335. Power Play: Successfully Navigate Power, Status, and Influence at Work

In the moment conflict, it's difficult for everyone. In our October newsletter, out now, you will learn ways to help yourself handle these challenges better. Not only do you get specific advice, we're also providing an infographic to help you remember. Find our newsletter on the ThinkFast TalkSmart LinkedIn page or at www.FasterSmarter.io under Resources. Power and Status Hierarchies influence our success in our personal and professional lives. My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to ThinkFast TalkSmart, the podcast. Today, I'm excited to speak with my friend and colleague, Nier Hellevy. Nier is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, where his research focuses on influence, power, status, and negotiation. His newest book is Level Up why hierarchies are broken and how to fix them. Recently, I've had the opportunity to see Nier in action working with Stanford Athletes and Coaches. He is super smart and gives sharp, on-point advice. Well, Nier, welcome back. We had such a great time last time. It's great to have you back here. It's great to be here. Thank you, Matt. Okay, shall we get started? Definitely. Excellent. I'd love to start with your work on hierarchies and then expand more generally to talk about communication, conflict, and cooperation. Your book Level Up is all about hierarchies. Can you explain what you mean by hierarchy and how do they affect us and impact us? So, hierarchies are all around us and some of them are informal, some are formal, but they're all systems that differentiate between those who have more and those who have less. And they can differentiate based on ability and achievement on authority, but also based on status, power, number of friends you have or number of followers on social media. So, there are systems that are social or an organizational nature, and they create this tendency for us to engage in social comparison, to figure out where we stand relative to others. Now, your second question there is really tricky and interesting from my perspective, because hierarchies do many different things depending on whether they're broken or well-functioning. Broken hierarchies undermine our individual well-being. They undermine team performance and they undermine organizational success. They're really dysfunctional environments where people experience ultra-competitive interactions with peers, they experience them as ingest and unstable. So, there is no justification for the existence of hierarchies when they're broken and so dysfunctional, but then we also have these well-functioning hierarchies that are places where we see mentorship and achievement and respect. And those tend to be based on common value and pluralism and relatedness. And so, really what hierarchies doing to us depends on whether it's broken or well-functioning. Thank you for the definition what strikes me about hierarchies is, in my experience at least, there are almost two different types of hierarchies. The one that you can map on an organizational chart, and then there's the one how things actually work. Do you find that difference really exists? For sure, right? And some colleagues in this space of research have distinguished between kind of virtual hierarchies or structural power and then the sense of power that you have, right? So, psychologically, when you feel empowered to act, to initiate, to lead, that's slightly different than your kind of formal job description or role in the organization. I'm fascinated by both kinds. We know that even in small group of friends, hierarchies emerge very powerfully and very swiftly, right? So, some people will dominate conversations, take up more space in terms of time and conversation. It's really interesting to see how ubiquitous and diverse hierarchies. Absolutely. I remember I started a job and my manager said, you know, here are all the reporting structures, here's who's does was. And then as soon as that conversation was done, somebody who'd been there for a long time, pulled me aside and said, okay, here's how things actually work. Essentially, what he was describing was the true hierarchy. And I had to navigate both. And it took me a while to figure out how to manage that tension between the structural and the more informal. I want to talk more about the unhealthy hierarchies. You describe three views that define that. What are those views and what should we do about them? So in my research, I discovered that hierarchies tend to break in predictable ways. The broken hierarchies tend to be ultra competitive, unjust and unstable. And let me unpack what each dimension or each characteristic means. When I say ultra competitive, I mean an environment where your peers are punching you from the sides because they're competing with you endlessly, fiercely for opportunities, for resources, for promotions. And as a result of this, you experience a lot of threat, a lot of stress in the workplace, right? That's not a very successful environment if you think about the psychological safety that's required to have voice, to express your perspective, to give constructive feedback to other people. And it might manifest in passive forms of harm, such as people with holding help, with holding advice. But also, it could manifest in active forms of harm where they give you intentionally terrible advice, right? Hoping that you fall on your face and they get the promotion and so on. When we think about injustice in broken hierarchies, there are really three kinds of unfairness that people may encounter in a broken hierarchy. One is distributive injustice, right? So you really deserve a promotion, Matt, but the boss is going to give it to his nephew instead. The other kind of injustice is procedural injustice, right? So you don't know why certain decisions are being made. They seem to be capricious, arbitrary. There's no justification being provided. And the third kind of unfairness is really interactional injustice where you're the target of rudeness and harassment and abuse. And you don't get the dignity and respect that you deserve. What can somebody do if they find that they're having to work or exist in one of these negative hierarchies is calling it out enough? So partly depends on how much status and power they have within the system and how much they feel empowered to act. I will say that some people opt to leave, right? Which kind of contributes to the third dimension of instabilities. When we see swift demotion and promotion, when we see a lot of turnover, that could be a signal that we're working in a dysfunctional environment where people do not wish to stay long-term. Because of the stress, because of the threat, because of the harms to well-being and team functioning. What I want everyone who is listening to us to feel is that they are in a position to fix these broken hierarchies. They can actually take actions starting tomorrow. And a lot of these actions would be everyday interactive communication tools that they could use show more empathy, show more compassion, express pro-social emotions such as pride, such as gratitude toward others. Those would start acting towards repair of the kind of broken hierarchy. People often tend to assume that it's a job of HR to fix a broken hierarchy or the job of top management. But we can all actually contribute to fixing these broken hierarchies. So yes, leaving is an option. But staying in fixing is potentially a better option for the sake of all of us. I really like that idea of taking ownership and really trying, even though it can be really hard to do. But by demonstrating compassion, curiosity, concern, you can actually begin to repair and change the way that works. I want to focus on positive hierarchies, healthy hierarchies. You argue that common values, pluralism and relatedness are all standards for healthy hierarchies. How can leaders create these conditions so that they and their employees can thrive? So let's start with the common valley principle. The common valley principle has two aspects to it. The first one is we want to hierarchy that reflects who we are, who we wish to be, what we believe in, right? And so in addition to a meritocracy, a leader can create a virtueocracy based on virtue. You will promote people who show kindness, who are great in active listening, who support others, who mentor them, right? So we can add that to the ability and achievement and accomplishments based on which we promote. The way you structure your evaluation systems, your incentive structure in the organization really shapes kind of collective value and can reflect the fact that we are a team first kind of organization. Let's say Matt that you have $10,000 available to you. And you can use that as rewards to motivate your team. You could say my top two performers will get 5K each. Or you could say I'm going to find a way to use the 10K that I have to do an event and off-site. Some opportunity to come together as a team and celebrate our collective success, right? That will reinforce a notion that who we are is a team first organization. That aspect of the common valley principle is really making sure that the hierarchy creates benefits for everyone, not just the people at the top. So when we think about benefits, we think about the well-being that people are sick from the organization, the pride that they are getting from the organization and so on. When we transition from the C to P, right, that we're going to do CPR for work in hierarchies as we try to fix them. So pluralism, the P is really creating an environment where there are multiple pathways to contribute, thrive, ascend, and lead in the organization. We know that people are going to continue to engage in social comparisons, but when we had multiple dimensions of social comparison, when we acknowledge the value of different kinds of contribution, that goes a really long way. You want to work in an environment where you can be recognized for the value you're creating, even if it's not the typical way in which everyone else contributes. In my research on blade dancers that I did for this book, I discovered that there's more than a dozen ways in which blade dancers in elite companies contribute to the success of the company. Maybe you're a very reliable partner. You're always there for the other dancers and when you do the lift, the dancers do not feel wobbly. They're not worried that you might drop them and injure them and so on. Maybe you have a perturberer that's so extensive and so impressive that you can really do any number of different roles. So there are so many different ways in which you can contribute. And the third dimension relatedness involves bringing people closer together than pulling them apart. We want hierarchies that actually reinforce positive strong ties between members of the organization. And so C and P and R together reinforce each other in the same way that three symptoms of the broken hierarchy, right? The ultra-compagness and injustice and instability are part of the same syndrome that breaks hierarchies. I think it's interesting that you use CPR. are, we can use it for broken hearts and broken hierarchies and it can help. And one of the things you shared that I've always found fascinating about your work is you're very creative where you do your studying. You work with ballet companies. I know you and I have collaborated with Stanford athletes. I love that you find interesting places to find the work. You've done a lot of work with athletes. I've studied athletes, I think it's fascinating. We've done research published earlier this year about how we can create collaborative environments even in these seemingly very competitive environments. So think about student athletes who are high achievers, very competitive from a very young age. What we discovered is that if you're able to create internal collaboration with the athletic teams, they feel a greater sense of autonomy, right? That's very important for their well-being and for their performance in a team. And I think one of the solutions that I also mentioned in the book in that regard is compartmentalization. We're going to compete fiercely on the field, on the court or on the water. But when we're back in our dining halls and in the classrooms and in the dorms, 100% support. We're going to support each other on social media. We're going to support each other in person. So we're fierce competitors on the court. But everywhere else, 100% support. What you're highlighting there is the role of values. The value that we have as a team is that we compete when it is time to compete and we support when it is time to support. So having that strong value is important, which means when you're recruiting, when you're retaining the values that empower or build those hierarchies really matter. Something else that really matters as communication, as you know, near and dear to my heart, and you've even inferred that communication can support and enable healthy hierarchies but can certainly be involved in making very bad negative hierarchies. What advice and guidance do you have for how communication can be used effectively in hierarchies? I think one way in which we want to support the kind of fixing of broken hierarchies is by understanding how we can do a lot of small action on a daily basis to kind of support a well-functioning hierarchy. For example, there are almost no barriers to writing a gratitude letter, right? You can be the CEO and write a gratitude letter. You can be a new employee and send a gratitude note to someone who showed you the ropes just like your story earlier about kind of an old timer who was helpful in guiding you. We can help others by modeling kind behavior. We can encourage others to recognize contributions of teammates. Let's say we have a committee meeting or a team meeting where someone is kind of making a unique kind of contribution. We're going to emphasize this, reiterate the value there, kind of reinforce that we believe it has merit and a really important contribution to our achievements. A lot of the specific behaviors within the relatedness principle in the CPAR framework are communication behaviors and I'll give you one example from law enforcement. So our colleague here in MSNE, I read Corona Quran, has this fabulous research on 9-1-1 dispatchers. 9-1-1 dispatchers are not always held in high regard by police officers. That's because they're not sworn officers. That creates a problem for you and me when we call 9-1-1. If we expect someone to show up and help us and that depends on the ability of the 9-1-1 dispatcher to influence the police officer to actually go and be where they're needed. Arving discoveries that sometimes they actually use humor as a very effective tool to influence these stubborn police officers who are sitting in their car and not going to where they need to be. They will go in the radio where other police officers hear them and these police officers have high status and they would say I see that you're parked outside a casino and someone just won a lot of money there. Maybe you should go inside and gamble if you have some extra time officer and others would chime in, right? The other police officers would say he does have a poker face or wasn't he a gambler way back and now he's busting dealers and so on and that sense of humor is doing several things. First it gets that tension of that police officer and the car is not moving. Second it allows people to reinforce relatedness, right? We're all laughing together and it builds a coalition with the high status police officers who are now helping the lower status 9-1-1 dispatcher to do their job and keep all of us safe and protected and receiving help. So I love these very creative communication-based solutions that help hierarchies function. Both of the examples you use using connecting communication, bringing shared experience or expressing gratitude are relatively low stakes and pay dividends not just for the initial interaction but buy goodwill in the future as well and I think that's really useful to think about and the big thing there for me is they're not risky to do. I want to switch away from your work on hierarchy which is really interesting to other work you do which I also find really fascinating. One of the very first times I learned of your work was in a program we taught in together where we were talking about audiences and understanding audiences when you communicate. We talk a lot about the importance of knowing your audience on this show when you're on the show before talked about constroul fit. Can you define what this is and discuss how understanding this helps us to be better in communicating, better leaders etc. I'd love for you to revisit that. Constroul fit happens when you're able to match the abstractness versus concreteness of your communication to your psychological distance from your audience. And I just want to define for listeners what psychological distance means. Sometimes you feel a sense of connection to others you're very close because you are similar in terms of your characteristics or you work together on a daily basis but sometimes you're far from them you're far from them socially you don't belong to the same network or there's a lot of gap in the hierarchy in terms of the distance sometimes you're far from them temporarily or you're talking to people who might listen to this podcast for example in the future or you're talking to kind of people who used to work in the organization in the past so there can be goal setting for the near future or articulation of vision for the distant future. You're a distance from other people spatially some people are working very kind of far away locations rather than nearby and so on. When you're communicating across large psychological distances abstractness actually helps people understand what you're saying right it helps to connect with them because you're not sharing the immediate context so you need to talk in terms of broader principles rather than very concrete examples. When we've studied the power of constrial fitter organizations in one study we had more than 2,000 employees in a tech organization and we asked employees how often does your direct boss so short psychological distance and how much does your distance boss the boss of your boss so two steps removed engage in two different kinds of behaviors how much do they engage in concrete feedback they're actually giving you meaningful feedback on the tasks you're doing at work that would be the concrete behavior and how much are they articulating broad timeless vision for the distant future. We discovered that the satisfaction of employees increased when they're direct boss engaging concrete feedback but when the nearby boss engage in vision articulation that didn't do anything for their satisfaction right that was weird it didn't have constrial fit it was more difficult to understand and why is this kind of approximate leader engaging in such abstract communication with me. Same thing when the distant leader engaging concrete feedback why would you tell me about a type on page 27 is that really your job to kind of check for that so we really want to achieve this constrial fit to increase fluency to increase effective communication. I cannot say how important when I learn that from you that it changed the way I approach the way I teach and the way I communicate we often talk about does your audience know what you're talking about what knowledge level do they have what are their attitudes where the resistance points but thinking about the psychological distance and how that impacts what you need to say that has a huge impact on what you do so I really would like people to think about when you are talking to people who are far away from you and all the ways you describe temporarily distance wise you might change the depth and specificity of what you say I think that's really powerful so thank you. Many of us have heard of humble bragging I've probably been guilty of doing that but you and your co-authors did research into humorous bragging how does humor bragging work and how can job candidates entrepreneurs and others leverage humor bragging humor bragging happens when you're combining kind of two desirable standards of impression management one is coming across as competent and the other one is coming across as relatable as a warm and when you're talking about your achievements or accomplishments in a way that's humorous you're sending the message that you're kind of relatable colleague we want to spend time with you we want to get to know you we discovered in our research that when you add to a CV sent to recruiters we did it just one line of a humor bragging in the CV gets significantly more callbacks from recruiters when we analyze four seasons of shark tank we discovered that humor bragging actually works better than other types of humor so selfie facing humor might show that you're relatable but it doesn't speak to your achievements and accomplishments it doesn't signal competence when you're ridiculing your competition on the show right it doesn't come across as they're relatable maybe you're more successful than your competitors but really to resonate with your audience you want to come across as competent and warm so let's say you're interviewing math for a job where they're looking for people who are really high in conscientiousness and would pay attention to detail because you're going to have to review a lot of contracts so you could try saying something like well I tend to see faces in the clouds and I tend to see typos in my friends tags and I will find all of those typos that will save us thousands of dollars in our contract so letting them see you as a friend and see you as this person looking at the clouds but also the someone that will save a lot of money for the company I like this idea of using levity as a tool to demonstrate both competence and warmth the very first concept that we teach in my strategic communication class is how to balance that tension of competence and warmth they're both important in using levity humor can help and you studied it in some merely high value and important situations job interviews looking for money other situations so I like this idea of using humor to help you put forward your competence but show that you're warm thank you we'll be right back to finish our conversation but first we're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors their support covers the cost of production so we can bring you this show for free this podcast is sponsored by square space the best communicators don't just get their message across they make it easy for people to know what to do next your website site can do the same thing. 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And two, you've answered before, but I'm wondering since we've had a little time if those have changed, you ready for that? Yes. One of the things that I think is so cool that you did is you've actually created a card game and you help people play it in your classes and in some of the consulting you do. Tell all of our listeners about the card game and what results from it. It's not just playing cards to have fun, although it is. What do people learn? The game is a strategic game that models work less interactions when you are in a position to influence your own power and status, but also other people's power and status. We start the game from perfect egalitarianism. So each person in the table, let's say kind of imagine table of six players have two power cards and two status cards. And we each draw from pile of action cards such that in our hand, we have several different actions we could play. We could engage in brokering or gossip or put a burden on another colleague, but we can also collaborate and take other actions. And in the game, people have opportunities to vote up or down on other people's kind of actions. There is an element of lack just like in life, so people are all dyes and so on. And although all groups start with perfect egalitarianism within minutes, there's a hierarchy at the table. One person will have seven status cards and another will have three. One person will have five power cards and the other will have four. The goal of the game is if you wish to win to be the first person to get five power and five status cards. But if people have different pathways to get that and each hierarchy that emerges in each table is very different from the other hierarchies. So when we debrief the game, we ask people, how do you choose your actions? Did you monitor whether people were hiding their cards or playing with transparency? And we discuss the culture that emerged very powerfully, very swiftly in the different tables. And in some tables, you see a cutthroat, ultra competitive environment in other tables. You see a supportive environment where you see a tide that lifts all boats. So one thing that we discuss is, what if you were to multiply the six person table by a thousand? Think about a 6,000 person organization. If people in that organization always play burden and a sign and compete, right? That would be a very different organizational culture than if you were to play, collaborate and broker and other positive cards all day long. But there are also takeaways for leaders. Leaders really are in a position to stack the deck with different kinds of cards that will shape interactions, that will shape communications, that will shape organizational culture. So leaders can really see how they might influence. And one of the takeaways really for everyone is that is you're navigating your workplace hierarchy, you're also simultaneously shaping it. If people are curious, they're welcome to go on promotiongame.org and read more about the game. I love that you use a game to highlight these really important values. And one of the things I take away from what you've said is we can all think about the imaginary cards that we hold in our day-to-day life and how we choose to play them in the impact they have. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why? Recently I have been really enjoying listening to Eileen Gu, the Olympian. I find her responses in interviews, thought-provoking and really fluent. And I love to think about the messages she's sharing with all of us. I feel empowered listening to her. So I also take pride in the fact that she was a student at Stanford. I really appreciated listening to her in kind of post-competition interviews. She definitely comes off as somebody who's very credible and very passionate and blends that in a way that I think is very engaging. Final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? I heard you earlier kind of use alliteration with the 3C mentioned. So let me respond to this with alliteration. So let's go with 3Fs. The first one is going to be focused. The first ingredient should be cognitively, you should know the message, you should be very clear and articulate your main message in a very compelling way. So that's going to be focused. The second F is going to be filling. You should communicate with emotion. Hopefully you're excited, you're passionate, maybe you're angry about something, but that will help you connect with audiences and hopefully you can induce emotions in them. So feelings on your side, but also their side. In the third element, I would say fit, right? You be talking about construal feet earlier. Newer audience, make sure the way you deliver the message fits and lands well. Focus, feeling fit. You can tell you're a professor because you always summarize your answers. Those 3Fs really will help you have a communication that is engaging, compelling, and importantly memorable. As was this conversation, near, thank you so much for coming back. Best of luck on your game and your new book, and I appreciate our collaboration that we have both on air and off air. Thanks. Thank you, Matt. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talksmart, The Podcast. I always learn so much from near. The one thing that really stood out to me was how to make sure that we can improve our situations and hierarchies through gratitude, through complementing and highlighting people's successes. To hear near's first episode, please listen to episode 30. This episode was produced by Catherine Reed, Ryan Campos, Alex McCarthy, and me, Matt Weber Helms. Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. Please share our show with your friends, family, and co-workers. Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives. It inspires me and the whole team that brings you this show. If you want more episodes and resources, feel free to follow, subscribe, and explore past conversations. We're grateful for your support of Think Fast Talksmart.