Breaking the Taboo, Part 1: Fake it until you make it

Power: Breaking the Taboo

This is the first entry in a series of four blogs on power: each will contain an important lesson about how power works, and I will offer concrete tools to help you navigate and influence your social environment more effectively. The text below is based on a talk for Rabobank Women’s Network on 24 October 2018. Missed the introduction? You can find it back here. Interested in reading more? Make sure to follow my page to be notified when I upload the next post!

Are you nervous when you join a new group? Are you often afraid that other people might not like you? Do you ever pay attention to how much eye contact other people in the room make with you during a meeting? Does it make you feel good when others pay more attention to your opinion than they do to others?

For me personally, the answer to all those questions is yes. And again: I am sure I am not alone. Subconsciously, most people are constantly assessing: am I being heard? Am I taken seriously? What is my relative position in this group?

The mechanism that is at work here is what is called ranking. Ranking is power in motion, in its flexible, non-institutional form. Ranking is at the heart of many interpersonal and group dynamics: it plays in groups of friends, between colleagues, and, notoriously, in elementary school classrooms. Note that ranking has both formal and informal components. Your formal position in a given context can result in a high ranking: for example, when people are in a meeting with a CEO in a boardroom, they will typically behave very respectfully, giving the CEO plenty of time and opportunity to speak. But ranking also depends on many informal behavioral factors: your body language, tone of voice, use of words, how you dress, and so on.

Why do we care about ranking? Well: since humans are social animals, our security depends on our position in our group. Without the support of others - our colleagues, our family, our friends, and our wider society - we would have a very difficult time in life. Having a high ranking, then, makes us feel safe: high ranking reaffirms our importance to the social group. It ensures we won't just be abandoned or kicked out.

In addition, there's a biological component to this: having a very high social ranking unleashes dopamine and other chemicals in the brain. A lot of research since the 1970s has shown how high social ranking can distort our judgment, leads to risk-seeking behavior, negatively affects our cognitive functions, and reduces empathy. It is also, quite simply, addictive: those who have a high ranking cannot bear to lose it. That explains those dictators who remain on the throne until their death, even when they could have retired to a tropical private island decades ago.

It can be quite funny to observe ranking closely. I have to think of a meeting I joined some time ago, where a particular CEO made it clear to everyone he was the top dog: he determined who could speak and when, spoke with a firm and decisive tone, and led the meeting in a dominant way. After the meeting, he received a phone call from his wife and I saw a completely different man. He hung his shoulders, bowed his head and spoke with a submissive, defensive tone: turns out he had forgotten to pick up the children from school. From a professional to a family context, his ranking shifted drastically for the worse.

As I mentioned earlier, both formal and informal factors play a role in your ranking. Those formal factors are not so flexible: you usually don't just get a promotion because you'd like to have it. And the informal factors can sometimes feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy: your body language, tone of voice, and social behavior often reflect the way you think about yourself, and that has a big impact on your position in a group. People with high self-esteem automatically get a higher ranking than those who are down about themselves. That can be difficult to change, but there is also hope: it means there is a psychological truth to the idea that you can simply fake it until you make it.

I had a personal experience with this strategy quite recently. Together with a male colleague, I went to pitch a change program at a large company. At the pitch, I started to introduce our business, asked questions, and actively participated in the conversation. Despite all that, from the very start of our conversation, the company's representative barely made eye contact with me. It even happened multiple times that I'd ask a question and he proceeded to answer it to my male colleague, who was getting quite embarrassed. Obviously, this whole situation made me feel awkward and excluded; the man was basically ignoring my presence. He ranked me, apparently, so low that I wasn't worth acknowledging.

At any other point in my past career, this would have totally destabilized me. I would have withdrawn from the conversation and would have stopped participating, thinking that it'd be better to let my colleague handle it. I would have doubted myself, and probably wouldn't have slept that night, wondering what I'd done wrong; whether my questions had been stupid or my presentation skills lacking. But after my study of power, I knew that doing so would only reinforce his prejudices. So instead, I started to strategize. If he would not rank me as an equal, I would have to do it myself. I chose to persevere in a cold-blooded way: I continued to ask questions, and started to speak even more than before. Finally he came around: I had gotten his attention. My ranking had risen.

At the end of our meeting, I asked him if he was aware of the fact that he'd barely acknowledged me at the start of our meeting. What do you think? He was completely caught off guard.

It is an unfortunate reality that many women experience: in a professional context, it often takes more work to achieve the same status as a man. It's important to be aware of this, if only so that we do not blame ourselves for a structural issue. But know that your self-esteem and your behavior will often give you opportunities to influence the situation: if you project a higher ranking outward, that will be how the world starts to see you. In short: fake it until you make it.

What are your experiences with ranking? Have you ever turned around a situation where you initially didn't have much status? I'm curious! Let me know in the comments below, and please share this blog if you enjoyed it or found it useful. The next entry will be about power in interpersonal interactions: specifically, how we often respond to power defensively, and in doing so, only make it worse. Fortunately, we can turn this dynamic around - and I'll teach you how to do just that. I look forward to continuing our discussion of power in a few days!