Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential PDF
Preview Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential
COMPELLING PEOPLE 2 COMPELLING PEOPLE THE HIDDEN QUALITIES THAT MAKE US INFLUENTIAL John Neffinger and Matthew Kohut 3 COPYRIGHT Published by Piatkus ISBN: 978-0-349-40307-6 Copyright © John Neffinger and Matthew Kohut, 2013 The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. Piatkus Little, Brown Book Group 100 Victoria Embankment London, EC4Y 0DY www.littlebrown.co.uk www.hachette.co.uk 4 Contents HOW TO USE THIS BOOK PREFACE The Big Idea Strength Warmth Strength vs. Warmth Strength + Warmth The Hand You Are Dealt Quick and Dirty Judgment Gender Ethnicity Age A Closer Look at Looks Body Type Sexual Orientation and Identity Disability Playing the Hand The Choice Is Yours Nonverbal Communication Space Face Voice Mirroring Style Words Verbal Strength Strength + Warmth, Word by Word Making It Happen Strength and Warmth in the World Into the Wild At Work Words at Work Leadership In Public Speaking In Politics Online In Love Epilogue ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 5 NOTES INDEX 6 How to Use This Book This subject is endlessly fascinating to us, and we hope you feel the same way. This book draws on both our work with clients and a rapidly growing body of social science research. Seemingly every day brings a new study with some fresh insight that further strengthens our thinking, and as we write this on Guy Fawkes Day 2012, we realize that this is by no means the final word on this topic. With that in mind, this book is intended to work in concert with the accompanying website, compellingpeople.com, where we share perspectives on current events and related issues, discuss the latest research and directions for future research, and provide useful tools to bring some of these concepts to life. We have written the text in a way that we hope is engaging and fun to read. After laying out the basic idea in the first section, we look at what happens when you size someone up—and more important, when you get sized up yourself. We then explore how the basic idea plays out in a variety of real-life settings. The book is written to be read straight through, and everything is meant to relate to people you know and situations you find yourself in. But you can also use this like a handbook and jump around to the sections that are most relevant to your purposes. If you do jump around, know that the “Making It Happen” section and the epilogue offer useful tools and perspectives to help you operationalize the ideas covered throughout. Also, if you are not in a hurry, take a look at the endnotes: You will find research citations, resources, thoughts, and stories. 7 Preface Late one Friday afternoon a few years ago, our friend Susan had a chance encounter that changed her career. At forty-five years old, Susan had worked her way up in her company and was feeling good about her job. She had just come from the last meeting of a long week, and was looking forward to losing herself in a good book on the train ride home. A well-dressed man in his mid-fifties walked up and asked if the seat next to her was taken. When she said no, he sat down and offered a polite hello. She glanced at her new seatmate and noticed he was wearing a name tag sticker on his jacket. She had already opened her book, and debated whether to mention it. But he seemed nice enough, so she decided to make the effort. “You’re a doctor?” she asked. “Yes, how did you know?” She pointed to the name tag: Dr. Edward Jordan. He chuckled and peeled it off. “Thanks for letting me know.” Then he kept talking, explaining he had just come from a conference because he was trying to start a business and needed to make new contacts. Susan nodded silently, trying to strike a balance between being polite and not encouraging him. But he went on: He was a pediatrician, and he had just launched a company to let patients confer with doctors over the Internet. As he described this venture, Susan recalled taking her daughter to the doctor a month earlier. She would not have wanted to try that over e-mail. She asked him how he planned to get people to change the way they interacted with their doctors. He smiled, and turned the question back to her. “You’re absolutely right,” he said. “That’s the big hurdle. How would you handle it?” Susan was surprised that he asked. In her experience, doctors usually thought they had all the answers. So she told him about her recent experience, and they talked about the kinds of care a doctor could and could not provide over the Internet, and how parents would feel about that. Susan suggested a few ways that Edward might speak to parents’ concerns. He nodded, impressed, and asked more questions. She told him about a successful effort she had recently been involved in to market a new product. By the time the train reached her stop, Susan was on her way to accepting a newly created position as the head of sales for Edward’s company. We all hear stories like this from time to time, and chalk them up to serendipity. To a certain extent, dumb luck put these two people on the 8 same train, and they had skills and needs that fit well together. But there was more to it. In those first moments, what was it about Edward that persuaded Susan to talk with him further instead of diving into her book? After pitching his business to industry insiders all week, what was it about Susan that persuaded Edward to pitch it again to a stranger on a train? And what was it that eventually persuaded each of them to consider taking a gamble on working together? As they spoke, each of them made a character judgment about the other. Character judgments like these happen quickly, but they are a big deal, shaping every aspect of our lives. It starts on the playground, where most kids form bands of compatriots while a few unlucky souls are almost universally shunned, and a few favored others move seamlessly across cliques. When adolescence dawns, similar judgments dictate whom we can and cannot date, and ultimately who marries whom. They dictate our professional fates as well, determining which candidate gets the job, who gets promoted, and who gets shown the door when times are tough. This book explains how character judgments work. When people size you up, what are they looking for? It also explains how to make character judgments work for you—what you can do to affect the way others see you. The Short Answer It turns out that when we decide how we feel about someone, we are making not one judgment, but two. The criteria that count are what we call “strength” and “warmth.” Strength is a person’s capacity to make things happen with abilities and force of will. When people project strength, they command our respect. Warmth is the sense that a person shares our feelings, interests, and view of the world. When people project warmth, we like and support them. So we warm to warm people but dislike cold ones. We take seemingly strong people seriously but often disregard those who seem weak and inconsequential. People who project both strength and warmth impress us as knowing what they are doing and having our best interests at heart, so we trust them and find them persuasive. They seem willing (warm) and able (strong) to look out for our interests, so we look to them for leadership and feel comfortable knowing they are in charge. Strength and warmth are the principal criteria on which all our social judgments hinge. Once you grasp this insight, it opens up a whole new window on the human experience. You can understand why a person is appealing by looking closely at how they project strength and warmth. Or, if a person 9 is not so appealing, you can see what makes them seem cold or weak. The waitress’s sweet talk projects warmth, while her level gaze suggests she does not put up with nonsense. The boss’s awkward posture projects insecurity and undercuts his employees’ respect for him. The customer service rep projects warmth by sympathizing with the caller, saying that the snafu must have been aggravating—but then expresses confusion about the problem, projecting weakness and losing the caller’s confidence. Like a cost-benefit analysis or a pros-and-cons list, the strength + warmth lens reveals something fundamental about our experience. What About You? Knowing that strength and warmth matter is one thing, but when it comes to ourselves, acting on that insight turns out to be tricky. Any time we are in the presence of others, we are communicating, sending social signals, even when the message is just “This is who I am.” We project strength and warmth using many different signals, including ones we never think about. Most of us generally have only a dim understanding of the signals we are sending. In fact, a stranger who spends just a few minutes in your presence usually walks away with a much clearer sense of the impression you make on people than you have yourself. But understanding the signals you send is not the biggest challenge. The trickiest thing about strength and warmth is that it is very hard to project both at once. This is because strength and warmth are in direct tension with each other. Most of the things we do to project strength of character—wearing a serious facial expression, flexing our biceps, or flexing our vocabulary—tend to make us seem less warm. Likewise, most signals of warmth—smiling often, speaking softly, doing people favors—can leave us seeming more submissive than strong. This presents each of us with a dilemma. We get to decide what kind of social signals to send to the world. Do we choose to project warmth, so people like us? Do we instead show strength, so we command respect? Or do we try our best to project strength and warmth, knowing that one undermines the other and we might end up failing at both? The ability to master this tension, to project both strength and warmth at once, is rare—so rare, in fact, that we celebrate, elevate, and envy those people who manage it. We even have special names for this ability. The ancient Greeks called it “the divine gift,” from which we get the word “charisma.” Today it goes by different names in different circles: It is called “leadership potential” in the modern workplace, “cool” in social settings, and even just “it” in the entertainment business, 10
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