Likeable Badass, page 3
Chapter 2
The Likeable Badass Solution
Often the women I find most brilliant at managing their status aren’t the most senior women in the room. Many experienced women in high-ranking positions have a lot of status, but there are lots of young women in lower-level positions who have just as much. This was the case with Kate, a woman I met when I spoke at her company’s annual women’s conference. As my guide for the day, Kate met me at the hotel, showed me to our meeting room, and helped me transition from meeting to meeting. As I walked alongside her, I noticed that all the senior (male) leaders knew who she was and would stop to talk as they passed her in the hallway, as though they were talking with an executive peer and not a mid-level employee twenty years their junior. What’s more, they weren’t just stopping to discuss the weather, they were asking her advice or giving her important updates. I could see they respected her.
As we talked, I learned that her status in the organization was helping her gain power faster than her peers. She had joined the company as an analyst after earning her undergraduate degree and had already been promoted twice in less than four years, which she acknowledged was unusual. She was later promoted again, this time to a vice president role, a two-level jump, to take on a new position created for her—chief of staff to the CEO. Three promotions, a senior title, and daily interaction with the CEO, all while Kate was still in her twenties.
Eventually, a few years into knowing Kate, I asked what she had done to achieve such success. Her answer was as simple as it was brilliant—a true likeable badass move. From her first day in the company, she said, she was intentional about adding value to as many people as possible, especially senior leaders. Or, as Kate puts it, “I made shit happen. I got shit done.”
On one of her first days at work her boss pulled her aside and said, “Your job is to make my life easier.” Although Kate thought his delivery was rough, she took the idea to heart. Without even knowing the term, her boss’s comment made her think about managing her status: How did other people view her? Did they think she was making their life easier? This mentality shaped the way she behaved at work. She was proactive at offering help, and whenever someone had a request, she would say yes. Some of the things she did were poor uses of her time—like the time her boss called to tell her that his hotel had bedbugs and asked her to research fumigators in New Jersey. “I learned a lot of weird facts about bedbugs,” Kate remembers. But she didn’t give up on the idea of being helpful. Instead, she kept experimenting with helping different people in different ways, and as she did, she got more savvy about what kinds of help to offer, and to whom. One day, when a senior leader mentioned that she needed to make a PowerPoint presentation, Kate jumped in to help without being asked. It wasn’t officially her job (the company had a graphics department), but Kate felt it was a skill she could contribute. The slide decks weren’t sexy (mainly compliance training documents), but they would end up on the desk of the deputy chief operations officer (her boss’s boss). Soon after, when the COO—three levels up from Kate—needed someone to help on a high-visibility presentation, the deputy COO suggested, “Kate’s good at making PowerPoints. Why don’t you ask her?”
Although she initially accepted these presentation requests just to make other people’s lives easier, Kate soon realized that she added unique value—she was very good at storytelling and understood how to make an argument compelling to someone in a different group. She had enough business knowledge to tell the story well and was also willing to do the mundane task of turning the story into charts and graphs. It didn’t take her long to realize that, unlike researching fumigators, this type of assistance was both noticed and valued by powerful people. “I started getting more and more exposure to senior leaders,” Kate said. Soon, every senior leader in the company knew Kate’s name, and most had asked her directly for assistance making executive-level presentations. Because of this, she developed a reputation as a problem solver, and earned widespread respect as a result.
Of course, humble and grounded, Kate told me the story with a shrug of her shoulders, as if to say, “No big deal, anyone could have done it.” That’s true. Anyone can do what she did, but not everyone does. As I heard her story, I could immediately pick out the critical, yet easily replicable, actions that led to Kate’s early rise in both status and power. She may not have known exactly why it worked, but I did. In short, status is the problem, and being a likeable badass is the solution.
Likeable Badass, Defined
When you hear the term likeable badass, you get it. It’s more than a catchy term of endearment, though. It has a specific meaning, rooted in psychology, that is central to our discussion of status.
To understand the definition, we need to begin with the science of how people judge other people. Every time you observe, or even hear a story about, another person, you draw conclusions about their underlying personality, abilities, and traits. Other people do the same to you. You might think that because no two people are the same, our judgments of them are likely to be just as varied. That’s not the case. Our perceptions of people are organized around two fundamental dimensions: Warm-Cold and Assertive-Submissive.
Warm-Cold (Likeable)
When we observe other people, one thing we try to figure out is how they’ll treat us—will they care about us, will they help us, will they be pleasant? This is the Warm-Cold dimension of person perception, and it captures our social functioning—how well we get along with others. A person at the Warm end of the continuum is one we perceive to be very concerned about others and who interacts well with them. There are a lot of different ways that a person could convey Warmth, such as being agreeable, charitable, respectful, or cooperative. A person at the Cold end of the spectrum would be perceived as the opposite: impolite, uncivil, quarrelsome, and uncooperative.
Assertive-Submissive (Badass)
The other thing we try to figure out about people is how capable they are—will they work hard, will they avoid mistakes, will they produce good work? This is the Assertive-Submissive dimension of person perception, and it captures our task functioning—how well we can complete tasks, achieve goals, and get things done. An Assertive person is one we perceive to be very capable of succeeding at whatever is asked of them. We would describe this person using adjectives like competent, organized, self-confident, ambitious, and persistent. A Submissive person, on the other hand, is perceived as incapable of accomplishing tasks successfully, characterized by descriptors like timid, self-doubting, meek, lazy, and unproductive.
As the illustrations suggest, each dimension is a continuum, so a person can fall anywhere along a given line. And each dimension comprises multiple traits (even more than I’ve listed here). To be perceived as very Warm, for example, you don’t necessarily need to check every box on the list. You just need to do something that leads people to conclude that you play well with others. Being agreeable is different than being charitable, but they’re both signals of Warmth. Similarly, persistence and self-confidence both signal Assertiveness, even though they are different qualities. This is an important point to remember as we explore the relevance of these dimensions for status—how you show up matters a lot, but there are lots of different ways to get there.
For simplicity, I’ll usually refer to these dimensions as Warm and Assertive (or Warmth and Assertiveness), while occasionally referring to the other endpoints (Cold and Submissive). And as you can see, I capitalize Warm and Assertive (or Cold and Submissive) when referring to the dimensions, to distinguish them from the specific characteristics of warmth and assertiveness. So when you see these words capitalized, remind yourself that I’m referring to groups of traits, not any one in particular.
When you put the two dimensions together and graph them, they form the axes of a 360-degree space known in psychology as the interpersonal circumplex. Perceptions of others can fall anywhere in this circle, reflecting different judgments of Assertiveness and Warmth.
For our purposes, it’s helpful to think of this circle in four quadrants. Moving counterclockwise from the top left, we have the following:
Hostile Strength: A person perceived as Cold and Assertive. They can get things done, but no one enjoys them. If the person is a woman, they may be labeled “aggressive” or “a bitch” and told they are “too much.”
Hostile Weakness: A person perceived as Cold and Submissive. This person is both ineffective and uncaring.
Friendly Weakness: A person perceived as Warm and Submissive. This person is sweet and harmless, but not very capable. If the person is a woman, they may be told they lack “confidence” or “presence” and told they are “not enough.”
Friendly Strength: A person perceived as Assertive and Warm. This person can both get along and get things done. This is likeable badass territory.
We All Want to Be Likeable Badasses
The interpersonal circumplex is foundational in psychology research, including my own, and is central to our understanding of status. Importantly, the interpersonal circumplex is essentially a reputational map. When we refer to people as having a “good reputation,” what does this mean? Looking at the circumplex, we see the answer. If you could choose how others perceived you, which quadrant would you want to be in? If you chose Friendly Strength, congratulations, you’re just like everyone else. Assertive is more positive than Submissive, and Warm is more positive than Cold. A “good reputation,” then, isn’t idiosyncratic: We all aspire to the Assertive-Warm quadrant of this reputational space. We all want to be seen as capable and caring.
As an academic, I’ve known this for a long time. Still, writing this book gave me a new opportunity to experience this truth through others’ eyes. No matter whom I spoke with, I found that simply sharing the title elicited a common, effusive reaction: “Likeable Badass. YES! That’s exactly what I’m going for.” Perhaps you experienced this yourself if the title of the book enticed you to pick it up. Most people have never heard of the interpersonal circumplex, but we spend our entire lives trying to navigate it—all hoping to end up in the exact same spot.
Likeable Badasses Gain Status
Not only is a likeable badass reputation desirable in its own right, it’s also our path to status. We award status to those that we see as both Assertive and Warm.
Remember that a person’s status is the extent to which others respect and regard them. Our brains (usually nonconsciously) decide how much to respect someone by making inferences about how much value they contribute—past, present, and future—based on what we observe. The more we expect someone to have useful skills and knowledge to offer, the more respect and regard we have for them. This is why demographic characteristics, like gender, age, and race, affect status—they (unjustly) influence our perceptions of a person’s potential contributions based on cultural biases.
However, demographics and group memberships aren’t the only observable signals of value. More generally, to be seen as a valuable contributor, people need to believe you have the conviction and ability to perform tasks effectively and efficiently, and you care enough about other people to use your talents to benefit them, not just yourself. In other words, the more you show up as Assertive and Warm, the more people assume you have value to offer. And fortunately for our purposes, conveying Assertiveness and Warmth through your behavior has been shown to have a greater effect on your status than your group memberships (e.g., occupation, gender). Showing up as a likeable badass is the most effective and controllable way to gain status.
Evidence for this comes from a robust line of research on task cues, which are behaviors that signal how good a person might be at a task.[*1] Task cues indicate that a person is Assertive (e.g., confident, competent, knowledgeable, persuasive), Warm (e.g., likeable, pleasant, reasonable, and other-oriented), or both. Because task cues imply ability and competence, we award status to those who display them. To give you a flavor of the diverse types of task cues that have been linked to status, here are a few examples:
Speech Rate, Response Time, and Airtime
The faster we talk, the more status we get. A faster speech rate is associated with greater perceptions of confidence and competence, as is shorter response latency—the length of time that passes between when another person stops speaking and you begin. The quicker you enter a conversation and the faster you talk, the more confident and knowledgeable you’re perceived to be. Both fast talking and quick responding also enable you to get (more than) your share of airtime, and your overall level of verbal participation in a group (holding the content or value of that participation constant) positively affects your status. The more you talk, the more you’re seen as having the potential for meaningful contribution, and the more status you’re granted.[*2]
Speech Style
Traditionally, people—particularly women—have been counseled against the use of “powerless speech”—a tentative style of speaking characterized by hedges (I think, it might), disclaimers (This might be a bad idea, but…), and tag questions (Let’s meet at noon, OK?). Instead, we have been advised to use “powerful speech”—the Assertive alternative that eliminates these signs of hesitation. In reality, some of my earliest research in this area demonstrated that both powerless and powerful speech are valuable task cues. Whereas powerful speech conveys Assertiveness, powerless speech conveys Warmth.
In general, status is granted to people who are both Assertive and Warm. If you can signal to others that you’re both capable and caring, then your potential value is beyond reproach. But there are some circumstances where one dimension is weighted more heavily than the other. Specifically, I found that when people expected to work closely with someone, they valued that person’s Warmth more than their Assertiveness, and awarded the person more status when they used powerless speech. However, when people didn’t expect a future interaction, powerful speech was more status-enhancing, as Assertiveness was valued more than Warmth. From this work we see that (a) speech styles influence status and (b) powerless speech isn’t universally inferior to powerful speech; they each have their own advantage.
Eye Contact
Making and sustaining eye contact conveys Assertiveness, whereas looking away conveys the opposite. Eye contact also boosts perceptions of Warmth—those who look at us are judged as more likeable, trustworthy, and relationship-building than those who avert their eyes. However, it’s awkward and uncomfortable to sustain eye contact for too long, so most people will break off eye contact at some point. The person who holds eye contact longer is considered to have “outglanced” the other person, and in a group of multiple people it’s possible to measure an eye-contact hierarchy: If A outglances B, and B outglances C, then A is at the top of the eye-contact hierarchy. In three-person groups of strangers, researchers found that one’s position in the eye-contact hierarchy in the first minute of interaction was predictive of the person’s ultimate status in the group after working together for thirty minutes. That one minute of eye contact was an even bigger predictor of status than a person’s overall participation rate in the group.
Choosing Your Seat
Have you ever walked into a conference room and debated where to sit—at the head of the table, along the side, or perhaps in those random chairs that are pushed up against the wall? In one study, researchers explored whether choosing to sit at the head of the table could help a person with a minority opinion influence the decision of a majority. They assembled small groups of strangers and varied whether individuals selected their own seat or were assigned seats. They found the person who held a minority opinion from the rest of the group was more influential when they were seated at the head of the table (rather than on the side), but only when that person was seen choosing their own seat! That is, it wasn’t the act of being seated in any one chair that mattered, but the act of selecting it. Choosing to sit at the head of the table conveyed more confidence and consistency, two elements of Assertiveness, compared to being assigned the head seat. And, as a result, the person’s ideas were held in higher regard.
Humor
There is a strong relationship between humor and status. People who have high status engage in more humor: Men use humor more than women, high participators and frequent interrupters use more successful humor in groups, and being the subject of frequent interruptions—a mark of low status—makes individuals less likely to attempt humor. Just as status leads to humor, humor also leads to status. Individuals who engage in successful humor are awarded more status, in both new and existing relationships, so long as the humor is seen as appropriate. Why? You can probably guess by now: The use of humor signals Assertiveness. And successful humor leads to positive emotions and interpersonal cohesion, boosting perceptions of the joke teller’s Warmth.
Offering Help
Status also comes from being a generous exchange partner—giving more help, advice, and support to others than you receive in turn. Offering wisdom demonstrates Assertiveness, and when it’s done to help others, it also signals Warmth. Helping others is what earned Kate her reputation as a likeable badass. In her case, the help she offered was in the context of her job, and she spent a lot of time on it. But there are many ways to offer valuable help that take mere minutes (if that) and could be done for anyone—giving someone directions, recommending a restaurant, making an introduction. As my friend Scott Tillema, FBI-trained hostage negotiator, says: “If it doesn’t cost you much, always be generous.” Not only is it the kind thing to do, it’s also a great way to boost your status.
