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people are as objective about themselves as they need to be. Second, you can’t get trapped into following the crowd and doing something just because everyone else is. As decades-old research in social psychology illustrates, conformity pressures are strong. And so are the pressures of informational social influence: if everyone else is doing something, it must be because that is the right or smart thing to do. For you to do something else is to turn your back on their collective wisdom. So if everyone is going into finance, you go; if everyone is going overseas, you try to find an international position; if high tech is cool, you go there. But this conforming behavior can get in the way of doing what’s right for you.

Third, to pick the right place for yourself, you must be objective not only about yourself but about the job and its risks and opportunities. We see what we want to see, and if the job looks attractive because of its compensation package or title, we can fool ourselves or intentionally overlook the fact that it may require more influence skills or being tougher than we like. Harvard Business School professor John Kotter told me that he thought for many people, the biggest obstacle to success was not talent or motivation but the fact that they were in the wrong place—that the power and influence requirements of their job did not fit their personal aptitudes and interests. Although I know of no formal study of this hypothesis, my own experiences and those of many others who have watched careers unfold suggest that it is right.

Because we see what we want to see, we may not accurately assess the political risks of a job—and suffer the consequences. A few years ago a woman graduating from business school told me she was accepting a position as the assistant to the incoming university president at a large private university in the East. For almost 20 years the university had as its leader a tough, very visible, and controversial president, and the board of trustees felt it was time for a change. The outgoing president was going to remain on the board of trustees, and, since the new person would not take over until the academic year began in the fall, the soon to be former president still held formal authority. Was it a good idea, I inquired, to take a job with this degree of political risk? What if the new president, whose assistant she would be, was undermined by his predecessor?

Things turned out worse than even I expected—the new president never assumed his position. The outgoing leader used his relationships with the board and senior administrative people to sabotage his successor before that person could even take office. For the putative president, not a big deal—he got a “package” and had a distinguished reputation that permitted him to quickly land another position. For his prospective assistant, things were not as rosy—no package and more effort required locating a new job. You need to be realistic about the political risks, not just to you but to those to whom you are tied, if you want to build a path to power.

Don’t Give Up Your Power

You need to be in a job that fits and doesn’t come with undue political risks, but you also need to do the right things in that job. Most important, you need to claim power and not do things that give yours away. It’s amazing to me that people, in ways little and big, voluntarily give up their power, preemptively surrendering in the competition for status and influence. The process often begins with how you feel about yourself. If you feel powerful, you will act and project power and others will respond accordingly. If you feel powerless, your behavior will be similarly self-confirming.

Social psychologists Cameron Anderson and Jennifer Berdahl reviewed literature showing that people who had less power or didn’t feel powerful exhibited “inhibitive nonverbal behaviors,” such as shrinking in, caving in their chests, physically withdrawing, and using fewer and less forceful and dramatic hand gestures.3 As we know from chapter 7, “Acting and Speaking with Power,” one of