Posted on

Amy Cuddy: Power Poses

Amy Cuddy is best known for her research on how non-verbal behaviours assert power…

I’ll start again: Amy Cuddy is best known for her remarkable 2012 TED talk, ‘Your body language shapes who you are’, which has become the second most watched TED talk, with over 26 million views to date. You can watch it and add to that number at the foot of this blog. And you should.

Amy Cuddy

 

Short Biography

Amy Cuddy was born in 1972 and grew up a small Pennsylvania town. As a result of a car accident during her undergraduate years, she suffered a serious head injury that doctors asserted would compromise her academic ability. Nonetheless, she graduated from the University of Colorado in Social Psychology (1998) and then went on to earn her MA and PhD (2005) in the same subject, at Princeton.

Cuddy took a role as an Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, teaching leadership to MBA students. She moved to become Assistant Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, and then, in 2008, to Harvard Business School as Associate Professor, where she teaches MBA courses and executive education programmes, specialising in negotiation, body language, power and influence.

Cuddy’s Research

Amy Cuddy’s research interests have yielded nuggets of valuable knowledge for managers. Her most famous and impactful for many is the concept of the Power Pose, developed with Dana Carny and Andy Yap. But I will leave her to describe that far better than I ever could, in her TED talk below. Instead, I will focus on her research (with Susan Fiske and Peter Glick) on how we judge one another.

How we judge people

Cuddy’s research indicates that our judgements of people can determine how we will interact with them. This can affect our emotions, intentions and behaviours in hiring, promoting, electing, taking risks, giving to charity, and even persecution and genocide. Two trait dimensions are particularly salient in our judgements: warmth-trustworthiness and competence-power. This leads to stereotyping of racial groups, leading onwards to discrimination and persecution.

The first and most important judgement we make about someone we meet is their warmth: it is an attempt to assess ‘friend or foe?’ Then we try to assess their competence – ‘if they are a foe, how much care do I need to take?’.

Interestingly, competence in one arena leads us to infer a wider competence, whilst incompetence in one arena does not lead us to generalize in the same way. But it is different for warmth: one example of coldness creates an impression that this is our true character. This is how Cuddy describes it in one interview (with The Harvard Magazine):

‘You can purposely present yourself as warm—you can control that, but we feel that competence can’t be faked. So positive competence is seen as more diagnostic. On the other hand, being a jerk—well, we’re not very forgiving of people who act that way.’

Another generalization we make is pervasive and dangerous: we generalize our experiences across a whole social or racial group: gender, ethnicity, age, or nationality.

We also create another dangerous generalization: that warmth means not-competent and competent means not-warm. Too much of one trait leads us to suspect a shortage of the other. Hence the title of her much re-printed 2009 Harvard Business Review article, ‘Just Because I’m Nice, Don’t Assume I’m Dumb’.

Regular readers will know that I am a sucker for models and they don’t get simpler than four boxes. Here is one that flows from this, developed by Cuddy, Fiske and Glick.

Warmth-Competence Cuddy, Fiske, Glick

As soon as you look at this chart, you can see how the people and groups seen as cold are also the ones whom societies persecute – particularly when they are under pressure – either as ‘soft targets’ or as a ‘danger to society’.

Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are

Amy Cuddy’s 26million+ TED talk that introduced the world to power posing.

[ted id=1569]

Share this:
Posted on

Michelle Howard: Not a Wimp

Admiral Michelle Harris is the first woman and the first African American to be promoted to a four star role in the US Navy, and the first African American woman both to command a ship, and later, to reach three-stars. She was recently appointed to be the US Navy’s vice chief of operations – its second-highest-ranking officer. She was also the  officer who masterminded the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates – later dramatised in the Tom Hanks movie, Captain Phillips.

Admiral Michelle Howard

Short Biography

Michelle Howard was born in 1960 to an American father and British mother. Her father was a Master Sergeant in the US Air Force. She graduated from the US Naval academy and then earned a master’s degree in military arts and sciences in 1998 from the Army’s Command and General Staff College. When she took command of the U.S.S. Rushmore in 1999, she became the first African-American woman to command a ship in the US Navy.

Howard was promoted to rear admiral (lower half) – equivalent to Commodore in the UK’s Royal Navy – in 2007 and to rear admiral, in 2010. She was promoted to vice admiral in 2012, and then, on 1 July 2014, she was promoted to four-star admiral with President Obama’s nomination (since unanimously confirmed by the Senate) to become the Vice Chief of Naval Operations.

Leadership Thinking

From her earliest days as a junior officer, Howard was recognised as an outstanding leader. On only her second posting, aboard USS Lexington, she received the Secretary of the Navy/Navy League Captain Winifred Collins award for the one woman officer a year showing the most outstanding leadership.

But it has not always been easy. Howard said in an interview with Ebony magazine in 1999 that, in the course of her career, she encountered ‘individuals who didn’t want me at the command, or didn’t want me in a particular position.’ 

Speaking about the obstacles she has faced as an African American woman, she said in a 2010 talk about women and minorities in the Navy: ‘This is not for wimps.  You have to keep a sense of humor. You have to develop stamina because there’s going to be tough days. Like the pioneering women of old, you have to let some things go.’

But, for this blog, the most valuable interview is the one that she recently gave to Forbes Magazine, which you can read in full, and watch  extracts below.

The five leadership lessons that Howard offers are powerful indeed, not least because of the authority and careful consideration she brings to them.

  1. If you want to innovate, first take a hard look at yourself–and be flexible about making changes.
  2. Create space for creativity–you never know what could result.
  3. A morning routine can boost observation, not just efficiency.  (my own personal favourite)
  4. An appreciation for the lessons of the past will help you better craft the future.
  5. Create an environment where employees can meet personal goals and they’ll strive that much harder for the professional ones, too.

I shall not give more detail, because you can readily read it on the Forbes website. Please do.

 

 

You might also enjoy the Leadership Pocketbook and the Diversity Pocketbook.

 

 

 

 

 

Share this:
Posted on

Valuing Diversity

Peter_Honey.pngPeter Honey wrote a thought-provoking blog on the Training Journal website, where he opened by taking as read that valuing diversity is a good thing (my italics), but then he asked a really good question:

.

.

‘If we were going to start doing it at 0900 tomorrow morning, what exactly would we do?’

As usual, Peter gives a very good answer to his own question, but, also typical of him, his question really made me think.

But that was a couple of weeks ago…

The first equal opportunities employer?

The topic came back to me last night (Saturday 7 May) when I was watching a documentary about the Untold story of the Battle of Trafalgar.  It looked at the foreign sailors who fought on one of Nelson’s ships of the line, HMS Bellerophon and made the point that, for the few years of the war with Napoleon, the British Navy treated its black sailors better than Europeans had ever treated black people, and better than they were to do so for many years: it gave them total equality of opportunity.

Black and other foreign sailors were treated exactly the same as all others and promoted and respected strictly according to merit.  Perhaps that is the answer to Peter’s question.

After the war, however, it was back to colonialist business as usual, as the black sailors, who were no longer needed, were abandoned to the streets.  You can watch the video here.

Diversity Works

I have no special expertise in the subject of diversity, just the simplistic view that evidence shows that diverse teams get better results.  That’s why Peter’s question so impressed me.  So I thought it was time to read the Diversity Pocketbook.

What I found was a nice little model that can apply to many different change projects.  The author, Linbert Spencer, may forgive me for turning it into a simple picture.

image

Desire
How strong is it, really?

Definition
What do you mean by ‘diversity’?

Decision
A formal commitment from all the people who have real authority.

Determination
This is not an easy process.  You need to be in it for the long haul.

Discipline
When you make progress, celebrate, but keep up your commitment

So Here’s the Deal

Linbert Spencer offers a structured process to answer Peter Honey’s question.  He also gives lots of practical tips to supplement Peter’s eminently sound advice.  This does matter, because in tough times like these, you can’t afford to waste any opportunity to get the best team and to get the best from your team.

Management Pocketbooks you might enjoy

The Diversity Pocketbook

The Cross-cultural Business Pocketbook

The Empowerment Pocketbook

Share this: