Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [56]
In May 2008 I received an e-mail from a director of career management services that reinforced the importance of how we “show up” in our interactions with others for our job prospects. He had received comments from a Sam’s Club/Walmart interviewer who had seen some students and commented on their self-presentation:
There were a couple of students who were very confident in their interviews but more than half seemed slightly uncomfortable…. The students who impressed me the most spoke articulately, looked me in the eyes, and could rattle off stories right away. The students who didn’t impress me were the ones who stumbled over their words, looked away, and had trouble giving examples of some basic stories.
Although the research literature shows the interview is not a reliable or valid selection mechanism, it is almost universally used. And the impressions people make as they talk to others matter for their likelihood of getting a job offer or a promotion. It may not seem right that we are judged on our “appearance,” on how we present ourselves and our ideas. But the world isn’t always a just place. To come across effectively, we need to master how to convey power. We need to act, and speak, with power.
Atoosa Rubenstein began as a fashion assistant at Cosmopolitan in 1993 and in five years rose to the job of senior fashion editor. Rubenstein, at the instigation of Hearst Magazine president Cathleen Black, came up with the idea for CosmoGIRL! and in 1999, at the age of 26, Atoosa became editor-in-chief at the magazine, the youngest person to hold such a position in the more than 100-year history of the Hearst Corporation. Named by Columbia University in 2004 as one of its top 250 alumni of all time and recipient of much recognition, Rubenstein believes that her early success came from projecting an appropriate image.5 As she told some people writing about her:
I’m an actress. My chief trait in business is that I’m an actress. I’m not creative but I can really whip it out when I have to. I put on the costumes and play the roles that people need me to play. Bonnie [editor of Cosmopolitan] needed me to be very fashionable. I put on the hair, the clothes; I became exotic. Because of that, I went from being a background player to being on the pages of the magazine…. Cathie [Black, president of Hearst Magazines] started sending me to black tie events to represent Cosmopolitan.
ACTING WITH POWER
Peter Ueberroth, Time magazine’s man of the year for his success running the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and former commissioner of major-league baseball, has a favorite maxim: Authority is 20 percent given, 80 percent taken.6 Words to live by. If you are going to take power, you need to project confidence, as the case of Oliver North and the Walmart job candidates illustrate. You need to project assurance even if—or maybe particularly if—you aren’t sure what you’re doing. Andy Grove, a cofounder and former CEO and chairman of the semiconductor company Intel, has appropriate modesty about his (or anyone’s) ability to forecast the technological future. In reply to a question at a Silicon Valley forum about how to lead if you aren’t sure where you or your company is going, Grove replied:
Well, part of it is self-discipline and part of it is deception. And the deception becomes reality. Deception in the sense that you pump yourself up and put a better face on things than you start off feeling. But after a while, if you act confident, you become more confident. So the deception becomes less of a deception.7