Dressing Down to Influence

Of Suits and Tees

It all started with a couple of meetings that I had with Banks in Mumbai. Nay, it probably started even before that in a meeting in Singapore. Let's talk about these meetings to understand more.

Cut to some 2 years back when I was in Singapore for a one-off meeting with a prospective customer hosted by a large GSI. Despite the fact that that flew in to Singapore on a red-eye and flew back the same night as the meeting, I was dressed well for this meeting (in fact I had researched about business-casual, and semi-formal dressing and the differences between them). However the partner (GSI) and my sales rep were insisting that I could do well to don a coat. No chance I that had a coat packed into my overnighter on this trip!

I was pretty much brushing away the need to be that dressed up as I was a technical chap at the meeting and was not used to focusing on the dressing style as long as you didn't look like you were at a beach party!

Well, it turned out to be much hullabaloo about nothing as some senior folks from the prospects themselves were in tees and jeans.

Cut to about a year back when I was formally into a pre-sales role and had to meet prospects for a living. I generally dress up in formals and carry a blazer along (still can't fancy myself in a suit) for added good measure. While I was still getting my wardrobe in order and while I was traveling with younger folks (for whom this whole thing is nothing short of a culture shock), I did encounter the questioning eyes from certain prospects about the dressing sense of my colleagues to the extent that certain senior leaders have even complained to my sales leaders as to why we are coming to a meeting without wearing a coat, at the very least.

The team did get a dressing down(hah!) and the sales leaders ended up taking the 'in-formal' folks to clothing stores for a wardrobe change before they had the next word with another prospect.

Dressing for Influence

While those were interesting anecdotes, it is a fact that many a first impression is created by the way you come off in your meetings. The first impression makes the best impression as they say - at least it make one of the more important impressions, if nothing else.

However, and the point of this post, dressing up is not necessarily the only way to influence. In order to influence without authority, you do have to make a connect with certain people so that you get their trust and connect. You want them to be able to treat you as a peer and be as approachable to them as any of their other friends. The key here is influencing without authority - i.e. when you are not their manager or lead, or when they do not have to take orders from you as a function of their (dotted-line) reporting structure.

In my technical roles, I find that dressing even in semi-formals gets a few raised eyebrows from the developer folks. When interacting with very technical, or geeky teams, it makes sense to dress down in order to establish that connect and get the working relationship moving without any friction. Dressing up in short, printed tees, flip-flops - these all send different signals to a technical audience. While you must certainly be comfortable yourself in carrying off such dressing styles, you must also dress to your target stakeholders. Again this differs from on organization to another based on the culture that is propagated in that organization.

A services company for instance works in a way that dressing up gives you that influence you desire. I've experienced that when you walk over to someone in sharp formals, they look up to you as a mature and senior person and you are able to get things done more easily. Whereas in a tech startup, going over in formals makes you come off as a management types who deals in PPTs and not in code. So in cases where you want to influence the coding styles, or design or talk at a technical level, then I've seen that tees, jeans, and to a good extent even 3/4ths gets you started off with a good level of acceptance and then there are only goods things to gain from there. (PS: there is no intention to stereotype companies , individuals, or roles in this paragraph - just creating some hypothetical scenarios for the sake of the argument)

My approach is to dress in a way that you reduce any unwanted friction. When you meet, you want to get down to business and you want to kick off a good inter-personal relation. Having one or the other party worry about what you are wearing should be the least of anyone's priorities in the meeting. Unfortunately there is the innate societal behavior and culture to contend with and no amount of bias training can help with that in the short term. What needs to be realized is that while we can be unbiased in our ways, you never know what the person on the other side has on their mind and part of being prepared for a meeting is being prepared for such eventualities as well.

In short, dress to influence! Dress for the kind of people you are meeting with, the kind of interaction you are expecting, the kind of work you are dealing with, the kind of culture established in the organization - all these matter. Dressing Up is not the only way, but Dressing Down is very effective too!