Rule #1 Get Out of Your Own Way
Many people, particularly in professional settings such as nursing, medicine, and academia, either as faculty or (doctoral) students—particularly those from groups that have been discriminated against, such as women or first-generation college students—suffer from what the research literature calls imposter syndrome. “Imposter syndrome is a psychological term that refers to a pattern of behavior wherein people (even those with adequate external evidence of success) doubt their abilities and have a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud.”
One way of getting over imposter syndrome is to focus on others in high-level positions and their differences from you, if any. Many of them are no more qualified than you are; success is sometimes the result of luck or being born to the right parents. Another way to move past imposter syndrome is to do what this woman and other people sometimes do: push or force themselves, even in situations where they are uncomfortable, to present and sell themselves. With experience comes more comfort as well as skill. Getting over imposter syndrome is a first step on a person’s path to power.
Mastering imposter syndrome, and describing yourself in positive rather than self-deprecating ways, is critical for achieving power and success. If you do not think of yourself as powerful, competent, and deserving, it is likely that, in subtle and possibly not-so-subtle ways, you will communicate this self-assessment to others. Others are not likely to think more favorably of you than you do of yourself. Colleagues expect that you will, at least to some extent, self-advocate and self-promote—and if you don’t, that behavior will be held against you.
One way of getting over imposter syndrome is to focus on others in high-level positions and their differences from you, if any. Many of them are no more qualified than you are; success is sometimes the result of luck or being born to the right parents. Another way to move past imposter syndrome is to do what this woman and other people sometimes do: push or force themselves, even in situations where they are uncomfortable, to present and sell themselves. With experience comes more comfort as well as skill. Getting over imposter syndrome is a first step on a person’s path to power.
Mastering imposter syndrome, and describing yourself in positive rather than self-deprecating ways, is critical for achieving power and success. If you do not think of yourself as powerful, competent, and deserving, it is likely that, in subtle and possibly not-so-subtle ways, you will communicate this self-assessment to others. Others are not likely to think more favorably of you than you do of yourself. Colleagues expect that you will, at least to some extent, self-advocate and self-promote—and if you don’t, that behavior will be held against you.
Here’s a practical exercise that you can do and then repeat occasionally as part of your personal development. Write down the adjectives you use to describe yourself, both to yourself and to others. Check with friends to see if your list is correct. Then ask yourself what descriptors you need to get rid of in order to project yourself in a more powerful way. Ask yourself what positive adjectives about yourself—language that gives credit to your accomplishments and credentials—you underutilize in your interactions with others.
Rule #2 Break the Rules
Why play by rules others have made that may disadvantage you?
A stunning illustration of this principle is the study by political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft titled How the Weak Win Wars. He studied actual wars in which the difference in power—armaments, size of armies, and so forth—between the strong and weak was at least five times. Between 1800 and 2003, the stronger force won 71.5 percent of the time. Arreguín-Toft noted something interesting when he broke his analyses down by time period: between 1950 and 1999, the weak actually won more often than the strong, 51.2 percent of the time. His book explores why, and the insights are the foundation for Malcolm Gladwell’s deservedly acclaimed New Yorker article “How David Beats Goliath.” When underdogs don’t play by the conventional rules—when they employ an unconventional strategy—their winning percentage increases from 28.5 to 63.6 percent.
What is true in war is also true in basketball—teams that use a full-court press 100 percent of the time they are on defense outperform their natural talents and win disproportionately frequently. People who make their own ruls—who do the unexpected—often succeed in ways they could not have anticipated.
And what is true in war and basketball is also true in business. Many successful entrepreneurs, particularly those seeking to disrupt existing industries and business models, are notorious rule breakers. An extreme if well-known example: Elon Musk, the CEO of electric car and battery manufacturer Tesla. Musk has succeeded by violating the conventional wisdom that it is important to get along with regulators. Instead, he has taken them on and often insulted them. An article in the Wall Street Journal noted:
Elon Musk has emerged as a winner in a series of run-ins with a range of regulatory agencies that have watched as he sidestepped rules or ignored enforcement attempts . . . not letting regulations hinder his goals to revolutionize transportation with Tesla Inc.’s electric cars or colonize Mars using SpaceX rockets . . . Rather than engaging in a give-and-take with government authorities, Mr. Musk’s default response includes making public, sometimes crude, remarks via Twitter disparaging them.
Rule #3 Appear Powerful
People’s reactions to the physical and behavioral appearance of power is at least partly instinctual and subconscious. Our forebears, in order to survive, had to be able to quickly ascertain friend from foe and also who was likely to prevail in the struggle for dominance. Therefore, the ability to quickly size others up was—and is—an evolutionarily adaptive skill. Consequently, “We form first impressions from faces despite warnings not do so. Moreover, there is considerable agreement in our impressions, which carry significant social outcomes. Appearance matters because some facial qualities are so useful in guiding adaptive behavior that even a trace of those qualities can create an impression.”
Of course, these automatic responses are not invariably accurate. However, “the errors produced by these overgeneralizations are presumed to be less maladaptive than those that might result from failing to respond appropriately to persons who vary in fitness, age, emotion, or familiarity.”
Although we like to think of ourselves as rational beings, many of our decisions are guided by emotion—affect. Marketing professor Baba Shiv has extensively studied the role of emotions in choice. Fundamentally, when time and attention—cognitive resources—are limited, decisions are influenced more by affect than by thought. This situation is typical of daily living, in which we seldom cogitate about decisions but react quickly, mindlessly, and emotionally to situations as they come at us in rapid succession. The implication: the influence of physical appearance and body language on our responses to others is mostly going to occur outside of conscious awareness—one reason it is hard to overcome.
Rule #4 Build a Powerful Brand
A brand needs coherence. At its best and most effective, a brand brings together aspects of someone’s personal and professional life in a way that makes it clear why they are uniquely qualified for some position or to found a company in a particular industry. Narratives invariably arise around people and situations. It therefore behooves you to tell your story, to craft your narrative, to create your brand identity, before others can.
Many people, particularly women or those raised in cultures that inculcate the value of modesty, are reluctant to engage in what feels like self-promotion. The problem is that if you don’t tell your story, you cannot be sure that anyone else will, either, or whether others in the organization will see what you have accomplished.
One way to overcome the reluctance to engage in personal branding and self-advocacy is to reframe what this activity entails and means. Deborah Liu talks about how she inspired another person to do this:
I was doing a talk at this event and we were talking about self-evaluation, and this woman said, “I’m just really not good at self-promotion.” And I said, “Do you see what you just did there? If you treat your self-evaluation as self-promotion, you are not going to talk about the work that you’re doing. You’re not going to do it justice. If you call it helping your manager understand the impact that you have, if you call it helping your team get the recognition it deserves, would you see it differently?” And she said, “You’re right. I’ve been thinking about this all wrong.”
This small reframe can help people understand the necessity—and the importance—of telling their story, and the story of their colleagues, while making them more comfortable in undertaking the critical task of building their brand.
Rule #5 Network Relentlessly
Almost everyone recognizes the importance of professional networking—building social connections with instrumentally useful others—to their work and careers. The fact that they don’t engage in this activity sufficiently often begs the question of why.
This query has several answers, and they are far from mutually exclusive. Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and colleagues developed a survey method for assessing daily life experiences. They found that socializing was rated second only to intimate relations as the most positive activity people engaged in during a day.
However, they also found that the specific interaction partners mattered a lot for people’s positive or negative evaluation of their time spent socializing. Interactions with friends, relatives, and spouses were experienced much more positively than were interactions with coworkers, bosses, or clients and customers. Therefore, one reason that people don’t engage in professionally useful networking is that they don’t find the experience particularly enjoyable.
Social relationships are critical for career success and developing the capacity to get things done. Yet because many people do not enjoy networking and find it uncomfortable to be strategic in their social interactions, it is imperative that they be intentional in how they spend their time—and in choosing the people with whom they spend it.
Consider how you spend your time, maybe by looking at your calendar, asking others, or some combination. Are you devoting enough time to building social relationships and engaging in social interactions? And with whom are you spending your time? Are you building brokerage relationships—connecting people or organizations who could benefit from such connections? Are you associating often enough with high-status others? Are you spending your time in professionally useful ways, at least on occasion?
Believe it or not, people can learn about how to see social capital—and that learning translates into many career advantages. In an internal Raytheon study, Ronald Burt compared people who went through a training program that taught them networking principles with those who did not go through such a program, and with executives who had been nominated for the program (i.e., were considered skilled and with potential) but who had not yet taken it. He found that program graduates were “36–42% more likely to receive top performance evaluations, 43–72% more likely to be promoted . . . and 42–74% more likely to be retained by the company.”
Networking, like other power skills, can be taught and learned. It is important to master this rule of power.
Rule #6 Use Your Power
When vice president lyndon johnson assumed the presidency following John Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, he appointed Jack Valenti as a White House aide that night. Valenti, who subsequently served for thirty-eight years as head of the Motion Picture Association of America, said that Johnson immediately decided to use his power vigorously.
On the flight back from Dallas on Air Force One, reported Valenti, Johnson sat with three people in his bedroom for six or seven hours. During that time, he sketched out the Great Society, which included Medicare, Head Start, highway beautification, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the creation of the Cabinet department of Health, Education, and Welfare (later split into two separate departments), the war on poverty, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and much more. Valenti recalled Johnson saying:
“Now that I’ve got the power, I aim to use it,” and he said, “I’m going to pass that Civil Rights Bill which has been locked up too long. I’m going to pass an Education Bill which is going to make it possible for every boy and girl . . . to get all the education they can take . . . Number three . . . I’m going to pass Truman’s Medical Insurance Plan,” which today is Medicare. And he went on and on.
Johnson understood three things. First, when a person is new in a position, they have time, before their opponents get a chance to coalesce, and while the incumbent is in sort of a honeymoon period, to get a lot done. This includes actions that will help perpetuate their power on the basis of their accomplishments and the changes they make to institutionalize their power.
Second, enemies tend to last longer and keep grudges more than friends remember favors. This means that, practically speaking, the longer someone is in a position, the more opposition they will accumulate, the more precarious their position will become, and the more difficult it will be to get things done. Thus, because their time in a powerful role will be limited, people need to act quickly to accomplish their agenda.
Third is the idea that power is not some scarce, limited resource that becomes depleted by being used. Instead, the more someone uses their power to get things done—including structuring the world around them and changing who works with and for them in ways that support themselves and their objectives—the more power they will have. Using power signals that you have it, and because people are attracted to power, the more you use your power and demonstrate that you are powerful, the more allies you will accumulate.
Rule #7 Success Excuses (Almost) Everything: Why This Is the Most Important Rule of All
Madonna, the Queen of Pop, said it best: “We are living in a material world.” In such a world, it is more than Madonna’s companionship (as in the song) that is for sale—almost everything is. Or, put another way, much of life, including social life, is more transactional than we like to think.
Power is often associated with wealth, but even when it is not, power and its associated status and prestige can be used to generate financial resources. Those resources can then be deployed as gifts to prestigious, high-status nonprofit organizations to “purchase” social status and legitimacy. People’s names on or associated with legitimate, high-status institutions helps confer respectability on the donors. Not surprisingly, then, for people with wealth, donations with their names attached are an oft-used strategy to provide insurance that they will be seen in a favorable light and their bad behavior overlooked or forgotten.
To quote a New Yorker article about how charity can be used to cloak wrongdoing or compensate for it, using Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein as examples:
One view is that philanthropy can operate as a kind of penance mechanism. The individual who recognizes that he has done wrong attempts to make good in equal measure, to place a thumb on the scale of karma . . . We just recognized the annual awarding of an international peace prize created by a man [Nobel] who grew rich from the sales of dynamite and the attendant war munitions. Many of the great name-brand foundations were created in honor of individuals whose personal character or wealth was connected to deeply morally compromising actions.
Vince Lombardi, legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, is credited with the saying, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” although football coach Henry “Red” Sanders of UCLA may have said it first.
Lombardi, Sanders, and others who have said the same thing since were making the case that winning is very important. There is another way to interpret this adage, however. It is that winning—in this case, reaching a position of great power—becomes “the only thing” because winning, with the power, status, and wealth it brings, renders much else unimportant or irrelevant.
This is not to say that the powerful do not fall from grace. But their ability to maintain association with high-status institutions, and to ensure that their story is effectively told in ways that burnish their reputations—and the fact that power, because of how consistency effects operate, causes people to find ways to justify and rationalize and honor those in power—can make power self-perpetuating.