times still to this day, twenty-five years after I met her, when I confront things that I think are difficult communication challenges, I'm always thinking like, what would Maggie do here? And there are still times where I call her and I say, my first instinct is to do this. And then she would say, let's think about that. Like how would your audience react to that? She's been very good at doing that and also teaching me to get into the head of my audience, that curiosity, a lot of that came from her. 

[00:23:18] Jenny Luna: Alison, what are three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

[00:23:25] Alison Fragale: Authenticity, strategy, and curiosity.

[00:23:30] Jenny Luna: Tell me a bit more about curiosity.

[00:23:32] Alison Fragale: Communication is going to be a communicator and a receiver. The more curious you are about your audience, the better able you are to communicate in a way that's going to land, that's going to resonate. When I think about people who are really good communicators, or when I think about times when I've done a good versus a bad job, the more curious I am about trying to understand my audience, it informs the other two, right? Authenticity was obviously your version of, of you, but it informs the strategy, so we have to get curious about other people. 

[00:24:03] Jenny Luna: Thank you so much. This has been a great conversation, Alison. I've learned a lot and I'm excited to apply some of the things we've talked about to my new job too.

[00:24:11] Alison Fragale: Amazing. Pleasure to be here. 

[00:24:15] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about status and power, please listen to episode 12 with Deb Grunfeld. And to learn more about the work of Maggie Neale, please listen to episode 15. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram and check out FasterSmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content and our newsletters. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings and much more at FasterSmarter.io/premium.