335. Power Play: Successfully Navigate Power, Status, and Influence at Work

0:03 Power and status hierarchies influence our success in our personal and professional lives. My name's Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, I'm excited to speak with my friend and colleague, Nir Halevy. Nir is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, where his research focuses on influence, power, status, and negotiation. His newest book is Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them. Recently, I've had the opportunity to see Nir in action working with Stanford athletes and coaches. He is super smart and gives sharp, on-point advice.

0:45 Well, Nir, welcome back. We had such a great time last time. It's great to have you back here. It's great to be here. Thank you, Matt. Okay. Shall we get started? Definitely. Excellent. I'd love to start with your work on hierarchies and then expand more generally to talk about communication, conflict, and cooperation. Your book, Level Up, is all about hierarchies. Can you explain what you mean by hierarchy, and how do they affect us and impact us? So hierarchies are all around us, and some of them are informal, some are formal, but they're all systems that differentiate between those who have more and those who have less. And they can differentiate based on ability and achievement and authority, but also based on status, power, number of friends you have, or number of followers on social media, right?

1:28 So there are systems that are social or in organizational nature, and they create this tendency for us to engage in social comparison to figure out where we stand relative to others. Now, your second question there is really tricky and interesting from my perspective because hierarchies do many different things depending on whether they're broken or well-functioning. Broken hierarchies undermine our individual well-being, they undermine team performance, and they undermine organizational success. They're really dysfunctional environments where people experience ultra-competitive interactions with peers. They experience them as unjust and unstable, so there is no justification for the existence of hierarchies when they're broken and so dysfunctional. But then we also have these well-functioning hierarchies that are places where we see mentorship and achievement and respect, and those tend to be based on common value and pluralism and relatedness.

2:19 And so really what hierarchy is doing to us depends on whether it's broken or well-functioning. Thank you for the definition. What strikes me about hierarchies is, in my experience at least, there are almost two different types of hierarchies, the one that you can map on an organizational chart, and then there's the one how things actually work. Do you find that difference really exists? For sure, right? And, uh, some colleagues in this space of research have distinguished between kind of structural hierarchies or structural power and then the sense of power that you have, right? So psychologically, when you feel empowered to act, to initiate, to lead, that's slightly different than your kind of formal job description or role in the organization. I'm fascinated by both kinds.

3:00 We know that even in small group of friends, hierarchies emerge very powerfully and very swiftly, right? So some people will dominate conversations, take up more space in terms of time in conversation. It's really interesting to see how ubiquitous and diverse hierarchy is. Absolutely. I remember I started a job and my manager said, "You know, here are all the reporting structures, here's who does what." And then as soon as that conversation was done, uh, somebody who'd been there for a long time pulled me aside and said, "Okay, here's how things actually work." Essentially what he was describing was the true hierarchy, and I had to navigate both. And it took me a while to figure out how to manage that tension between the structural and the more informal I want to talk more about the unhealthy hierarchies.

3:42 You describe three U's that define that. What are those U's and what should we do about them? So in my research, I discovered that hierarchies tend to break in predictable ways. The broken hierarchies tend to be ultra-competitive, unjust, and unstable. And let me unpack what each dimension or each characteristic means. When I say ultra-competitive, I mean an environment where your peers are punching you from the sides because they're competing with you endlessly, fiercely for opportunities, for resources, for promotions. And as a result of this, you experience a lot of threat, a lot of stress in the workplace, right? That's not a very successful environment if you think about the psychological safety that's required to have voice, to express your perspective, to give constructive feedback to other people.

4:25 And it might manifest in passive forms of harm, such as people withholding help, withholding advice, but also it could manifest in active forms of harm where they give you intentionally terrible advice, right? Hoping that you fall on your face and they get the promotion and so on. When we think about injustice in broken hierarchies, there are really three kinds of unfairness that people may encounter in a broken hierarchy. One is distributive injustice, right? So you really deserve a promotion, Matt, but the boss is going to give it to his nephew instead. The other kind of injustice is procedural injustice, right? So you don't know why certain decisions are being made. They seem to be capricious, arbitrary. There's no justification being provided. And the third kind of unfairness is really interactional injustice, where you're the target of rudeness and harassment and abuse, and you don't get the dignity and respect that you deserve.

5:14 What can somebody do if they find that they're having to work or exist in one of these negative hierarchies? Is calling it out enough? So part of it depends on how much status and power they have within the system and how much they feel empowered to act. I will say that some people opt to leave, right, which kind of contributes to the third dimension of instabilities. When we see swift demotion and promotion, when we see a lot of turnover, that could be a signal that we're working in a dysfunctional environment where people do not wish to stay long term because of the stress, because of the threat, because of the harms to wellbeing and team functioning. What I want everyone who is listening to us to feel is that they are in a position to fix these broken hierarchies. They can actually take actions starting tomorrow, and a lot of these actions would be everyday interactive communication tools that they could use.

6:01 Show more empathy, show more compassion, express prosocial emotions such as pride, such as gratitude toward others. Those would start acting towards repair of the kind of broken hierarchy. People often tend to assume that it's the job of HR to fix a broken hierarchy or the job of top management, but we can all actually contribute to fixing these broken hierarchies. So yes, leaving is an option, but staying and fixing is potentially a better option for the sake of all of us. I really like that idea of taking ownership and really trying, even though it can be really hard to do. But by demonstrating compassion, curiosity, concern, you can actually begin to repair and change the way that works.

6:43 I want to focus on positive hierarchies, healthy hierarchies. You argue that common values, pluralism, and relatedness are all standards for healthy hierarchies. How can leaders create these conditions so that they and their employees can thrive? So let's start with the common value principle. The common value principle has two aspects to it. The first one is we want a hierarchy that reflects who we are, who we wish to be, what we believe in, right? And so in addition to a meritocracy, a leader can create a virtuocracy based on virtue. You will promote people who show kindness, who are great in active listening, who support others, who mentor them, right? So we can add that to the ability and achievements and accomplishments based on which we promote.

7:25 The way you structure your evaluation systems, your incentive structure in the organization really shapes kind of collective value and can reflect the fact that we are a team first kind of organization. Let's say, Matt, that you have 10 thousand dollars available to you, and you can use that as rewards to motivate your team. You could say, "My top two performers will get 5K each," or you could say, "I'm gonna find a way to use the 10K that I have to do an event, an offsite, some opportunity to come together as a team and celebrate our collective success," right? That will reinforce the notion that who we are is a team first organization. The other aspect of the common value principle is really making sure that the hierarchy creates benefits for everyone, not just the people at the top.

8:07 So when we think about benefits, we think about the wellbeing that people receive from the organization, the pride that they're getting from the organization and so on. When we transition from the C to P, right, we're gonna do CPR for broken hierarchies as we try to fix them. So pluralism, the P, is really creating an environment where there are multiple pathways to contribute, thrive, ascend, and lead in the organization. We know that people are going to continue to engage in social comparisons, but when we add multiple dimensions of social comparison, when we acknowledge the value of different kinds of contribution, that goes a really long way. You want to work in an environment where you can be recognized for the value you're creating, even if it's not the typical way in which everyone else contributes. In my research on ballet dancers that I did for this book, I discovered that there's more than a dozen ways in which ballet dancers in elite companies contribute to the success of the company.

8:56 Maybe you're a very reliable partner. You're always there for the other dancers, and when you do the lift, the dancers do not feel wobbly. They're not worried that you might drop them and injure them and so on. Maybe you have a repertoire that's so extensive and so impressive that you can really do any number of different roles. So there are so many different ways in which you can contribute. And the third dimension, relatedness, involves bringing people closer together rather than pulling them apart. We want hierarchies that actually reinforce positive, strong ties between members of the organization. And so C and P and R together reinforce each other in the same way that three symptoms of the broken hierarchy, right, the ultra-competitiveness and injustice and instability are part of the same syndrome that breaks hierarchies. I think it's interesting that you use CPR.

9:38 We can use it for broken hearts and broken hierarchies, and it can help. And one of the things you shared that I've always found fascinating about your work is you're very creative where you do your studying. You work with ballet companies. I know you and I have collaborated with Stanford athletes. I love that you find interesting places to find the work. You've done a lot of work with athletes. I've studied athletes. I think it's fascinating. We've done research published earlier this year about how we can create collaborative environments, even in these seemingly very competitive environments. So think about student athletes who are high achievers, very competitive from a very young age. What we discovered is that if you're able to create internal collaboration with the athletic teams, they feel a greater sense of autonomy, right? That's very important for their well-being and for their performance in a team.

10:20 And I think one of the solutions that I also mentioned in the book in that regard is compartmentalization. We're going to compete fiercely on the field, on the court, or on the water, but when we're back in our dining halls and in the classrooms and in the dorms, 100% support. We're going to support each other on social media. We're going to support each other in person. So we're fierce competitors on the court, but everywhere else, 100% support. What you're highlighting there is the role of values. The value that we have as a team is that we compete when it is time to compete, and we support when it is time to support. So having that strong value is important, which means when you're recruiting, when you're retaining, the values that empower or build those hierarchies really matter. Something else that really matters is communication, as you know, near and dear to my heart, and you've even inferred that communication can support and enable healthy hierarchies, but can certainly be involved in making very bad negative hierarchies.

11:12 What advice and guidance do you have for how communication can be used effectively in hierarchies? I think one way in which we want to support the kind of fixing of broken hierarchies is by understanding how we can do a lot of small actions on a daily basis to kind of support a well-functioning hierarchy. For example, there are almost no barriers to writing a gratitude letter, right? You can be the CEO and write a gratitude letter. You can be a new employee and send a gratitude note to someone who showed you the ropes, just like your story earlier about kind of an old-timer who was helpful in guiding you. We can help others by modeling kind behavior. We can encourage others to recognize contributions of teammates. Let's say we have a committee meeting or a team meeting where someone is kind of making a unique kind of contribution.

11:55 We're going to emphasize this, reiterate the value there, kind of reinforce it. We believe it has merit and a really important contribution to our achievements. A lot of the specific behaviors within the relatedness principle in the CPR framework are communication behaviors, and I'll give you one example from law enforcement. So our colleague here in MS&E, Arvind Karunakaran, has this fabulous research on 911 dispatchers. 911 dispatchers are not always held in high regard by police officers. That's because they're not sworn officers. That creates a problem for you and me when we call 911. We expect someone to show up and help us, and that depends on the ability of the 911 dispatcher to influence the police officer to actually go and be where they're needed.

12:37 Arvind's discovery is that sometimes they actually use humor as a very effective tool to influence these stubborn police officers who are sitting in their car and not going to where they need to be. They will go on the radio where other police officers hear them, and these police officers have high status, and they would say, "I see that you're parked outside a casino and someone just won a lot of money there. Maybe you should go inside and gamble if you have some extra time, officer." And others would chime in, right? The other police officers would say, "He does have a poker face," or, "Wasn't he a gambler way back and now he's busting dealers?" And so on. And that sense of humor is doing several things. First, it gets the attention of that police officer in the car who's not moving. Second, it allows people to reinforce relatedness, right?

13:17 We're all laughing together, and it builds a coalition with the high-status police officers who are now helping the lower-status 911 dispatcher to do their job and keep all of us safe and protected and receiving help. So I love these very creative communication-based solutions that help hierarchies function. Both of the examples you use, using connecting communication, bringing shared experience or expressing gratitude, are relatively low stakes and pay dividends, not just for the initial interaction, but by goodwill in the future as well, and I think that's really useful to think about. And the big thing there for me is they're not risky to do. Nir, I want to switch away from your work on hierarchy, which is really interesting, to other work you do, which I also find really fascinating.

14:02 One of the very first times I learned of your work was in a program we taught in together where we were talking about audiences and understanding audiences when you communicate. We talk a lot about the importance of knowing your audience on this show. When you were on the show before, talked about construal fit. Can you define what this is and discuss how understanding this helps us to be better in communicating, better leaders, et cetera? I'd love for you to revisit that. Construal fit happens when you're able to match the abstractness versus concreteness of your communication to your psychological distance from your audience. And I just want to define for our listeners what psychological distance means. Sometimes you feel a sense of connection to others.

14:42 You're very close because you are similar in terms of your characteristics, or you work together on a daily basis. But sometimes you're far from them. You're far from them socially. You don't belong to the same network, or there's a lot of gap in the hierarchy in terms of the distance. Sometimes you're far from them temporally, or you're talking to people who might listen to this podcast, for example, in the future, or you're talking to kind of people who used to work in the organization in the past. So there can be goal setting for the near future or articulation of vision for the distant future. You're distant from other people spatially. Some people are working in very kind of faraway locations rather than nearby and so on. When you're communicating across large psychological distances, abstractness actually helps people understand what you're saying, right? It helps to connect with them because you're not sharing the immediate context.

15:24 So you need to talk in terms of broader principles rather than very concrete examples. When we've studied the power of construal fit in organizations, in one study, we had more than two thousand employees in a tech organization. And we asked employees, "How often does your direct boss," so short psychological distance, "and how much does your distant boss," the boss of your boss, so two steps removed, "engage in two different kinds of behaviors? How much do they engage in concrete feedback?" They're actually giving you meaningful feedback on the tasks you're doing at work. That would be the concrete behavior. "And how much are they articulating broad, timeless vision for the distant future?" We discovered that the satisfaction of employees increased when their direct boss engaged in concrete feedback.

16:04 But when the nearby boss engaged in vision articulation, that didn't do anything for their satisfaction, right? That was weird. It didn't have construal fit. It was more difficult to understand, and why is this kind of proximate leader engaging in such abstract communication with me? Same thing when the distant leader engaged in concrete feedback. Why would you tell me about a typo on page 27? Is that really your job to kind of check for that? So we really want to achieve this construal fit to increase fluency, to increase effective communication. I cannot say how important when I learned that from you, that it changed the way I approach, the way I teach, and the way I communicate. We often talk about, does your audience know what you're talking about? What knowledge level do they have? What are their attitudes? Where are the resistance points?

16:45 But thinking about the psychological distance and how that impacts what you need to say, that has a huge impact on what you do. So I really would like people to think about when you are talking to people who are far away from you in all the ways you described, temporally, distance-wise, you might change the depth and specificity of what you say. I think that's really powerful, so thank you. Many of us have heard of humble bragging. I've probably been guilty of doing that, but you and your co-authors did research into humorous bragging. How does humor bragging work, and how can job candidates, entrepreneurs, and others leverage humor bragging? Humor bragging happens when you're combining kind of two desirable standards of impression management.

17:30 One is coming across as competent, and the other one is coming across as relatable, as warm. And when you're talking about your achievements, your accomplishments in a way that's humorous, you're sending the message that you're kind of a relatable colleague. We want to spend time with you. We want to get to know you. We discovered in our research that when you add to a CV sent to recruiters, we did it just one line of humor bragging in the CV gets significantly more callbacks from recruiters. When we analyzed four seasons of Shark Tank, we discovered that humor bragging actually works better than other types of humor. So selfie-facing humor might show that you're relatable, but it doesn't speak to your achievements and accomplishments. It doesn't signal competence. When you're ridiculing your competition on the show, right, it doesn't come across as very relatable.

18:12 Maybe you're more successful than your competitors, but really to resonate with your audience, you want to come across as competent and warm. So let's say you're interviewing, Matt, for a job where they're looking for people who are really high in conscientiousness and would pay attention to detail because you're going to have to review a lot of contracts. So you could try saying something like, "Well, I tend to see faces in the clouds, and I tend to see typos in my friend's texts, and I will find all of those typos that will save us thousands of dollars in our contract." So letting them see you as a friend and see you as this person looking at the clouds, but also as someone that will save a lot of money for the company. I like this idea of using levity as a tool to demonstrate both competence and warmth.

18:53 The very first concept that we teach in my strategic communication class is how to balance that tension of competence and warmth. They're both important, and using levity humor can help, and you studied it in some really high value and important situations, job interviews, looking for money, other situations. So I like this idea of using humor to help you put forward your competence, but show that you're warm. Thank you. I knew this conversation was going to be great 'cause you and I always have great conversations. Before we end, as you know, I like to ask three questions. One I make up just for you and two you've answered before, but I'm wondering since we've had a little time, if those have changed. You ready for that? Yes. One of the things that I think is so cool that you did is you've actually created a card game, and you help people play it in your classes and in some of the consulting you do.

19:39 Tell all of our listeners about the card game and what results from it. It's not just playing cards to have fun, although it is. What do people learn? The game is a strategic game that models workplace interactions when you are in a position to influence your own power and status, but also other people's power and status. We start the game from perfect egalitarianism. So each person in the table, let's say kind of imagined table of 6 players, have 2 power cards and 2 status cards. And we each draw from a pile of action cards such that in our hand we have several different actions we could play. We could engage in brokering or gossip or put a burden on another colleague, but we can also collaborate and take other actions. And in the game, people have opportunities to vote up or down on other people's kind of actions.

20:22 There is an element of luck, just like in life, so people roll dice and so on. And although all groups start with perfect egalitarianism, within minutes, there's a hierarchy at the table. One person will have 7 status cards and another will have 3. One person will have 5 power cards and the other will have 4. The goal of the game is, if you wish to win, to be the first person to get 5 power and 5 status cards But these people have different pathways to get that. And each hierarchy that emerges in each table is very different from the other hierarchies. So when we debrief the game, we ask people, "How did you choose your actions? Did you monitor whether people were hiding their cards or playing with transparency?" And we discuss the culture that emerged very powerfully, very swiftly in the different tables.

21:02 And in some tables you see a cutthroat, ultra-competitive environment. In other tables, you see a supportive environment where you see a tide that lifts all boats. So one thing that we discuss is, what if you were to multiply this six-person table by 1,000? Think about a 6,000-person organization. If people in that organization always play burden and assign and compete, right, that would be a very different organizational culture than if you were to play collaborate and broker and other positive cards all day long. But there are also takeaways for leaders. Leaders really are in a position to stack the deck with different kinds of cards that will shape interactions, that will shape communications, that will shape organizational culture. So leaders can really see how they might influence.

21:44 And one of the takeaways really for everyone is that as you're navigating your workplace hierarchy, you're also simultaneously shaping it. If people are curious, they're welcome to go on promotiongame.org and read more about the game. I love that you use a game to highlight these really important values, and one of the things I take away from what you've said is we can all think about the imaginary cards that we hold in our day-to-day life and how we choose to play them and the impact they have. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why? Recently, I have been really enjoying listening to Eileen Gu, the Olympian. I find her responses in interviews thought-provoking and really fluent, and I love to think about the messages she's sharing with all of us.

22:27 I feel empowered listening to her. So I also take pride in the fact that she was a student at Stanford. I really appreciated listening to her in kind of post-competition interviews. She definitely comes off as somebody who's very credible and very passionate and blends that in a way that I think is very engaging. Final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? I heard you earlier kind of use alliteration with the three C's you mentioned, so let me respond to this with alliteration. So let's go with three F's. The first one is going to be focus. The first ingredient should be cognitively you should know the message. It should be very clear and articulate your main message in a very compelling way. So that's going to be focus.

23:07 The second F is going to be feeling. You should communicate with emotion. Hopefully, you're excited, you're passionate, maybe you're angry about something, but that will help you connect with audiences, and hopefully you can induce emotions in them. So feelings on your side, but also their side. And the third element, I would say fit, right? We talked about construal fit earlier. Know your audience. Make sure the way you deliver the message fits and lands well. Focus, feeling, fit. You can tell you're a professor because you always summarize your answers. Those three F's really will help you have a communication that is engaging, compelling, and importantly memorable, as was this conversation. Nir, thank you so much for coming back. Best of luck on your game and your new book, and I appreciate our collaboration that we have both on air and off air.

23:53 Thanks. Thank you, Matt. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. I always learn so much from Nir. The one thing that really stood out to me was how to make sure that we can improve our situations and hierarchies through gratitude, through complimenting and highlighting people's successes. To hear Nir's first episode, please listen to episode 30. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, Alex McCarthy, 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, TikTok, and Instagram.

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