CM 281: Alison Fragale on Women and Success
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Be your awesome in the most strategic way possible, do you, with a little more intention to what your audience is thinking, and you will be able to live a beautiful life authentically, easily and with all of the rewards you deserve.

Welcome to curious minds at work. I'm your host, gale Allen. If you're a woman in the workplace, you know the deck is rarely stacked in your favor.

For example, promotions are harder to come by, the gender wage gap is real and power can feel inclusive. Psychology professor and researcher alison for gale has studied the power problem for decades. What she's figured out is that the solution lies with status.

But as he argues in her book, likeable, bad, ask how women get the success they deserve. If women shift their focus to cultivating status, they can get further ahead and solving the power problem. Alison for gill has unliked to the key to achieving greater status in the workplace, and SHE shares practical tips on how to get started.

It's a book I be recommending to all my friends. Before we start one quick ask, if you like the podcast, please take a moment to leave a rating on itunes or wherever you subscribe. Your feedback sends a strong signal to people looking for their next podcast. And now here's my interview with alison. For gail alison fergie, welcome to the podcast.

So happy to be here.

When we critique the state of women in the workplace today, you point out that we tend to focus on women's lack of power, but you argue that there is an equally important problem. And it's connected to the power problem. It's status. What is the connection?

So status is how much we're respected and regarded by others. It's other people's judgments of us. And power is controlling resources like being paid, being promoted, advancing in a higher archy.

And the relationship is that being respected is often a gateway to being able to control resources. People don't want to put people in charge if they don't respect them. So when we have status, the respect of others IT makes IT a lot easier for us to contend with. These problems is gender base problems that you point out of women not having the the power they deserve life. But also at work.

you offer a solution. Write is the title of your book is about becoming a likeable bad as what is that?

yes. So it's more than a catchy term of endearment status. I've studied IT for twenty years, and the idea that is that would you look at other people in your brain, says, do I respect that person? And when other people do IT to you, these judgments aren't random.

They're based on evaluating two things about people. One, do they care about people other than themselves, right? We want people who are pleasant to be around, who try to make other people's lives Better.

So are you caring? Are you warm? So I can, on the title I call IT likeable.

And then the other thing we care about is, can I rely on you? Are you good at what you do? If I if I give you a task, can I be sure you'll execute IT well? And we like that kind of dependability, that agency that you assertiveness. So then I call that bad as so when we show up in a way that convinces other people that we are very caring and we are very capable, we have shown up in the best possible way to get their respect.

Well, let's be clear. You're not putting this all on women. You make IT very clear that the rules of the game writ large, they need to change.

There are systems in place, they need to change. But in the meantime, this is something we can actually do something about. Can you say a little bit about that?

Yeah, I mean, I talk about the idea of start managing status as my game. And sometimes many games have unfair rules or unfair outcomes. There's no doubt that's true for women and for many other people.

But here's the thing. Status is not something women have to manage. Status is something human beings have to manage. IT is a fundamental human need. All human beings want to be respected and life is Better with respect than without IT.

So this is actually, even when, say not if, when we we address all of the other systemic biased toward women and other groups in society, managing status is not gona go away. It's always going to be something that human beings due. It's just I wrote this book for women because it's an audience I care about, but also because IT is the case that some judgments of respect are based on characteristics outside our control like gender.

So when two, all other things being equal, when a woman walks into a room, the audience might give that woman less respect in their brain than they would give an equivalent met. So that means the starting line is an equivalent. And therefore, managing the parts of your status that you can control becomes particularly important.

So it's not putting a burden on women. It's acknowledging that the the the starting line is not equal and that's unfair and that all human beings need to manage their status. Even if you would start out with an advantage, I would still counsel you to do everything you could control to show up in your environment that would get people to respect you as much as you deserve to be respective.

Allison, and you've talked about status. As you know, a key component of IT is perception. How are perceived? And you make a clear in your book that we tend to perceive people along two dimensions. There's more cold and assertive, submissive. How does this work?

Are two independent dimensions. And so the warm, cold with psychologist college, that's what i'm calling a caring, or the likeable you. And warm is gonna be our more preferred space.

If I said every people could have an opinion of you, would you rather than see you as very warm and pleasant and agreeable and giving, or would you rather than see you as hostile and coral sum difficult and everyone picks warm on the other dimension, a sort of submissive? That's a dimension of capability, competent, decisive, persistent, organized these characteristics. So I said, would you like people to perceive you that way? People say, yeah, that sounds good. And the combination of the two in this now creates four quadrant. The combination is this idea, you friendly strike, that people can trust you and rely on you, but they also enjoy you and see you as a person who's giving and make other people's lives Better.

I really liked in your book the tips that you give, the suggestions and recommendations for, you know, how to cultivate and maybe deep in your friendly strength. And we're I got to talk about all of them. There were a couple that you talked about in relation to speech style and speech rate that can signal friendly strength. What works best there.

your audience is pay attention to all the signals that you give off on that you don't control like gender, race and some that you do like um perhaps how you're speaking.

So if we look across all of psychology, we see a lot of communication behaviors that help people get status because they convince their audience that these people are more capable and warm um speech style a speech rate uh when we speak faster and we seem more intelligent, more capable and we also get more words in per minute. And so we get more air time. And the more air time we take up, people see that as a signal of confidence.

Now of course, we've all seen somebody who basically just filling busters the entire meeting and then has seen as a great leader and its super annoying. So sometimes the signals are that, that we're paying attention to aren't aren't right, but we can't really tell the difference. So I what I tell people is you you should understand how certain signals come across so that you can show up in ways that are both authentic but also are strategic.

So so if you're a fast talker like I am, you could recognize, oh, okay, that's actually not terrible because he has some advantage for me. Many people say i'm a slow talker out and i'm a deep thinker and processor, not the first one to raise my hand or quick to jump in to a conversation and I duped. So absolutely not. But if some of your behaviors may not be signaling, hey, i'm capable and know what i'm doing, you know, i'm confident, then find some other ways to signal that while still honoring the behaviors that feel very natural to you.

Is there another way that you often recommend when that capability or that that feeling of comfort is not there?

I always start by having people just turn in word and and become self aware.

What do you what are you good at? First of val, where do you shine? And how can you put yourself in those donations where where you shine? So you know, if you're in a meeting, maybe your deep thinking means i'm a great summarized and synthesizer of all the different points and I can be the person who comes up with this great contribution at the end that pulls all the different concepts and ideas that have been thrown around in a sixty minute meeting together into a very coherent concluding statement that says, here's where I hear that we are and here's where we're going maybe that's my great strike and so that's what I can do or maybe say, i'm a terrible smiler and I I you know, one resting bitch face.

I was like, that explains IT and so I was saying, okay, i'm not great to that, but how do I like to show other people that I care about them, that I want to make their life Better? And I do IT through all kinds of ways. I do IT by making time to speak with women who say, i've got a problem at work.

Can you help? I do IT by introducing people to people in my network. I do IT by post the resources on social media that I think i'll help people.

So you have to just think about, what do I like to do that is going to show people that I know what i'm doing and that I care about them. So self, starting with the self awareness and what you like. And then I think a little bit of experimental of try something and see what reaction you get for your audience. If it's good, do more of IT. If it's not good, you adjust nothing forever.

That's really helpful. And you know one of them the examples that you gave, the one of the tips really resonated with me, which is those folks who are so good at the end of the meeting, who maybe have not spoken out much, who can pull things together, tie things together, they always leave such a great impression. I've never walked away and thought to myself, well, they didn't speaker earlier. I tend to walk away and say, well, they just did some heavy lifting for all of us.

That's right. I mean, but we would all agree that if someone went into a meeting and they SAT silent the entire time and they left and didn't say anything, that person probably wouldn't make a big impact. And so that's where authenticity and strategy, you might want to sit silent the entire time, but you could recognize that may not be the best way to show that uncapable and that I want to care about contributing to the group.

So what could I do? IT may not be a hundred percent what I want, but I still feels authentic and comfortable. Okay, I can be the person who summarizes this, or I will ask one question, or I will amplify the statement of somebody in the room who might be spoken over.

So that's where you start to have to think, yeah, it's not crazy. But if I SAT there silent the entire time, my audience might not think I contributed a lot. Um that's pretty reasonable. So how do I change that? But while still not having to be like the person next to me who might be the, you know, fast talk or dominate the conversation person, you don't want to do that, you just have to do something.

If we think about something that often comes up when women or conversation with each other, and I can seem like this one comes up a lot, which is IT can feel like in the workplace that men will also get more credit for the same behaviors. And I think sometimes we say to ourselves, is that real? Is that not real? Is that real? And if IT is real, why is that .

on a hole on average, it's absolutely real. Yes, it's real. Because why? Because if if there are status differences between and women. So if we haven't if we as individuals haven't taken steps to get the respect that we deserve. And so we are less respected than people around us, that means that our audience seize us as less capable and less caring than than others.

And so if you have a man and and who has been given status by his birth, right, and he shows up and because of his gender, just gets status when he walks in a room, then what that means is the audience is thinking, here comes a very capable, caring person, and then, no matter what that person does is seen as very capable and caring. In psychology, it's called confirmation bias. Initial hypotheses are hard to change, right? Initial are sticky.

So then then that person is given more credit. Because if you see something done by a person know you highly value, you know like, oh, that was so smart and so kind. If you see something done by somebody you don't value, you like, oh, maybe that they got lucky or maybe they were just doing that because I was in their own self interest.

And so that's where we get this different, different credit. But IT doesn't have to be that way. So is IT that way? Sometimes one hundred percent is IT unfair. One thousand percent can IT be changed? One million percent.

okay. So what if i've put my likeable bad as self out there, and i'm advancing in my career, and i'm a woman who keeps moving forward? Research shows, as you share, that things can get worse for women as they advance. Why is this .

so they can? And that is because i've studied for many years a concept what I call low status powers holders. People who do have a lot of control, they have advanced, but they're not that respected by people around them. And when people come in to tack with lowest status powers holders, they don't really like IT. We don't want to be controlled by people that we don't hold in hie regard.

And so what we often do is we often mistreat those people in ways that are subbed enough that we can get away with that, right? Um you might be able to interpret somebody or not listen to their idea or you question their judgment or cut them out of the information flow. Then we call these types of things in the way I always think about IT is imagine, just think about going to through airport security, right? When you go through airport security, the tsa has one hundred percent absolute power to make you do whatever they want to do, or you're not getting on that plane.

At the same time, we often feel like the status inherent in that occupation is not as high as other jobs and says, sometimes that makes us feel like our most narky sales. Like, what do you mean I have to take my belt off wide and have to take my belt off at the last airport? And IT can bring out that kind of that kind of incivility in that situation.

And so not every woman is destined to be a low status powler. And many men could be in that situation. But it's a risk for women because if we don't manage our status, we do happen to advance.

We could wake up and find that we're quite senior. We have a lot of power, but there are people who don't respect us and then they're treating us worse. And we see evidence of this. We see evidence that senior women often leave at higher rates and organizations than junior women.

And one of the reasons they said, if we look at the the women in the workplace report is instances of of of this treatment kind of related to status being interpreted, having judgement question, people implying they're not qualified for their jobs. And no one likes that. No one wants to work in that kind of environment.

So when people can leave, they do. And so that the idea that things can get worse, you might think if if I just put my head down and I ignored all this noise around me and I just did enough good work, somebody around here eventually promote me, and then i'll be in charge one day and none, this will be a problem. And I would love to believe that. But that is not true if you continue to lack status. And so like IT or not, state is just a path to good relationships, a happy life, being able to get power, and also being able to use power when we get IT, use IT, use IT effectively and enjoy IT.

You must find this because I feel, I feel like, I feel in my own life. It's like you you have to really deliberately practice and learn how to um think about status, how to enact status. Like it's not something we necessarily and may maybe some people learn to do IT or maybe some people, like you said, have a by birthright IT. IT really isn't something that we call out.

I think part of why we are not that practice of doing that is because we don't have a label for IT. We we don't even one of the things that I do to talk about this work a lot, I have to start with what is dad? It's the first question, everyone.

And it's because we just have an as psychologist been putting this idea out there is that is is you know this is documented in in psychology is it's a fundamental human nee in which there aren't all that many. So there is all like the food and shelter of things that will physically keep you alive. And then after that, there's power, there's a filling ation having friends, there's achievement, learning stuff and their status being respected.

So this is something all human beings want. And IT is critical to live in a happy life. And yet we are talking about IT. And so when we aren't talking about IT, people don't have a language or a model when they see something happen to to code IT or experience at that way, I say, oh, I see why that just happened because person a doesn't really respect person b and that's pretty predictable table. But they know how they're behaving.

So one of the things i've found for people read my book, which is exactly what I wanted, was they said, now what I have this language, I start to see the same things I was always seeing, but through the lens of status, oh, that's why that's happening. And that's what I can do about that. And that's why i'm not getting the results here, but I am getting the results there.

And that I think really what IT just takes is a little bit of a mindset shift in a vocabulary to say, oh, okay, everyone's navigating this. And some of us have been doing IT more successfully than others, either because we started out with some advantage or we just happened to have a set of behaviors that were working for us, but went with some education and conscious awareness. Then we can all do IT and all start to be more aware of how we show up to our audience, says, in ways that get us what we want and what we deserve, which is an audience who looks at us and says, I really value you and and that's what we're all going for, and that's what we all .

should have volunteer point. We also ended in a situation where we may not realize we don't have IT just at the moment, we realized we really need IT. So working on IT continuously is really important because if you can almost get behind this status and then have to build IT at a time where you need at the most yeah I mean.

this is my my biggest pet p or soap box or think you think I want to fix. So I, in the nature of my work being an educator advocate for women, I get a lot of calls from women who say, hey, can you help sure I get on the phone? And it's always, almost always someone calling me because they have an immediate problem like um you know I i've been talking to my boss about you being promoted and i'm going into my performance to read tomorrow and what do I say or you know I need to raise or I just you know I can't haven't got a bad outcome likely told me this year they're not going to give me more resources or they're not going to give me more responsibility.

They're not going to change my title, whatever that someone based calls me and says they don't use these words, but they basically say, I have an audience that I need to influence because there's something they have that I want and this audience is not being influenced by me. And essentially they are sending me signals if they value me. Okay, that's a problem.

Now what I really wish is that I could talk to that person six months or a year before the conversation that we're actually having, because I would say hm is IT predictable that that the people you work with, like your boss, and your boss is boss, are people that you need to think highly of you. And everyone would say, yeah, that would be Better for me. If they, they respected me, life would be Better.

great. Okay, we agree on that. Let's think about with a year, one way, what we could do to show up in ways that would get the people that need to value us paying attention to us and realizing how valuable we are.

When you have a longer time to work on IT IT can be um easy. IT can be, you know not that effortful IT can almost be joyous to say I can invest in these relationships. It's it's harder when you have to meet somebody and in an instant have them respect you IT can be done. But it's even harder to have somebody who hasn't really valued you for years. You didn't notice IT because your head was down doing work.

Now you look up and you're like, huh this person actually doesn't just, you know, they they have doctors about me and they actively decided i'm not a person they value, but not to changed their mind and that changing people's minds is just you always a heard of task and shaping their minds from the outset. So one of the things I want people to think about IT is once you start thinking about life through a status lands, and I started saying, like everybody, I talk you from the person who delivers all my amazon boxes every day, to the, you know, the cashier at the grocery store, to my boss, you know, to the the person next to me at the birthday party at my kid school. Whatever IT is is a person that, you know could add value to my life.

And I could add value to there is, and if that person valued me, my life would be Better in some way. Shape reform and to start thinking about how to build our status really, really broadly with all kinds people. So that a year from now there are you and I are both one year from now going to be in conversations that right now, we don't know we're going to be having. And so the more broadly we build our status, the more likely IT is that when those conversations do start to emerge, we have already set the groundwork for being able to be respected in those relationships and into our damage.

In this interview, alison for gale share strategies for gaining status, including effective ways to say no to low status work. If you'd like to learn more about how to say no while maintaining your relationships, check out my interview with the ea Patrick, author of a book, the power of saying no. SHE shares how we can build, maintain, even grow our relationships .

while saying no, the more we invest in doing stuff that's a line with what we can uniquely do, what we care about, that becomes our personal brand. If we do stuff that we don't want to do, that becomes our personal brand. And now we have a brand that we don't even want or like, and that is our responsibility.

Now let's go back to my interview with alison for gale. So one of the things you encourage is that to increase our status, we have to tell our own story. What does that mean? Why is this so important? And how is this really something we need to be thinking about in so many may be more spaces than we've ever thought about before?

yes. So we think that what is status? Status is exist. Your status exist only in other people's minds. It's their judgment about you, which can be horribly unfair, but it's their judgement about how caring you are and how capable, how, how likeable and how bad as well.

How are they going to make those judgments? They're going to make those judgments based on some kind of information. The bigger source of information is information that comes from you.

They've interacted with you. They've read something. You wrote theyve got an email. They've read something on social media. The information you put out into the world is the data that your audience uses to make these two judgments.

So if the information either you're putting out no information, imagine you're just exciting a cay of doing your work. Well, obviously, you're not going to build respect in the minds of other people. Or if the information you're putting out is unintentionally sending the opposite signals that you want, that's not going to be good either.

And so that's why I talk about telling a story. Telling a story is not just simply words that come out of your mouth. Although IT sounds that way, it's any information you're putting out the world.

IT can be your emotions like smiling is a part of your story, right? It's not part of my story because i'm good, bad smile, but smiling is part of your story. How you dress is part of your story.

The words you use, the actions people see, you take, the emails you write, the social media at all. These things though, they, what you, how your resume, every little and interaction is part of your story. And so we wanted be able to control our stories with both authenticity.

Of course, we don't want to be something or not and strategy uh, and that's the idea of of you putting that out there because again, the extreme opposite is if you lived in a cave and no one ever met you, would anyone respect to you? Well, no, of course not. So all right.

Well, how does that happen? IT happens because people have interacted with me in some way, and that's what that means to be sorry to. And you know what? I help make them sure we will talk about this, but what I help people realizes the breath of ways that their story can come across so that it's not what most people like.

Think what I say this, they think, oh my gosh, i'm going to have to go to people at cocktail parties are networking, have to interpret their conversation. I'm going to have to start giving them, you know, a monologue of my qualifications. I said, no one's interested in that. Please don't do that terrible idea, right? That's not how you tell a story, but you tell a story where stories come out in all kinds of subtle ways. And and one of things assignment, I put the book and I give to all listeners ers, is, next thing you are a coffee shop, just leave drop on people talking and just listen to what you learn about them through them talking to each other and what kind of conclusions you can draw. And just in the natural given take of human interaction, stories come out and people say things that you like, oh, I I started to learn about people in in all these ways.

You work with a lot of women who need to work on their story or who want to work on their story. What are some things right out of the day that you notice they do that weakens their story?

There's this whole issue about women have a very complicated relationship with warmth and likability. On one hand, they've feel they they're justifiably resentful that they're criticized at times for not being likeable enough when they're not doing anything. And they feel like, why should I have to do that?

On the other hand, we all human beings, right, care deeply about having relationships with others and women, and are also care about that a lot. So we want to be liable, we want to give to our relationships, we don't want to be saving. So we want IT and we feel and so um I think one of the things that that women in particular kind of fear is like preserving warm at all costs, preserving relationships at all costs.

And so what that often leads to is a series of behaviors that seem logical but don't often work. So for example, when someone compliments you, often times we like to beat those away like a little flies in our face and are like our fish water is comes in and says, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not really that good at that or this old dress.

You know, I just I I haven't even done my hair in that whatever something like that that is rejecting a compliment. And we do, I think, is a lot of times to because that's the modest thing to do. I want you to like me.

And so if I I don't want to see both for like, oh, of course i've got great. So we beat away the comment to try to preserve our warmth, but that's not what happens. I always say compliment is a gift.

Someone who does IT is trying to make you happy or try trying to tell you they appreciate you. When you say that, you're basically saying, one, you have bad taste, you an idiot because i'm not that good and to your gift, I hate your gift. I'm giving IT back and it's not very warm.

And so that would be an example where we do IT because we're trying to see nice. But when someone rejects your element, you never feel like, oh, that was so nice of them to reject that comment. I really feel appreciated.

Now that's an example. Um keeping quiet you know, when you have good news going on is another one. I don't want to brag. I don't want to go tell you all the good things that are happening in my life because that's in modest. I want you like me.

But when people interact and you later find out that you were just talking to somebody and they had something positive to say and they didn't say that they didn't tell you their good news. They didn't tell you they just got promoted at or or whatever was do everything oh, that was so modest of them to not tell me they got promoted no IT turns out from the research, it's not what people think people think, huh? Why didn't they tell me maybe we're not good friends or do they think i'm so petty that or my life is so pathetic, I couldn't be happy for them like they must not think very much of me.

So we do these things because we feel like, hey, this is the way you show up as warm. But we see from the science that's not actually what ends up happening. So we end up doing some things that are well intention. They just don't work.

You've interposed within that evolve in into what you've just said, things we should do instead. Is there anything you would add to that?

Yeah so well, first of all, get good at accept in compliments a simple thank you that makes my day you you're amazing. I really appreciate that whatever do that um think about how we can talk about our successes in ways that feel comfortable.

As I said, do not go walk up to somebody who's in another conversation at a cocktail party and just start telling them hurry, you are but i'll give you a very like look for the subtle ways to tell your story. So the other day I saw a guy in an event I was hosting. I didn't know him very well.

He walks in and I say very sincerely, almost like an extended form of, hello, hey, how was your day and he responds big and response, and he said, elson, I had the best day today. Now, I mean, i've sure you would have done exactly what I have gone curious, did he win the powerball? Like I edo did they put like extra cheese on his sandwich?

Like, I don't know so so I said, what happened and he said, I basically land a new client that he had met on, linked in, met with this person for the first time. And in one lunch, he has lent this new client. They're going to work together.

And he's super excited because he in this client have a very common mission driven approach to like making the world Better place and. He's gone to get to work with this person. So he based tells me I did at a road win at work today and that the win allows me to, like, contribute to the world in ways that I think we're meaningful.

So he showed up, is very capable and very caring, and he did IT in a very natural way because I was asking him questions. But what he did that was very strategic, was he made me curious enough to get into a conversation with him. And that idea of I could put IT out there through how I respond to how are you.

I could put things on my social media that talk about, you know, great things that are happening. I can send an update to my boss about how the work my group has completed this week. And I can also in that email um include thanks to other people on my team who are really went above and beyond this week that's called dull promotion, saying something good about myself and something good about other people at the same time.

And that turns out to be a really effective way for people to get credit for both being very competent and also very caring. Um so once you start looking for all the different ways that you can let people know about what's going on with you, you'll start to find different options. You know other things again, how many channels my email signature conveys information about me, right?

My email signatures designed to make people care. I want to check out my newsletter. Some people like maybe I do, maybe we'll click on that button, right? Um so thinking about natural ways that fit that, you could make people curious to learn more about you um and and put little bits of information out there about your story in ways that feel feel natural.

You've really helped answer this question like IT is risky to self promote, but you're giving us ways to really decrease that risk. Very thoughtful ly as you said him very strategically.

absolutely. I think the the one of the ways to um always think like A A good strategy for doing that is to say if you going to say something about your like the brag about yourself, then at a second statement about how IT will help other people so i'll give you an example for my life. I was gonna say right like all about us was released IT became a national best seller.

Okay, that's a something that reflects positive at me because that's kind of bragging and I would say truth that makes me so happy because the reason I wrote this book was to get IT in the hands of women who had never sit in one of my programs. And the fact that IT has been disseminated so widely makes me feel so proud of the fact I have been able to, I get these tools in the hands of more women, which is also a true statement. So when you talk about yourself, then add the second piece of how IT allows you to contribute others, because that's where you get that warmth, peace.

And the research has shown, whether it's negotiation or self promotion, IT is not the presence of that assertiveness and confidence and pride that that a generates backache to women is the absence of work. So I always look for ways to add that other orientation, that warmth, into my interactions with people, because that's what we're looking for and not what they like. And and do they put a higher standard on women for that? Yes, sometimes they do, which is back to the unthinkable.

But you know what? No big deal. Because, guess what? I am a really Carrying person. I am doing a lot of good for the world, and I can just start talking about a little bit more.

You encourage us to recruit an army of other promoters is actually one of your chapter titles. What are they and why are they such a powerful resource for us?

Self promotion is you promoting yourself? Other promotion is other people promoting you. We build our SaaS through telling our story, but our status is built even faster and Better by other people talking us up, right?

We want other people going into rooms. We're not in saying how Carrying and capable we are. It's super efficient because there's a lot more of them in there of us. And it's very effective because when you know when other people brag on you, there's no limits to how a bragger they can be and IT doesn't reflect badly on you at all on your warmth because you're not the one saying IT.

So when other people talk you up and everyone's benefit from this at some point, whether it's a simple referral in your business or whether it's a sponsor that you have at work for somebody who's really committed to your advancement, but everyone has been adhered from this. And when that happens, IT feels so good. But what I want people to realize is that not just a happy accident is something that we can start to influence.

How can we get more people telling the world how great we are? The more we can do that, the more other people are building our status. And so you am sure in your work, right, a lot of times people, you start talking people because they were introduced to you by somebody else.

And in that introduction, the person says, I know who the next person is. You need to talk to this person's amazing. Here's why. And when you meet that person, your brain has already given that person a bit of a head start that compared to any stranger, you've men on the street, because theyve been vouched for by someone else, their status has already built.

They could lose IT if they showed up and were, but they don't have to do much at this point to sustain that initial respect that came here. So that's what I mean by another other promoter. And I help people think about how, how simple, authentic actions can help you get more of them.

Some things to keep in mind, when we want to do things like volunteer, sometimes we might think, well, I want to volunteer. I want to do the warm stuff. I want to bring them into my life in other ways and know guilty is charged here.

They're often waste. When i've gotta ten myself, stuck works like, you know, i'm given a lot of time here, and i'm not really sure this is the best use of my time. And you do something really great when you talk about this.

This is kind of a set of questions we want us to ask to really think through the best use of our time for volunteering, because we want to volunteer, we want to make a difference. We want to do a Jason things maybe to what we currently do, but we wanted do IT thought fully. And women can get stuck sometimes. Can you talk about that sort of your screening mechanism and why this is so important?

There's volunteering outside the workplace. But often the volunteering inside the workplace feels very tRicky for women because there are kind of these qazi directionally activities where you get asked and not have to say yes but you feel like, do I kind have to say yes and there's a great book written by four um academy s in my field called the no club putting a stop to women's dead and work and these four professors develop their own outside of work club to help each other say no to the incessant number of what they called non promotable tasks that they were being asked to do in their jobs these are tasks that the organization needs to function, but they do nothing to advance their own career.

And then they went on to do research together to document how women are settled with more of these. That's probably a surprise to no one. But I experiences this myself in my own career where I wanted to say as to people I legitimately, I want to be helpful.

So when someone asked me, I think, oh, this might be good for my status because people respect me if I say yes, and I actually want to do IT. But then I would become so overloaded with tasks that I wasn't getting my main job done. I was miserable, I was resentful, and then long behind, something interesting would come come along.

And I had actually really want to say yes for IT. But I couldn't, because I had these ten terrible tasks I had already volunteered for. So I had to learn to get myself out of that at the same time, while still trying to manage the overall impression I have have.

There's a male colleague. I no longer work with him. He switched institutions, but he was mass about saying no to everything, so much so that people stopped asking him and people say, don't even bother.

He is just onna tell you. Now, with no seeming consequence to his reputation, what library was very successful. I didn't want to do that, nor did I think I could get away with IT.

So as what could I do so developed some criteria for myself I thought would be helpful for being able to say yes to enjoy my life, to contribute to other people but still manage not be not be taken adventure of um so my three criteria are, will I bring joy to my life? So I always think showing up as very caring and capable is naturally a lot easier if you actually enjoy what you're doing. Am I uniquely qualified to contribute? So lot of times that I thought ten other people could be doing this.

This may not be my my time to step in. And because if it's not chAllenging me, if I don't feel like my contributions are unique in anyway, I can't really build my status. And but the third one, which I think is one black people don't think about, is who will I meet? And a lot of times I would take on things that weren't that much work.

They on't. They were kindly on promotable tasks. With one exception is that they would bring me into contact with other people that I otherwise wouldn't get a chance to know or to work with. And I started to use that as a criteria.

I pretty early on in my career, and I found that IT helps me a lot, meet more people outside my immediate area, even across institutions, and that those people became my part of my network. And that is, that network grows. As we all know, we spend a lot of time talking about networking. A bigger, deeper network is is a huge source of advantage. So one of the ways I was able to grow my network was by thinking about who I would meet as part of my criteria, to say yes or no. And as a result, I felt like I can think of different points in my career getting ten years as an as a professor, launching this book, where those early investments that I made many years ago, just to simply meet people, i'll doing work alongside them, and started to pay off few years later, when I had people in my network who could be quite helpful to me.

You also do this in a very creative way for yourself and for others. Through the way you make introductions to people. So you had really encourage us in the book to, you know, think about doing this instead of maybe going off for coffee with somebody talk about this.

what we say, you know you if if you do go to coffee with somebody, it's natural. And I know even at acquaintances, friend work one person to offer to pay, right? And it's, yeah you pay for someone's coffee and you think all i've done a nice thing, know you're happy to do up, but you are going to get a little warmth credit there because I was like able and yeah you might.

But the problem on IT is its not doesn't show your capability in any way IT doesn't no one really you don't get a job because about someone coffee. No you don't get to refer about someone coffee um and so I started experimenting with low effort ways that I could be giving to people that would show my capabilities but didn't take a lot of time. And I found that making introductions feels very joyous, authentic and also strategic for me because so what I do is any time I meet a new person, I just have gotten in a habit.

As i'm listening to this person tell me about their life, I am kind of thinking, and who do I know in in my life that could help this person with whatever is they care about, whether it's their work, their kids, whatever. And I will then at the end of the conversation, say, you know, by the way, hearing your story makes me think you might be interested and benefit from meeting so. And so I described somebody in my network.

Would you be open to an introduction? Everyone always says yesterday, and then I fire off a quick email that tells both people you bother. amazing.

Here's why i'm introducing you. Let me get out of the way. Take three minutes of my life. But that simple shift from coffee to introductions is shifting of behavior, is equally easy, is equally joyous, ous and authentic, but gets you more credit in the eyes of your audience.

why? Because an introduction makes you unique, right? When you use your network, which is only which is unique to you to benefit someone else, it's both bad as and likeable as opposed to coffee is just likeable.

And so this is one of the things I encourage people to look for, is how can you find short ways that feel, you know, authentic C, T O. Quick ways that allow you to put a little bit of value in people's flies like it's not at a huge investment, it's just a little little contribution. And those contributions are the the kind of easy, joyous ways that status is built.

Women want mentor. People in general want mentor. We all want mentors, but we can get stuck on waiting for the perfect mentor. This really resonated the person we believe, right, who can give us all the answers of all the advice. And we get so stuck at that.

Sometimes we don't get any mentor um and we actually think it's like this holy grail and some people are getting IT and some people aren't. And why arent we you share a different way to think about this as well as a different approach. And I think it's really game changing. Can you talk to us about mentioning and mentorship?

Yeah I think we know we certainly one mattering you and and so that's very important to us. One point I want to to emphasize is that at every stage of life, people should be being mentored and they should be mentoring at both. I don't care if your fifteen or eight, five, both of those, those should be in your life.

There is a tendency in leadership to think that you've outgrow entering and that's not true. So so first, no, I told you there was an athlete and this athlete had eight coaches and a nutrition coaching, a strength coach and a mental coaching. And they, they listen them off.

You would immediately think that must be an elite ite athlete. But in in leadership, we think if you're elite, you don't need coaching. You did IT coaching the media.

That's not true. So one is, we should always be seeing how matters at every stage. And two, no matter how Young you are, a guarantees there's value you can contribute to other people's lives. You should be thinking about developing a pattern of menorah from a very, very Young age and early career stage. But then this idea that you referenced is that we talk a tend to talk about mentor singular inside a mental plura.

Like, do you have a mentor like a person who has made a lifelong commitment to you and is decided that they will be available in your back and call to give you all the advice you need, a life that's just a really high standard to find that person and to find somebody who knows everything you need to know, right? That's not likely to be the case. And so then people report they don't have anybody.

I think it's because they think they have to find a single person. And rather than I think of a fractional mentorship, you need people to teach you stuff like the the athlete doesn't have one coach. They have eight because they don't expect the one coach to be able to know everything.

So you don't have one mentor, you have a or whatever IT is, and you're looking for whatever skills you want to learn at that point in life. IT can be things along your career path. But just as importantly, IT could be how to manage your status. So I always help you a great wave if you want to.

Ideas for how you could show up differently is just look around at the people you really respect that are in your orbit, and look for someone who has done a great job of cultivating respect and that there they're overall style and personality is similar enough to yours that you think you can kind of model them well that's a great mentor and you don't have to go up to them and ask them like say, hey, will you be my mentor? You just have to say I really admire the way that you are able to um convey how your capabilities and and you're caring for others in a way that people really respect. I would love to learn from you.

And so can we can we talk about that and ask that person to start to expand upon what they've done, what lessons they've learned? And well, law, that person is a mentor, even if you never see them again and you just had one lunch. And so expanding that idea of mentorship from just a singular percent that you're calling all the time to pulling bits and pieces of learning from a lot of different people IT one makes the whole thing feel very less high pressure and IT expands the set of things that that you are learning from people rather than rely on one person.

You I think of A A couple people my life who have been really influential, and I would call the mentors, but they're not good at everything. And there are some things I think they are actually quite bad doing. And I do Better, and i'm to learn from you on that. I need someone else. So expanding that that how do we think .

about mentioning others, especially as you mentioned, it's a really good habit to get into and put ourselves out there to do IT. How do we start now when we may think that we don't have a whole lot to share? Maybe you're Young person and you think to yourself, I don't know what I could share with someone else.

You just start so guarantee somewhere you did you do couple of things. One, you can find people who are no matter how earlier you, you can find people who are even earlier on who are less far a lot, right? You know, you're just starting out in your career.

You can think about mentioning people who are still in college and have and entered the workforce at things like that, the interns who are coming in. So you can think about IT that way. But the other thing you can think about is even people who are at or above your level of sand ity your age and life.

I guarantee you you know things they do not know, you are good at, things they are not good at. Okay um i'll give you an example, social media. So I met a woman in an event.

SHE was Younger. He said on social media that he was clearly very good instagram. SHE was doing a lot of real and stuff for the event, and SHE said, but my older colleagues think it's rivoli.

They think it's kids stuff. And so like, I don't want to be band on that, but I also want to be seen as a serious employee. And I said, look, what you're telling me is you have a skill that I guarantee you they don't have.

How do I know? Because me might be closer to their age and I don't have that skill because I didn't grow up with IT. So here I am on social media doing my best with no training, no skill, no natural inclined because I didn't grow up with IT.

Um if you could use that thing that you're naturally good at to help them wallah, right you become a mentor or to them and it's a great way to build your status because you're showing up as capable so I said offer to work on the companies social media pages um as your volunteer direction ary activity or offered to take a video of your boss next time they're speaking at an event and clip IT into a little video that they could post on social for the event that they were doing that day. Those are the kinds of things that start with what you're good at and not often times people who are Younger might have a different set of skills you know in the social media being just one example. And then I think when all else fails, you can always at least um think about um helping people by making an introduction right? Your mentorship is just advice, but the advice of just have to come from you.

And so an introduction can be a form of mentors. Let me connect you with somebody who can help you. And one of my favorite ite h experiences, the summer, is my, my three kids and one of my older is a teenager.

And he went to a sleep wake up. But IT was academic in nature and IT. Um there was a leadership speaker.

And after the first night, he texted me and he said, mom, I think the speaker does kind of the same work you do IT would be OK if I inro's ce you. No, I guess. And then, of course, is very cute.

Text from a fifteen year old boy comes back. He goes, how do I do that? And so he writes my name and my email on a piece of paper, like no book paper. And after the class, I gave a lot of credit for this. He walks up to the front of this two hundred personator and and he hands you this pair of this paper and says, hey, I think he would like to meet my mom.

And of course, the woman, when I eventually meter, says, I thought I was in trouble for a second because I was basically being told by a teenager I D to call his mom and I was, I was like, what did I possibly say in the session that was offensive? And then SHE said, no, he realized he was just saying that we should connect and he said, he said, I thought about IT for a second and SHE said, I realized in all the years of working with with teenagers, not one teenager boy had ever come up to me and told me that I needed to meet this mom. And so he said, I SHE said, I just onna trust this so we meet.

And when I pick up from the program, we meet for her coffee. And within five minutes, we realize we both are leadership speakers who support women who are doing all est cool, different work, and she's doing different things. I am till like, you know, put work out there.

And I was like, we really enjoying each other. We realized me all these opportunities to work together. In fact, i'm overdo responding to a text from her that in my is on my phone.

But I want to a point out, right, that relationship, that that value to my life. Where did that come from? A fifteen year old boy.

So I think if that kid could add value to his forty nine year old mother, right? And an equally probably similar age other know leadership speaker, anybody can do IT. You just have to have the mentality of what could I do that could make your life Better? What do I know? What do I love that I could add to you if you go with that value of what do I find join that could be of service to others and that's kind of the my set you'll instant start people at.

Listen, there's two questions that I ask every guest who comes on the podcast. And the first has to do with the demo of the podcast was just curiosity. What is most curious about today?

Oh, that yes, is a very good question. What I, what am I am most curious about? What I am most curious about is finding all of the different unique ways that people have been able to manage their status.

And what I mean by that is, as an academic, I know the science very well, and I have the tools that have worked for me. But one of the coolest parts about writing this book is seeing all the different ways that different human beings honor their authenticity while still showing up very strategically. And I I share some of them in the book that I learned. But continuing for people to give me their tips and tricks for how they've managed status is just so fun. And I just like I like, like insensately curious about how people have been navigating this, because everyone's been navigating in in their own different ways and kind of collecting those stories.

The other question is, is there anything you want to leave the listeners with? There is so much in your book, there is no way where you can get to all of that. Is there, you know, one thing that we haven't talked about or is there one you just wanted? Leave this with?

I would just say, be your awesome self in the most strategic way possible, do you, with a little more intention to what your audience is thinking, and you will be able to live a beautiful life authentically, easily and with all of the rewards you do so. So I just say, you do you, dick, and life will be good.

Thank you so much for speaking with me. Been such a pleasure to speak with you. This is such a fantastic tic book.

My pleasure anytime. Thanks for having me.

Curious minions at work is made possible through a partnership with the innovator circle, an executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. A special thank you to producer in editor romagna li for leading the amazing behind the scenes team that makes IT all happen. Each episode, we give a shout out to something that's feeding our curiosity.

This week is lian morrer's novel here. One moment at the heart of the book is the question, what would you do if you knew when and how you'll die? The characteristic reactions, as well as our own, makes this a hard book to put down.