Transcription
So this is not my work. This is the work of Dr. Susan Fisk. This is an instrumental study. It's been repeated many times. Back in 2002, it found that to be charismatic, you have to be both highly warm and highly competent. Or, more importantly, you have to signal high warmth and high competence. And that this makes up 82% of impressions of people. Warmth, trust, likability, friendliness. Competence, power, reliability, capability. So, very highly charismatic people. You meet them, you see them, and they are signaling, "You can trust me. You like me. And boy, am I reliable and competent at the very same time."
So when I say you are charismatic, but you lean very high in competence, which means that people can see you as cold or stoic if you're not showing enough warmth cues. Have you been told that intimidating? Indirectly? Indirectly, right? People are too scared to say it to me, and I'm joking. But no, I do get that. I think I have like some degree of self-awareness as to how I come across. And I think how you described it is exactly how I come across. And that's not a bad thing, right? Like, you get to pick your own recipe. Like, I lean a little higher on the warm side. I'm also female, and there are differences between men and women. So typically, not always, men default to higher competence. Women are defaulted to higher in warmth. Typically, not always. This isn't a bad thing, but you should know that if you are trying to come across as warmer on your team, you're trying to inspire more collaboration, you're trying to make more friends, you want to dial up your warmth cues. If you're someone who's interrupted a lot, not taken seriously, people forget meeting you, you need to dial up competence. This is like a thermostat. You can dial up warmth cues and dial up competence cues, and this changes the way people treat you.
We're going to go through all of those. I saw this wonderful graph which kind of explains it, which I'll put on the screen for anyone that's watching. And this was really, really interesting. There's a danger zone.
The danger zone, I'm guessing, is when you're low warmth and low competence.
That's it. Those are those folks that are stoic. If you don't send enough warmth cues, if you don't send enough competence cues, people cannot trust you. They have trouble working with you. They have trouble talking to you. This is the curse of very smart people. Very smart people think, "My ideas will stand alone. My book smarts are great. I don't need to communicate these cues. My ideas are enough." That's what happened to Jamie Siminoff in the tank. He did not show enough warmth or competence cues. He relied solely on his ideas and his numbers, and he could not get a deal. So, people who want to be taken seriously, you have to show warmth and competence.
The other problem with highly competent folks, and you lean higher in competence, this is for you too, which is this directly from the research. Too much competence without enough warmth leaves people feeling suspicious.
So no matter how competent you are, no matter how good your ideas are, if you are not showcasing that with warmth, people are skeptical of you.
And you can be too warm.
You can be absolutely too warm. You can be too warm and too competent. Too warm. You know what that looks like? That's too warm.
Okay.
Okay. Too warm is... So, we'll talk about the five warmth cues. Too much of any cue is dangerous, right? So, too much nodding, too much laughing, too much vocalizations. Those are all too warm, and they make us think this person is a thimbo or a ditz or not competent. That's what happens. We have too much warmth that takes away from our competence.
Where should we start?
Let's start with the power cues.
Okay, the power cues. So, this is competence.
Yes, power cues. Let me get some more power cues. Okay, so we talked about the importance of hand gestures. There is a very good competent hand gesture which everyone should know if you want to be perceived as higher in competence. It's called the steeple.
Oh, this this...
Oh, yes. It's on the cover of my book if you want to see it. Yes. This looks when your hands look like a little steeple. They're kind of relaxed, open.
It's a triangle for anyone that comes. It's kind of like a triangle.
Yep. A triangle. It's a power pose for the hands. Why? If you are doing this pose, you're showing, "I'm not hiding anything from you." You can still see my palms, but I am very relaxed and poised enough so that I'm keeping my hands together. Now, be careful. Don't drum. This is evil fingers.
Yeah.
This is Mr. Burns for those of you who know, right? So, it's a nice, still steeple. They have found they rated hand gestures in a study and they found that this was the single, the highest-rated hand gesture that leaders made was when they made this gesture. Now, personally, I don't use this a lot in my interpersonal interactions because it doesn't feel natural to me. It's funny because we took one picture for my cover photos. All, every single picture of me for my cover photos, I was smiling. And my wonderful photographer, Maggie Kirkland, said, "Vanessa, can we just do one of you serious?" And I was like, "But I'm not serious." She's like, "Just, just one. Just do your most powerful power cue." And this is the only picture. And that was the one that we chose for it. So, it's just funny because it's a very high competence cue. So, you can try the steeple. Just be careful not to do evil fingers with it. That's a high confidence cue.