Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [38]
Condoleezza Rice served as national security adviser under President George W. Bush. Before joining the government, Rice was provost at Stanford under President Gerhard Casper; there she was known for being someone you did not want to cross. As Jacob Heilbrunn wrote, “Rice slashed the budget and challenged proponents of affirmative action…earning the enmity of many students and much of the faculty for her blunt style. Rice’s credo, as she told one protégé, was that ‘ people may oppose you, but when they realize you can hurt them, they’ll join your side.’”16
Likability Can Create Power, but Power Almost Certainly Creates Likability
Condoleezza Rice is right: people will join your side if you have power and are willing to use it, not just because they are afraid of your hurting them but also because they want to be close to your power and success. There is lots of evidence that people like to be associated with successful institutions and people—to bask in the reflected glory of the powerful.
Some years ago, social psychologist Robert Cialdini and some colleagues did a wonderful study of this effect. Cialdini taught at Arizona State University, which has a first-class but not dominating football team. In a typical season ASU will win some but not all of its football games. This created a great opportunity for the ASU researchers to ask: If the team won the game the previous Saturday, would more students wear clothes with school insignia the following Monday? Their study found that a higher proportion of people wore visible items of clothing with the school colors, letters, name, or other insignia following a victory than following a defeat. They also found that people were more likely to use the inclusive pronoun “we” to refer to a group following that group’s success rather than failure.17
What this research implies is that people’s support for you will depend as much on whether or not you seem to be “winning” as on your charm or ability. When writer Gary Weiss profiled Timothy Geithner, who was then the up-and-coming president of the New York Federal Reserve, “some of the nation’s most prominent figures in government and finance—former Federal Reserve chairmen Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan, as well as John Thain, then CEO of Merrill Lynch, and former New York Fed chief Gerald Corrigan—were only too happy to share fond anecdotes about this youthful public official.” But things changed in the fall of 2008, when Geithner became Obama’s secretary of the Treasury and ran into trouble as the financial meltdown unfolded: “When I approached them [these same prominent figures] again for this article, to get a word of defense of their beleaguered friend, the reaction was far different.”18
What’s Likability Got to Do with Anything?
At a conference in Florida where I was giving a presentation, I sat next to a Harvard Business School graduate from the class of 1992 at dinner. I asked if he knew Keith Ferrazzi, who had graduated that same year. The answer was, “Of course.” He wasn’t a close personal friend of Keith’s and noted that Ferrazzi was not necessarily very popular with his HBS classmates. My next question, had he hired Ferrazzi to do marketing consulting for his company in the online publishing space? The answer: “Certainly. What’s liking got to do with hiring someone to help you build your business? The question is, ‘Can they be helpful to you?’”
This instrumental